![\"Even](\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/Vader_and_the_Deathly_Hallows.jpg\")
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I think I must be the last person in the Northern Hemisphere to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon. (Or should I say the Hogwart’s Express? Nah, that would be way too clever and precious, and may even induce vomiting in some of my more sensitive readers…) I simply haven’t had much interest in reading children’s<\/i> books, nor have I been able to quite fathom all the grown-ups I’ve seen on the train who seem utterly engrossed by them.<\/p>\n
However, I’m a sucker for a good pop-cultural groundswell, and with the final book and fifth movie in the series debuting in the last few days, and the constant buzz of excitement coming from practically everybody I meet, well, I’ve finally given in. I started reading the series for the first time a few weeks back (I just began Book 5 today), and yes, I did attend one of the midnight release events on Friday. I’ll be writing more about my experiences with Harry soon.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I was really amused to see that not even Sith Lords are immune from hype. No matter what one may think of J.K. Rowling’s writing style or the stories themselves — Harold Bloom, I’m thinking of you, you sour-pussed old killjoy snob — you cannot deny that this weekend was a remarkable, watershed event. Millions of copies<\/a> of the same book were distributed all around the world in a single weekend, a good percentage of them in a single night<\/i>, and a significant number of those books were read cover-to-cover before Monday morning. That’s almost unbelievable. Has there ever been any other mass entertainment that has come so close to being a ubiquitous experience, i.e., something that everyone<\/i> was doing? Maybe the mini-series Roots<\/i> back in the ’70s, or the initial surge of Star Wars<\/i>‘s popularity (although both of those played out across longer timeframes than this single, three-day orgy of reading…), but I’m not sure even those things were so big. It’s truly mind-boggling, and I doubt it will ever be repeated.<\/p>\n (Credit where it’s due: the photo came from here<\/a> — I also like the one of Vader in the shower — and there’s an explanation of that photo set here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think I must be the last person in the Northern Hemisphere to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon. (Or should I say the Hogwart’s Express? Nah, that would be way too clever and precious, and may even induce vomiting in some of my more sensitive readers…) I simply haven’t had much interest in reading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}