Home | Away

Monday, July 18, 2005

A nice short post for a change

On Saturday Jamie and I had the day to ourselves (and then on Sunday he and Janet had the day, and I wrote wrote wrote like a fiend).  We went to the Penn State Natatorium, where he was willing to jump off the one-meter platform into the deep end, but the one-meter platform was closed.  The lowest platform available was the 5m, and he wouldn’t go up there (and I wouldn’t let him), but he said he wanted to watch me take the plunge.  And you know what?  It turns out that five meters is a long way to fall.  But it was good scary fun (I managed three jumps), and I’ve promised Jamie that before the summer is over I will find the nerve to go off the 7m.  “How about the ten?” Jamie says.  I cower and tell him the ten is too scary, and it is.  But he thinks this is very funny.

Then we went to buy Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I won’t reprise last year’s Azkaban blogging (as Jamie says, “we did that already”wink, but I do have a simple question, now that I’m 120 pages in:  has there ever been a children’s/ fantasy author who’s had to deal with the frenzy of anticipation induced by these books?  I know that Tolkien didn’t have to worry about this stuff—it wasn’t like people were lining up at bookstores, dressed as Gandalf, waiting for the first shipments of The Return of the King. It wasn’t a mass-culture phenomenon.  On the contrary, when The Lord of the Rings was published it was a mere curiosity, an elaborate hobby indulged by that odd pipe-smoking medieval scholar down the hall.  And though Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia picked up some public momentum as they appeared in yearly installments, I don’t believe that there were any Canadian courts issuing injunctions to embargo the premature reading of The Horse and His Boy.  I suppose we needn’t feel sorry for Rowling, whose wealth can no longer be calculated in the Hindu-Arabic numeric system, but still, the fact remains that she has written most of this series, at least since 1998, in the knowledge that about a billion people are desperately awaiting her next move.  I don’t know about you, but that kind of pressure would drive me mad.  I’d rather jump off the 10m platform any day.

Posted by Michael on 07/18 at 10:18 AM
(67) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages