Harry Potter–the Event & Reading It

No spoilers, I promise.

After some friends warned me that I might need to arrive early to get a number that would determine my place in line, I bit the bullet and went down to B&N at 7:00 Friday evening. Because I had to stand in line about thirty minutes just to get up to the table outside the door to get a wristband (orange for those of us who had pre-reserved our copies, blue for those who didn’t), and hearing people talk about how much trouble they had with parking and getting back into the store later in the evening “last time,” I made the decision to just stay there for the entire length of time instead of returning home or doing other shopping in the area.

I made my way through the crowd to the very quiet Christian fiction aisle and picked up Terri Blackstock’s Last Light, which, I believe, someone recommended in a comment here on the blog. After a little more than an hour of book browsing and picking up a few other titles to look at to see if I might be interested in reading them, and found an empty table in the cafe area. I sat there and read until about 10:30 (after reading about the first one-third of Last Light) when I finally got up to figure out where I needed to be to have a decent shot of getting my book as close to midnight as I could. I ran into a few people I know from church and stood with them in what eventually became a line. We were two Bargain Books rows back from the cashier’s station. I finally got to the front and got my book at 12:38 a.m. While waiting at the head of the line, I asked the employee standing there (who’d been directing people to the appropriate lines outside earlier, walking around with a clicker/counter) if they knew a rough estimate of how many people where there. He said when he turned the clicker over to someone else at 9:30, there were already 1,800 people there—based on the steady stream of people he saw coming in after that, he figured there were probably at least 2,000-2,200 people there. And this is not a overly large B&N. There were people everywhere.

Since I hadn’t taken the time to get something to eat before going, I stopped at Jack-in-the-Box on the way home for food (was able to read the first page and a half waiting at the window), then came straight home and, after changing into PJs, started reading. I stopped around 3 a.m. only because I kept dozing off and rereading the same page without really comprehending anything on it. So I decided to sleep. Woke up around 9 a.m., made coffee, eggs, and bacon, and immediately started reading again. With only a few breaks to get up and move my stiff, sore body, I finished reading it at 7:00 p.m. tonight. I went through about a dozen tissues while reading. She didn’t pull any punches, but it has a deeply satisfying ending.

As far as the predictions I made before reading it—well, with some of them, I was right on the money. With others, I got a couple of elements correct but missed others, and with a few, I was just way off base.

I’m so glad I went last night and experienced this much excitement over a book. And not just any book—a genre fiction/popular fiction novel!

I’ll be getting the unabridged audio version from Amazon some time this week, so I’ll spend the next couple of weeks listening to it and catching all of the little details I know I missed because I tend to skim in my anxiousness to know what happens next when reading a new book.