Eew, it's Wednesday again

[altivo]

Another Wednesday survived. ;p

I wanna start reading Potter 7 but I have too many other things that really need to take priority.

I'm barely into Ben Goodridge's White Crusade and I have to admit, I really, really like his main character, Tay of the Wolf Tribe, even though the introduction was so awful (emotionally) that I almost gave up reading on the spot.

OK, 'Tivo, you have an hour till bedtime, get back to work...

Comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*watches the industrious horse clip clop back and forth* Nothing's worse than having a book you want to read and no time to read it in :D

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

I cringe everytime I see mention of the finaly HP book... Thankfully my cringing has been pain free so far as noone has been sporting spoilers around, but I'm still on gurad. i don't want anything revealed ot me before I read it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've seen lots of mention here on LJ, but everyone has been good enough to put them behind a cut. Gary read it as soon as I brought it home but he has kept quiet too. Still, it won't do to wait too long.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and usually a Thursday would give me some time to read, but I have a meeting this afternoon.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

My friend bought the new book but he hasn't had a chance to read it. I've been good and not touched it as it's bad Karma to read someone's book before they have.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

While the Potter fad is something I'll aviod while it's hot & check it out later in life, I've never really connected with why people like to steal an experience from someone by revealing things to them like that- kind of sad & pathetic really... sort of a control mechanism even...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The books are good rollicking enetertainment but certainly not great literature. Obviously, they do touch some sensitive spots in a lot of us: school bullies, prejudice, incompetent teachers, injustice, and so forth.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I wanna start reading Potter 7 but I have too many other things that really need to take priority.

What??? There are other things besides Harry?

At the folk festival I just attended, the eldest daughter of the friends I was staying with spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday reading it. It took her that long only because we finally convinced her to put down the book and pick up her fiddle for a couple of hours and play with us. :)

p.s.: I just saw the file for the large-print version. It's going to press today.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Jeez, in large print these things must weigh five pounds apiece. A year or two ago someone asked me why we didn't have Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove in large print, and the answer turned out to be that there was no such edition. Evidently it would be too large for the binding to hold up, and no one wanted to put it out in two volumes.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

The LP HP totaled a mere 971 pages, surprisingly enough (only 212 more than the original hardcover). So binding will actually not be an issue for HP (well, not any more than usual, I guess -- you tell me how they hold up. :-)

No, I haven't read any of it. Well, maybe a sentence or two, but not anything like the last page or a whole chapter. I've missed all the others so far, so book seven seemed like a poor way to jump in.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah. If you haven't read any of them, book 7 is definitely not the place to start. You want to start at the beginning or so much of it is going to be wasted on you. She does a great job of picking up little loose bits from two or three volumes back and making you suddenly realize WHY they were left loose back then, and how important they were even though they seemed insignificant at the time. That's why the films have begun to irritate me so much, because of course they are mere crude imitations of the subtlety that is the books.

Now as for bindings holding up, I can tell you that Thorndike/Gale and Center Point large print editions hold up extremely well. Often better than the original trade hardcovers, in fact. Where the original publishers issue a large print edition, as Random or Harper sometimes do, they are cheaply made and printed on poor quality paper, so they have no wearability at all.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

Waiting until September unless I manage to get a copy at the library.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

The hardback HP's by Scholastic absolutely suck. When i worked at the old HS library, we had to repair the binding on most of those at least once a month.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Chance of finding a copy sitting on the shelf in most libraries is nil until probably after Christmas. If you put yourself on a waiting list at the library, then you might possibly get to see it in Sept. or Oct. with a little luck. Our eight-library system shares copies of popular books across most of the member libraries. We presently have about 90 names on the waiting list for HP 7, and about 28 copies in circulation. Assuming that most readers return the book as soon as they finish, rather than keeping it for the full two or three weeks (or longer, ending up with a fine) then that entire list should be satisfied by the end of September. Of course, judging by past experience, more names will be added to the list by then.

It's amazing how many people walk into the library right now expecting us to have a copy of the book on the shelf that they can check out. ;p At the moment, no matter how many copies we actually might own, they would be checked out the moment they became available. The past two HP titles have taken at least six months before the rush wore off and they were sometimes waiting on the shelf. It takes about ten months before we consistently have at least one copy on the shelf all the time.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The trade bindings on such thick books are never meant to take the abuse that library copies get, especially in the case of books mostly read by kids or teens. There are reinforced library bindings available that hold up much better, but of course they cost more and only a few libraries spring for them. Kids, including teens, are extremely hard on books.

We've had several HP volumes that went out and never came back, but only one has ever had to be removed from service because the binding became unrepairable. Given that the average life of one of these shows anywhere from 50 to 100 circulations, mostly to users under age 15, they aren't doing badly at all. We buy the regular trade editions.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

Then it will be september when the boxed set of hardbacks I am pre-ordering ships before I read it.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear the Thorndikes hold up. They look like they would. It would be bad to spend all that time on making them look pretty only to have them fall apart. :) Besides, I'd bet your typical large-print reader isn't terribly rough with their books, anyway.

If they put all the stuff from the books into the films, they'd need more than double the number of films. OK, that might not be a bad thing for fans, huh?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

True, turning an 800 page book into a film is going to require cutting. That alone is enough for me to object to turning good books into films. But the problem is that literary art has certain goals and film has different goals. The film director wants striking visuals, and will often seek them at the expense of plot, character development, and other elements that are essential to the original work.