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Harry Potter...for friends and fans alike

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MaineWriter:
Hagrid makes sense. He was the very first person Harry met from the wizarding world and Hagrid nurtured him through his early years at Hogwarts (I feel like he has been less of a presence in the last two books). I think Hagrid's death would really be a devastation for Harry.

Snape makes sense, too. Harry finally figures out he is an ally and poof! he's gone. The same sort of thing happened with Sirius.

I also wonder about Ginny Weasley, especially now since she is Harry's girlfriend. Remember, she was possessed by Voldemort before...the same thing could happen and she could die this time.

L

ifyoucantfixit:



            I even thought about McGonagle but if she dies, the wizard world would have, no real teacher of substance and reliability.  So I dont think it will be her..but others could maybe give further thoughts. 

MaineWriter:
This gave me a laugh...


Confessions of a Harry-come-lately
(http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/468674,CST-BOOKS-potter15.article)

July 15, 2007

BY KEVIN NANCE

With a tenacity Lord Voldemort himself might have admired, I fought Harry Potter for years. In the early days of his fame, I neither knew nor cared what a Muggle was, and Hogwarts sounded like the condition of someone in desperate need of a dermatologist. By 2002, I'd learned Muggles were people without magical abilities, that Hogwarts was a school for wizards and even that Quidditch was a game, something like soccer on broomsticks.

I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

The problem wasn't that I was a literary snob, or that J.K. Rowling's series of fantasy novels were marketed to young readers. I was a J.R.R. Tolkien fan from way back, and everywhere I looked, I saw adults devouring the Potter books as avidly as their children.

Nor was it Harry Potter himself I couldn't stand. It was Pottermania.

I'm one of those people who insist on discovering things on their own, preferably well before the publicity machine has been cranked up full blast. But by the time he penetrated my consciousness, Harry Potter was far more than a boy whose destiny was to save the world from an evil sorcerer. Harry was an international phenomenon on page and screen, his every move dissected on hundreds of Web sites, his publication dates and movie openings spurring long lines and front-page feature stories. Even Rowling's career -- her beginnings as a welfare mom scribbling away in cafes, her staggering wealth, her teasing secrecy about future plot developments -- had become the endlessly chewed-over stuff of legend.

To a hype-hating curmudgeon like me, it was nauseating. Harry Potter was being shoved down my throat, and I was determined to keep spitting him out.

Then one day in 2005, for reasons I can't fully explain, my resolve weakened. On Amazon, I came across a boxed set of the first five Potter books in paperback, The Sorcerer's Stone through The Order of the Phoenix. Almost as if I were playing on a Ouija board with a supernatural presence -- was that you, Harry? -- in the room, I felt my fingers tapping out the order. It wasn't so very expensive, I reasoned, so why not find out what all the fuss was about?

I was done for. When the books arrived, I read the first in two days, including short breaks for things like food and earning a living, and quickly understood something of what it must be like to be an addict. Within two weeks I'd gone through the whole stash -- er, set -- and within a month I was standing in line for my hardcover copy of The Half-Blood Prince, which, fortunately for my sanity, had just come out.

In the agonizing two-year wait for the series finale, The Deathly Hallows, to be released on Saturday, I've steeped myself in Potteriana. With Talmudic rigor I can illuminate for you exactly what a Horcrux is, reel off the three Unforgivable Curses, and spar with the field's greatest sages (who tend to be around 12 years old) about whether the sinister Professor Snape is a bad guy or a good one. I've trolled the Internet fan sites, including those in a tizzy about the possibility that Rowling might kill off Harry in the end. (If that happens, which I seriously doubt, the author may have to go underground for a while. Maybe Salman Rushdie has a spare couch.) Heaven help me, I've even tried pumpkin juice.

Naturally, I've watched all the movie versions so far -- the latest, "The Order of the Phoenix," opened this week -- and found them acceptable, though far less satisfying than the books. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry onscreen, is a little too handsome to match my mental picture of the character, which more closely resembles the wand-wielding geek of Mary GrandPre's book jackets for the U.S. editions. (On the other hand, Alan Rickman is a dead ringer for Snape.)

And so my transformation from skeptic to fan is complete. If whatever guided my fingers on Amazon that fateful day emanated not from the spirit world or Hogwarts but from Madison Avenue, I'm grateful anyhow. The Potter craze is that rare example, like America's love affair with the Beatles in the '60s, of a mass infatuation that deservedly grew into a long-term relationship.

No, the Potter books aren't the best fantasy writing of recent years; that distinction belongs to Philip Pullman's great His Dark Materials trilogy, also coming soon to a theater near you. But Rowling has succeeded in creating a compelling, consistent and progressively dark world all her own, one that wears its literary lineage lightly but unmistakably. Harry is King Arthur, Frodo Baggins and Luke Skywalker rolled into one. Joseph Campbell would have been proud. So would Tolkien.

Come Saturday morning, I'll be proud, too -- to stand in line, plop down my Muggle money and spend a day with my favorite wizard.

I wasn't there for you at first, Harry, but now I've got your back. Voldemort doesn't stand a chance.

Kevin Nance is the Sun-Times' critic-at-large.

opinionista:
LOL he sounds like me. I went through something similar with Harry Potter. At first I refused to read it thinking it was a silly novel for kids. Then, hearing my sister talking about Harry Potter again and again, curiosity won over me and I decided to read the first book just to find out what the fuss was all about. And I've been hooked ever since!!

