Book #19: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (no spoilers or plot points)

Last night, at 10 p.m. (pacific time), I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, about 22 hours after it was released. It took about nine hours of reading time total.

But let’s back up. All the way to last weekend, where I tried to accomplish an immense amount, just so this weekend could be completely free to do nothing but read Harry Potter. Then this past week, where the main goal in my life was to avoid finding out plot details. I stopped reading the newspaper, blogs…I even had to have a serious conversation with myself about whether Jon Stewart would say something related to Harry Potter that would ruin the book. One of my coworkers speculated that an e-mail spammer might send a spam that had the ending as the title of the spam, so that even checking my e-mail became a cause for fear.

I was just absolutely convinced that I was going to find out a crucial detail, so I disengaged from life, conversations, etc, just trying to make it to the weekend so that I could get the book and retreat to my apartment, and not emerge until I knew the end.

Part of me was like, what does it matter? To be honest, I would have been okay with however the book/series had ended. Everyone could have turned into a Martian and flown in a Dr. Pepper can to Timbuktu, and I would have been okay (that doesn’t happen, and I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to use that as example). I just didn’t want someone to tell me what happened before I read it for myself. But why did I even need that? I’ve read plenty of books where I knew the ending, and really, tons of trailers show the end of movies. Why was Harry Potter any different?

It’s a hard line to draw these days, when pop culture is news. Five minutes after The Sopranos ended, you could get detailed descriptions of how the show ended, and everyone wanted to talk about it endlessly, so that even if you had TIVO’d it, and were going to watch it the next night….well, there was just no way that you could have made it to that night without finding out the end. And when it’s a cultural touchstone, like The Sopranos, or Harry Potter, reporting the end almost does seem to be a newsworthy item. But it’s not. We’ve developed a world of instant gratification but not taken into account that some things require time to be enjoyed.

So what I decided was that I was trying to avoid the kind of spoiler that people would tell you for the express purpose of being cruel, or as a way to be condescending. I had a very vivid daydream that I would be reading the bus, reading Harry Potter, and someone would just lean over and tell me the end, just to be spiteful. And maybe it’s precisely because it’s so blown out of control that people who are not on the inside want to do that to others. I don’t know what it says about me that I think other people are so capable of that cruelty. But last night I went out to get a cheeseburger, with about four hundred pages to go, and I have never been so scared in my life that some conversation in another booth would go, “Hey, did you hear what happens in Harry Potter?”

So, because I am part of the camp that believes that absolutely no detail at all should be in the public sphere before you read this book, even if I can’t precisely pinpoint why I think that is, I won’t do a traditional review of the book. Instead, here’s what I did yesterday:

I had a bad night’s sleep Friday night, full of Harry Potter anxiety dreams…anxiety over finding the book in a bookstore or being told the ending. At 5 a.m. I called it quits on sleeping and went to the 24-hour QFC down the street. No HP7 books were out! I was forced to ask some guy stocking cat food at 5 a.m. if he had any Harry Potter books, and I can’t think of too much that’s more pathetic than that. He tried to make small talk but I completely avoided eye contact and gave one-word answers, just because at that point I was so convinced that the book would be ruined. Then I went home and ate Rice Krispies and read for two hours. Then I fell back to sleep, probably out of relief that I finally had the book and could read it without leaving the apartment again. I woke up and ate lunch and read. I talked to my mom on the phone, then read. I went and got the cheeseburger mentioned above, and then read some more. I laughed, I cried, and then it was done. I was a little sad that I couldn’t savor it a little more, but I probably would have read it quickly even without being convinced that the whole world was out to ruin the experience for me. It was good. I give it an A.