july heat

It is hot. It's hot like my bathroom is right after my shower. It's hot like I feel right after I work out. It's wet air, stinky pits, damp clothing, everything-is-too-much-effort, get-me-a-damn-mint-julep-and-lace-fan HOT.

I would not mind if summer came driving up casually, with its top down and its music playing. NO. It screeched in like a teen with his first car. Like a guy on a Harley. Like it was very late and is overcompensating, getting into accidents and inconveniencing innocent passersby in order to make up for time lost.

HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT.

And so, naturally, I thought of Harry Potter.

No, really, there's a natural segue. It's always hot when you first read a Harry Potter. It's always summer, either where you're reading or in the book. So, um. Yes. Hot. And Harry Potter. Sure.

Anyway, I've been thinking about reading speed of late. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm going to feel rushed, having to finish the book in about 15 hours. And the answer thus far has been that I don't care, that it's WORTH it even if I am a little rushed.

But I actually thought about it yesterday, and realized that, hm, this may actually be quite perfect.

I was one of the last to finish book five, of my group. I took about an hour of naps/breaks, I talked to people, I even did radio interviews in the morning. I was done about midday Saturday, and though others have always thought I did, I didn't rush at all. There was once or twice someone saying, "OOH WAIT UNTIL PAGE 62!", and if I was on page 59, I did rush a little. But that stopped after about the third chapter. People broke off on their own, as did I; I stopped to freak out with other people who had read as far as I had several times, but the reading itself was done privately, for the most part.

I read it at totally my own pace. I had said at the time that I was going to take as much time as I needed to read that book, and it wasn't anything but the book that had me reading all through the night and into the next day. I intended to take more naps; I intended to laze around in pajamas and casually leaf pages and absorb. No way, man. That story - a proper JKR story - just propels you right through it, and if i couldn't put it down it was only because that was absolutely what was required of me by the fiction.

That was simply the pace I chose - rather, it was the pace the book chose for me. In retrospect, I do not feel as though I rushed. I do not feel as though finishing it by Saturday diminished it even in the slightest. I don't feel that obeying the natural obligations of a fast-paced story - even one that is hard to read at points - does anything to anyone's enjoyment of the text but enhance it.

I do feel that purposefully denying that push, that force, that momentum that all the Potter books have had thus far, would drain the book of some of its power and enchantment - that purposefully slowing my reading would mean I was forcing the book to take on a different narrative shape than it is intended to have, at least on me.

With book five, I just let the story and my connection to it dictate my reading speed. I have never had a different experience with a Potter book; I pick it up, and it carries me along. So, I do not expect different for book six. I will pick it up, and find the pace that fits, that is natural, and go with it. I've no reason to believe it won't be fast, and fun, and wild, and so gripping I am loath to do anything resembling sleep.

So, 15 hours, when that's about the time it took me (maybe it took me 17? I don't remember) to finish a book that was not only two to three hundred pages longer, but was actually physically painful in parts? Fifteen hours for a book that Jo has compared to Prisoner of Azkaban, the one of them that I read the fastest? Fifteen hours sounds like plenty of time to read the book, revise questions, get a nap in, shower and be clean, and be off to interview Jo with a clear head.

Holy crap.

OK, sorry, that happens sometimes. But still, it's plenty of time. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Why would I force false impediments on the experience? Potter books have always been rides, always been unputdownable, at least for me. I can't imagine how obeying that gravitation, that attraction, would do anything to harm the journey.

OK, I'm off. (Ed, I'm writing the article. Honest. Right now. A girl needs a break now and then, from writing - to write.)