Slashdot Mirror
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Release Date Announced
Croakyvoice writes "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, the seventh and final book
in the best-selling series, has been scheduled for release at 12:01 a.m. on July
21, 2007, Scholastic announced today." A deluxe edition for collectors and enthusiasts is also planned with a simultaneous release.
Appealing to the lowest common denominator should never be encouraged. She wrote schlock fantasy, obviously targetted it at children (in a patronising fashion), and laughed as everyone lapped it up, seemingly oblivious to the contrived nature of its creation. She's the literary Britney Spears. yay her.
Hmm, I may well do that, with 'now go buy a decent book' after. The Harry Potter books, or as I like to call them 'that crap that people who'd never read a book with a real plot like' piss me off.
They've been critisized as being the book equivilent of a Tabloid newspaper. That is to say, containing no content of substance. The main problem I found with the stories (yes, I did read them to my son for a short while before realising how shit they were and moving on to Douglas adams instead), is that the plotlines are completelly, utterly predictable. You can work out what's going to happen so easily its unreal.
Personally I think she knows this, which is why this is the last book.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Loathing shitty literature hardly makes me a moron.
Maybe an elitist better-than-thou asshat, but certainly not a moron.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Strictly speaking it makes you someone who bases his reading choices on things other then 'well their queueing up at might to buy it, it must be great'.
My local bookstore had pallet loads of the stuff, and garish signs advertising it. No doubt they made a lot of sales, but I get the feeling the manager did it because of the sales potential, not the quality of the books themselves. How do I know this? When there isn't a new Potter book to hype up her books are relegated to an out of the way part of the shop.
Frankly though, the hype and dump nature of the major book chains pisses me off. I vastly prefer a small local bookshop that sells second hand and new books, and has free coffee. They can get new books too, so they get all my considerable book spending budget nowadays. Probably this is over £100 a month.
Note that they have not one single J.K Rowling book, not one.
> I read these books aloud to my wife... I guess I should clear my calendar on August evenings!
You can cut the time in half by just omitting the adverbs:
"Malfoy really makes me angry", Harry said [angrily].
"Will you stop complaining and just focus on your homework?", Hermione said [testily].
"Why don't you understand that there's more to life than homework?", Ron said [hotly].
etc, etc, etc.
Ok, so maybe the adverbs are just 5-10% of the sentence - but the preceding "harry said", "ron said", etc - can also usually be removed - it's generally obvious to anyone paying attention who said each line in a dialog between two people. So, I'd remove those two words as well.
And this is how I read it to my boys. Of course, eventually I started additional words and entire sentences - and they never realized. Anything to make these poorly written books go more quickly. Unfortunately, there's no way to simply omit plot holes.
Cartman and friends dress up in lotr costumes cartman, looks at bunch of kids dressed up in harry potter costumes and chanting spells cartman - wat u guys doing? HP kid - well, playing harry potter of course! cartman - FAGS! I rest my case. Also, i would love for harry potter to die, cant wait to taste the tears of all those fuckin kids bitchin about the way the old fart dies in the previous book. All ends well :D