I'm a hopeless Harry Potter nerd

OK, so I'm listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks for what must be the gazillionth time, and I noticed an inconsistency (yes, there are a number of inconsistencies in the series, but I'd never noticed this one before). In Chamber of Secrets, Ginny's eyes are described as green (last track of disk 1 at about 1:10 if you want to check for yourself), while in Deathly Hallows they're described as brown (when Harry notices that Mrs. Weasley's eyes are the same shade of brown as Ginny's).

Yes, I am a nerd. Yes, I need to get a life. But if I could only learn to use the Imperious Curse on my co-workers, my work days would be so much more fun.

Our most literate cities

Dr. Jack Miller, President of Central Connecticut State University, has ranked major US cities (population > 250,000) according to how literate they are (see http://www.ccsu.edu/AMLC07/Overall_Rankings/Top10.htm). The rankings are based on a variety of different measures, which he divides into the following categories: "Booksellers; Educational attainment; Internet Resources; Library Resources; Newspaper Circulation; and Periodical publications." I've lived in three of the cities on the list: Portland, OR, my current home, which ranks #12; Seattle, WA, where I went to graduate school, way up at #2; and Stockton, CA, a short drive from my hometown as well as the home of my undergraduate alma mater, which ranks dead last (no surprise--it's hard to get much reading done when you're dodging bullets).

It would be interesting to see how these rankings correlate with other city characteristics. Are cities with lousy weather more literate than sunny places? That would explain why Minneapolis, Seattle, and St. Paul hold the top 3 spots. How about average commute time? That could be an advantage if audiobooks count. And how about the presence and quality of professional sports teams? Other recreation opportunities? And do literacy rates correlate positively or negatively with consumption of other media--music, movies, TV, etc.? I could make some assumptions, but the reality might not be so obvious. How about the birth rate? Reading in bed would tend to detract from other activities, and people with children have less time to read than the childless do (trust me--that one I know from firsthand experience).

Inquiring, literate minds want to know more...

Quote of the Day

"Among the trite and true notions about human nature, none is more so than the fact that the majority of people care more for what they do not have than for what they do have. This legacy of our original parents is the foundation of progress. It supports all such improvements in living as the discovery of the spear, America, and the garbage compacter. It subsidizes credit cards and divorce lawyers."

Michael Malone in Dingley Falls

Stuff I like that everyone else likes

I posted awhile ago on stuff everyone else likes except me and stuff I like that most people don't know about. This time I'll try a different angle--stuff I like that everyone else likes too. Ho hum... What's so special about that, you say? Well, I'm usually such a weirdo that I miss out on popular stuff, so this list won't be as long as you might think.

Popular things I like . . . on TV:
This will probably be the shortest list of the bunch. I don't watch much TV--and no, I'm not one of those pretentious people who sniffs derisively at any TV program not on PBS. I just don't have a lot of free time, and I prefer to spend most of that free time on other activities (like eating and sleeping). But I can come up with a couple things:

• The Daily Show: Honestly, if it weren't for Jon Stewart, I don't think I'd ever know what was going on in the world. And of course I love the snark.
  
• The Colbert Report: Stephen Colbert is a crackup, and I'm a sucker for well-executed irony.
  
• The Simpsons: especially the Halloween specials.
  

Popular things I like . . . on the radio:

• Satellite radio: A huge variety of music, no commercials, and I can get my favorite stations almost anywhere in the US. What's not to love? Hair Nation on Sirius rocks!
  
• Goo Goo Dolls: OK, they're kinda 90s, but for me that's positively recent, and they're as close to alternative as I get. And John Rzeznik... yum.
  
• "Paralyzer" by Finger Eleven: Finally a recent song I like! Satan must be strapping on his ice skates...
  
• Classic rock from the 70s through early 90s. My music is popular again! Turn it up to 11!
  

Popular things I like . . . actors/movies:
This'll be my longest list. To keep it manageable, I'll stick to the major ones.

• Oldies: Original Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek movies (well, most of 'em), Indiana Jones movies, 80s slasher flicks, James Bond movies (again, most of 'em), The Princess Bride
  
• New stuff: newest James Bond movie, Bourne movies (Matt Damon... *sigh*. And the car chases and explosions are cool too.), Harry Potter movies
  
• Actors: Tom Hanks, John Cusack, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Nicholas Cage
  

Popular things I like... books:
I just realized my last post didn't have a category for books. How could I miss that? This list is shorter than I thought it would be, but that's probably because I read a lot of older stuff, especially nonfiction.

• Harry Potter: love 'em! I wish there were more coming. The audiobooks are great too, but then I could probably listen to Jim Dale read the phone book.
  
