NOTE: This is a SPOILER THREAD for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The post itself has no spoilers, but people posting comments on it are welcome to discuss the book as freely as they want to, which includes mentioning plot details.
Well! So much for the Harry Potter books!
I ordered mine from Amazon, and they’d sent an e-mail saying it would be delivered by UPS on Saturday. This meant I spent the first part of the day lurking around my apartment with one eye on the window, keeping watch for the UPS guy. I put off taking a shower for fear of missing him while I was in there. Amazon had said the package wouldn’t require a signature, but there was no guarantee the UPS guy would consider my doorstep safe enough to leave it if no one answered the door. THERE WAS NO GUARANTEE!!
He finally showed up at about 1:30. He looked haggard (not Hagrid; haggard), and I said, “Busy day, I’ll bet?” He laughed and said yeah, it had been busy. I was his very last stop, as it happens, which he seemed apologetic about.
I set to work reading it at about 2, and read for about the next 10 hours, taking occasional breaks here and there to do other things. I was up to about page 550 when I went to bed, leaving 200 pages to finish on Sunday.
Normally I have no problem taking my time with a book and reading it over the course of several days. But in this case, I wanted to hurry up and finish it so that I wouldn’t run the risk of having things spoiled for me. As long as I was reading it, I had to be very careful where I went on the Internet, lest someone shout out a spoiler just to ruin it for people.
Do people do that? Oh yes they do. When book 6 came out two years ago, I was in the middle of reading it when I was browsing at Fark.com one day, and reading some discussion thread about something entirely non-Potter-related. People were talking about whatever the issue was, and then, right in the middle, some jackass posted a message with just three words: “_____ kills _____!” [Names omitted in case you haven’t read Harry Potter book 6 yet.]
To people reading the thread who knew nothing about Harry Potter, it just looked like an odd, random, non-sequitur thing to say. To Harry Potter readers, they knew exactly what this person was doing. He was spoiling a HUGE twist in the plot. And why? Because he was an anus.
So that’s why I wanted to hurry up with “Deathly Hallows,” and I’m glad to say I made it through before anything was spoiled for me. Well, I had inadvertently seen a “spoiler” earlier in the week, but it proved to be false, which I had suspected it might be. Turns out Hagrid does NOT devour a house-elf on a dare.
Who else read it this weekend? What did you think? Feel free to discuss, spoil, and ruminate in the comments.
