HP Book Club Participants: Some thoughts & feedback please.

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#1

We will begin reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone August 1st. I was looking at Sorcerer’s Stone today. It’s about 310 pages. Easy to read in a few days to two weeks, depending on your personal schedule.

I’ll talk to Casilda, and we’ll put up a book discussion thread. I’ve got some “book discussion questions to add to the thread” just to make things interesting, add some spice to the discussion. (Took a while not to find completely childish questions.)

The larger books will be a much bigger challenge if you aren’t able to read rather quickly. In that case, and just because they are so darn good anyway, I recommend the audio versions of the books. If you have a long commute or can listen at work, you’ll be able to get through the longer books in the series in a month’s time easily. There are two different audio versions available for each book–American version read by Jim Dale (narrator of Pushing Daisies) and British version read by Stephen Fry. Personally, I adore Jim Dale’s performance, for which he has won awards. I have it on mp3 and just listen on my ipod. You can find the audio versions at your local library, usually.

One other thing I want to address: SPOILERS. How do we feel about this? For me, this is a re-re-re-re…read of these books. I often forget what’s a spoiler. For those of you reading this series for the first time, do you wish to keep content about later books out of the threads for earlier books? (There is much foreshadowing that you won’t pick-up on reading through the first time, little objects or people that are mentioned–that on a re-read you think “ah-HA!”) Again, I know the books have been out a long time, but I want this to be an enjoyable experience and will respect the feelings of the majority of the group.

Several of you showed an interest in doing a Talkshoe discussion as well. I need to know if there is a majority interest in doing it. This month, we would do the Talkshoe discussion on Sunday the 23rd. (That’s during my vacation, but I’ll have wireless internet, supposedly, at our beach house. So it should be all good.)

Please respond to the following by quoting this post and making sure to include your response to this:

Feedback:
Talkshoe: Yay or Nay
Spoilers: They’re OK or No Way

#2

I’ve jumped ahead of myself and am already into Goblet of Fire, couldn’t be helped. I agree the audiobook versions are so convieniet, although Order of the Phoenix takes around 28hrs to listen to. I’ve only listened to the Stephen Fry version. 1. becuase he’s one of my hero’s and 2. I know it would drive me nuts to hear a certain item be called a Sorcerer’s stone. I don’t know why, it just bothers me for some reason. I’ve had to get through the US version of the movie, just for the rifftrax

Are there any spoilers that aren’t in the public conciousness. Most of the major plots are in the same league as Vader is Luke’s father. By the way, the Deathly Hallows is a sled

#3

I like the idea of taking them in order, mostly because some of the things in the first book end up having even bigger meaning later. i.e… Harry’s first postions class…)

My suggestion is to take them in order and post any reference to future book events as spoilers, so any new comers can experience them in the proper order…FWIW…

[spoiler] Harry is not really a potter…in fact there is no pottery class in the entire series…[/spoiler]

#4

Bumping this thread, hoping especially to get feedback on participants’ feelings about spoilers, since we’re starting Sorcerer’s Stone as of tomorrow.

#5

Since I’ve read all the books I can’t really be spoiled but I think we should be considerate of those who haven’t read them. Using the [ Spoiler ] spoiler goes here, remove the spaces within the brackets [ /spoiler ] tags should work for everyone and anyone not wanting to be spoiled can avoid them by not highlighting what’s in the grey box. :slight_smile:

And I have my book out, ready to start tomorrow. Thinking about taking it to work with me tomorrow morning. Yuck…I hate working on the weekend, so it should make it go better while I wait on the network guys.

#6

There’s been a bit of discussion over on the B5 threads about this question. People who started out as complete newbies, quickly race ahead of the schedule and so now everyone’s a few season’s ahead. Over there, the consensus seems to be that spoilers are those that concern future seasons.

That said, one of the things I would like to do is discuss series level things like relationships between early and later books, over all structure, etc. However, if we do decide to discuss subsequent books in the clear, we should make the thread “SPOILERS” just so no one’s surprised. I don’t know how much of our actual discussion will be at that level, so maybe it’s unnecessary. Or we could simply setup a dedicated 10,000 ft thread.