• The Da Vinci Code: I avoided this one for awhile because of all the hype, but a friend loaned me a copy, so I thought I'd give it a try. Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I could argue the theology and find holes in the plot, but why ruin a great read?
  
• Sherlock Holmes stories: A century old and still wonderful.
  

Popular things I like . . . when it comes to people:
Well, gee, this one will be a little inane. I'll probably start sounding like a singles ad or a Playboy caption ("and I like sincere people and puppies and long walks on the beach..." Gag!)

• Sense of humor: The single most important requirement for anyone in my life! You need to be able to laugh--at yourself, at nothing, at stupid stuff, whatever. And when we women say that a sense of humor is the most attractive quality a man can have, we aren't kidding.
  
• Sincerity: Try not to set off my BS detector more than once per day, please.
  
• Kindness: "Kind" is a bit like "nice" -- a word that's usually seen as wimpy and nondescript. But both "kind" and "nice" are actually really important qualities. Life is short and sometimes difficult; don't make it worse than it needs to be. If you can't treat people well, especially people from whom you have nothing to gain, please just go away. Sarcasm and snark are great, but underneath that, try to be a decent human being.
  
• A spirit of adventure: No, I don't mean bungee jumping or other pastimes that attract people with more adrenaline than brains. But be willing to visit new places, try new things, and meet new people. There's a whole world out there, ya know.
  

Top Unread Books on LibraryThing

Here's a fun, bookish meme, perfect for a librarian and former English lit major like me. Grabbed from Libwitch

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132) Loved it! Just a big, long, Russian soap opera. I have fond memories of reading it while sitting under the trees at UOP.
Crime and punishment (121) Depressing, of course.
Catch-22 (117) ROTFL.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) Not as good as I'd hoped.
Moby Dick (86) Generations of high school students are right--booorrrinnnggggg....
Ulysses (84) Sorry, just couldn't deal with it. And since it wasn't assigned reading, I saw no reason to prolong my suffering.
Madame Bovary (83) Another soap opera and more evidence that human nature is constant across both time and space.
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80) Loved it.
A Tale of Two Cities (80) One of my favorites! And it's about time I read it again.
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78) Good, but Anna Karenina was better. Tolstoy could have cut about 200 pages by condensing the long descriptions of military tactics in the battle scenes.
Vanity Fair (74) Required reading in my English novel class in college. For the most part, I really enjoyed it. Gotta love those big Victorian soap operas...er, I mean novels.
The Time Traveler's Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70) Oh, deliver me from stream of consciousness writing! Ugh. Another assignment, this time for an English novel class, and I hated it.
Great Expectations (70) Hated it in 9th grade, loved it as an adult. Dickens rocks!
American gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66) OK, I think I'm the only woman on the planet that read this and didn't like it. I didn't hate it, but I really didn't like it.
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Llife and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64) Love 'em.
The Historian : A Novel (63).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61) Another big ol' Victorian novel I read in college. Good stuff.
Frankenstein (59) I love horror, but I couldn't get into Frankenstein. I think it's because I found it so depressing. I felt sorry for the monster, didn't want to read about his suffering, and thought the doctor was cruel.
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57) Terribly depressing but incredible. I found this one especially interesting, because my father's family came to California during the Dust Bowl migrations. Dad talked a lot about going to bed hungry and eating beans night after night, but he didn't talk much about the rest of the experience.
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57) Chilling.
Angels & Demons (56) I really want to finish this one. I got about halfway through and got distracted. Not as good as the Da Vinci Code, but good.
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (54) Truly chilling.
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54) Loved it. Almost as good as Jude the Obscure. The Victorians had some fascinating and frightening views on sexuality. Makes me glad I live now.
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les Misérables (53) Another one I need to finish someday.
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48) Incredible.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48) Should be mandatory reading for every middle school student. Why are otherwise-intelligent people baffled by the apostrophe?
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45) - I really want to read this.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44) I recommend reading this one while curled up in front of a crackling fire, with a steaming mug of cocoa close by.

What's so special about Harry Potter?

Note: This post is spoiler-free! Read on in safety.

Last weekend was Harry Potter weekend in the Crum household. Hubby and I planned to go to a release party at our local Borders, then get our copies (print and audio) just after midnight. I got too sleepy, though, so Hubby went without me--in his Lord Voldemort costume. Apparently he was a big hit with the kids, which isn't quite in keeping with the Dark Lord's evil image. But then Darth Vader is a hit with kids too. Here's a pic of Hubby in all his evil glory:



Bright and early Saturday morning, we all got started. I grabbed the print copy and headed for the couch. Hubby ripped the CDs (all 24 of 'em), put them on his iPod, and headed to work. Son took the CDs and headed for his room. I finished the book at 9:00 that evening; Hubby finished Sunday night, and Son is about halfway through. Since Son isn't done yet, Hubby and I have to be very careful about discussing it. It's hard, because Son keeps asking us to tell him if [insert character here] will die.

