Spoiler Free Harry Talk

I got back home yesterday and the first order of business was to finish Harry Potter. I'd been chipping away at it best I could while I was on holiday this last week, but mostly surrounded by people all the time (or alone but driving - and it occurred to me a few hundred pages into the book, read a half dozen pages here, a couple pages there, that it would have been worth it to pop for the audio book!), I was frustratingly only about halfway through yesterday.

As the days have gone by, despite staying off the internet, I was finding it more and more difficult not to get hit with clues and spoilers. People I know have been calling me to see if I'd finished it yet. Waitresses, seeing me reading feverishly, while trying to shove salad in my mouth without looking at it, would interupt me to say "I finished it last night", trying for a deadpan face that wouldn't give anything away. At a coffee shop late Saturday night, eating dessert after the play, we had Harry readers seated on both sides of us, discussing the story, trying politely to be ambiguous but ARGHHHHH! I finally gave up and told hubby we had to go, NOW, and I jumped up singing "La-la-la-la-LAAAA" and quickly walked outside.

One of my husband's more annoying idiosyncracies is his habit of reading the end of a book first. Or to just listen to William and/or I tell him about a book (or movie) and then discuss it, analyze it, talk about it as if he's actually read it. Annoying to me. My best friend reads endings first too. It drives me nuts. I hold to the opposite viewpoint with what can only be described as a sense of sacredness, that a writer goes to great pains to tell a story, weave a plot, foreshadow, build up, create moods and images and dialogue and that the reader works and is rewarded by the ending by READING THE BOOK FIRST!!! So it bugged the crap out of me that even though he hasn't even read six out of the seven Harry books, he went online and read the spoilers about this last one a week before the book was even released.

He's been going around with a smug look on his face (which I've wanted to slap but have settled for screaming "SHUT UP!" at him every time he wears it, to which he laughs (an evil laugh) and all self righteously responds "I didn't SAY anything!"), waiting for me to know what he knew. Today he kept finding reasons to come into the bedroom - for a pencil, to check his calender, to lift random papers on his dresser - while stealing glimpses to see how much longer I had to go to the end of the book. Why couldn't he read it himself instead of having me vicariously read it "for" him!? Hubby, the phone calls, even the cell phone messages asking "Are you done yet?!", it was all starting to drive me slightly over the edge. (and you all know I walk very close to said edge most of the time anyway)

I didn't even unpack the car. I just pulled my book and what was left of my now melted fancy chocolates out of the backseat, and, with a few interuptions, hid in the bedroom and read. (oh, well, AFTER Rosie went frantically and deliriously bonkers about my return and jumped in and out of my lap and ran in circles around the room and then bounced on me and then ran some more circles and then licked my face off and then more circles and.....and so on. I also hugged William after a week's absense and got a smile and a nice "that's long enough" pat on the shoulder in return. Sigh.) Anywaaaay. I read until my eyes closed halfway through a page early in the wee hours and then this morning, when I drifted up through enough layers of sleep to remember where I'd last left the motley crew of characters, I bolted upright, grabbed the book, and kept reading. I stopped to heat something in the microwave a few hours later. And then kept reading.

I just finished it a bit ago and I'm exhausted both physically because of little sleep and emotionally because.....well, for a zillion reasons and you have to read the book yourself to find them out. I'm just relieved to have made it through without a spoiler. And sad to think that this is the end. No more Harry Potter adventures to look forward to, no more.... well, there's the last two movies still to see on the big screen. I can hardly wait to see what the do with the Deathly Hallows. It will will be a very exciting movie.

Oh, two more things - slightly hinty, but no outright spoilers, so it you're manic about them like me, you can stop reading now. If you're a relatively normal, sane person though, you can safely read them. One, for those of you who have finished the book and have been reading my blog long enough to know about current events in my life - How weirdly, spine tingling coincidental is ... well, the coincidence! Two, after reading the sixth book (the first time, not the second time just a few months ago) I'd mentioned to a few people that I thought I had something figured out about the plot. I refused to tell anyone what it was that I suspected but, just for the record, I was right. There's more of a twist to it than just my basic suspicion. But I was right.

So, okay, that's all. If you've finished the book and you want to talk details, you can e-mail me privately. If you haven't finished the book yet then, well, what are you doing reading my blog instead!? Get back to the story!