So what is it about these books that make us--and millions more otherwise-normal people of all ages--so obsessive? I'm sure the critics and psychoanalysts could give you detailed, academic answers, but I'm not going to do that. I'll just give you my thoughts:

• Storytelling: The tales are well-plotted and engaging adventures with lots of excitement. Harry's magical world is fascinating, and it's a thrill to tag along on his many adventures, with dramas both large and small.
  
  
• Characterization: Rowling's characters are multifaceted and richly-drawn. She has very few one-dimensional characters. They are complex and seem very real (except for their magical ability). All are flawed, just like real people, and readers can relate to their struggles. We really care about these characters. Sometimes they seem almost like family.
  
  
• Authenticity: Rowling doesn't talk down to her readers, and she doesn't sugarcoat anything. There's real evil in her books, and endings aren't always 100% happy. Even though the books are fantasy, there's an element of realism that pulls you in and enables you to relate to the characters. Some parents object to how dark the books can be, but I suspect kids appreciate that. My childhood certainly wasn't all sunshine and light, so stories that present the world that way didn't really interest me. Kids are good BS-detectors.
  
  

Now that I've finished the last book, I feel almost bereft. It's over. If anyone out there can recommend another series to fill this gap in my literary life, please speak up! I need something to ease my Harry Potter withdrawl.

Harry Potter: the latest movie and the last book

[don't worry; no spoilers here]

I've been too busy living life to blog about it much lately, but I do want to say something about the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I saw Friday night. Hubby and I disagree; I liked it, and he didn't. He's a purist where Harry Potter movies are concerned, getting annoyed at any change they make from the books. But since Phoenix was an 800+ page book, they had to cut it to pieces to make a 2 1/2 hr movie. Overall, I think they cut intelligently, including everything that was essential for telling the story and keeping the sequence logical and easy to follow. The acting seemed better than it has it some of the previous movies. Michael Gambon seemed to get Dumbledore right for a change. Supposedly he finally read the books before playing the part this time, so he now has a clue about the character after being way off in Goblet of Fire. Emma Watson's acting gets better with each film (thank goodness). Imelda Staunton was perfect as Dolores Umbridge, absolutely loathesome. And Daniel Radcliffe just gets better and better as Harry, bringing more maturity and range to the role than ever.

Now the countdown begins to the seventh and final book, due out this Saturday. Tony plans to dress as Voldemort for the party at Borders and get our copy right at midnight. I might go, but after a long day at work, I'm not sure I'll make it till midnight. The big discussion at our house is, Is Snape evil or (sort of) good? I don't want to say too much, because I know at least one of my readers hasn't read Book 6 yet, so I'll be a bit vague. Tony maintains that he's really on Dumbledore's side. I think Snape's on his own side, looking out for himself. He does what he has to do to stay alive. It'll be interesting to see what he does in the last book. Of course, the really big question is, Will Harry die? In a way I think he might, because that would be a good way for Rowling to ensure that she doesn't get talked into writing another Harry Potter book. Having Harry die while killing Voldemort would make a great dramatic ending to the series. But I don't know if she would do that. She has said that parts of the 7th book are very sad and that there is more than one death. In other words, I'll be in a foul mood for at least a week after I read it.

If you're a Harry Potter fan, please leave a comment with your predictions. If you aren't: run, don't walk, to your nearest library or bookstore, get a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and start reading! You don't know what you're missing.

Gay Penguins in Lodi

Now that I have your attention, your shoes are untied. No, seriously... someone in Lodi (and apparently people in other cities around the country) is upset about a children's book called And Tango Makes Three. The book is based on a true story about two male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo who become something of a couple and even make a nest for a fake egg. The Stockton Record has a brief article about the controversy at http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070505/A_NEWS/705050321. The reader comments are more entertaining than the article.

As a librarian, I find nearly all censorship abhorrent, but this example seems especially ridiculous. Someone posted a comment about not wanting to have a sex talk with her three-year-old because of the book. Well, gosh, I don't think a picture book about a couple penguins requires a sex talk! Little kids aren't nearly as obsessed with sex as their parents. You can tell a three-year-old that the penguins are friends and let it go at that. In fact, in the not-too-distant past same-sex friends would hug and kiss routinely, and they weren't gay. It just seems to be our culture today that insists on sexualizing everything.

Maybe the authors intended for the book to promote "the gay lifestyle" (or as we liberals call it, "tolerance"), and maybe they didn't. But it really doesn't matter. The book's target audience will see it as just a cute story about penguins... unless we grownups insist on giving them other ideas.