MaineWriter:
I love the Harry Potter audiobooks. Jim Dale does a terrific job. From the New York Times:


July 17, 2007

The Voice of Harry Potter Can Keep a Secret

By MOTOKO RICH

Jim Dale is either one of the luckiest men in America or one of the most tortured.

A little less than two months ago, Mr. Dale, the veteran Broadway actor turned voice of Harry Potter, finished recording the audio version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the colossally successful series by J. K. Rowling.

So that means that he knows how it ends.

His grandchildren, who visited from England after he completed the recording, literally twisted his arms trying to get him to divulge a clue. His wife is still in the dark. Everywhere he goes, people want to know What He Knows.

“It’s a surprise ending,” he said on Friday, during an interview in his Park Avenue co-op. “Let’s say that.”

Gee, thanks.

It is not quite four days until Harry Potter’s legions of fans can procure a copy of “Deathly Hallows” — in hardcover, CD or cassette — and find out for themselves exactly who does what to whom. Mr. Dale signed a confidentiality agreement so that he will not breathe a word of the plot.

But after spending eight years creating more than 200 voices for all the characters in the “Harry Potter” books, Mr. Dale really believes that readers — and listeners — should discover the end for themselves.

“For those people who say, ‘C’mon, Jim, how does it end?,’ it’s like parents who say: ‘There’s a surprise gift for you in the next room. It’s a bicycle,’ ” said Mr. Dale, whose apartment could easily make a Hogwarts professor feel at home with its eclectic collections of Victorian cake decorations, pewter plates and Persian swords. “Let the child find out for himself by opening this gift.”

Mr. Dale, 71, was born in central England and has had a long and storied career as a stand-up comedian, a pop singer and an actor in everything from the British “Carry On” series of films and Shakespeare at the National Theater in London to Broadway productions of “Joe Egg” and “Barnum,” for which he won a Tony Award.

Serendipity landed Mr. Dale the part of reading “Harry Potter.” Back in 1999, Listening Library, then an independent company, acquired the United States audiobook rights to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, for just $15,000. Timothy Ditlow, the son of the company’s founders, was at a dinner party with a group of avid theatergoers who recommended Mr. Dale. (In Britain the audiobooks are produced by Bloomsbury, and Stephen Fry, the actor, author and comedian, reads them.)

Mr. Ditlow recalled Mr. Dale’s performance in “Barnum” and a few other Broadway shows. Although Mr. Dale had recorded only one audiobook, which was never released, Mr. Ditlow offered him the job. “I think it’s just one of those combination factors of luck and just going by your gut,” Mr. Ditlow said.

Since he first went into the recording studio in the summer of 1999, Mr. Dale has recorded every single word of the “Harry Potter” series, amounting to 117 hours and 4 minutes of reading time across the seven books — or a lot of long car rides. Including sales of CDs, cassettes and digital downloads, the audiobooks have sold more than 5.7 million copies, according to the Random House Audio Publishing Group, which now owns Listening Library.

For his work on the “Harry Potter” series, Mr. Dale has won a Grammy Award and holds the record for creating the most voices in an audiobook in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Deathly Hallows,” which runs to 784 pages in the ink-and-paper version, took about two and a half weeks, working six-and-a-half-hour days, recording about 18 to 20 pages an hour, to finish. As with the other books, Mr. Dale received the manuscript only two or three days before he was scheduled to begin recording.

“That makes it impossible for me to actually read it before recording it,” said Mr. Dale, who does not possess the 13-year-old megafan’s ability to inhale the book in a weekend.

So he read about 100 pages ahead, and noted all the different voices he needed for the first few days of recording. The benefit of reading in chunks, Mr. Dale said, is that: “I don’t ever know how the book is going to end so I can’t unconsciously lead you in the direction that the book is going. I don’t know who the villain is because I am just reading 100 pages at a time.”

By now the publisher has digital files of all the voices he has used for long-running characters like Hermione Granger, one of Harry’s sidekicks, as well as more minor recurring characters like the Death Eaters, so that Mr. Dale can recreate those voices for the latest book. He takes into account the aging of the main characters, who started out as 10 and 11 in “Sorcerer’s Stone” and are now 17 and 18 in “Deathly Hallows.”

For new characters Mr. Dale uses an old-fashioned cassette recorder and tapes one or two sentences in the new voice and notes the place in the text. Then, when he shows up in the studio and starts to read, he will go to his tape recorder, rewind until he finds the right voice, and play it back to refresh his memory before recording the text. To create the range of voices, he calls on his knowledge of dozens of accents from across the British Isles and imitates the voices of friends and relatives.

For Peeves, the poltergeist, he used the voice of an old comedian friend. For Prof. Minerva McGonagall, Mr. Dale chose the voice of an aunt on his wife’s side, who, perhaps fortunately, did not live to hear herself commemorated that way.

As with the earlier books, Ms. Rowling (whom Mr. Dale said he has met twice) sent along a list of new words and character names and their corresponding pronunciations. Whenever he stumbled on a word not on the author’s list, Mr. Dale would record it in context in several ways to account for every possible pronunciation.

The producers are sticklers for absolute fidelity to the text. “If she says ‘someone laughs, ha, ha, ha,’ and I do four ‘ha’s,’ I am stopped and told, ‘Just do three,’ ” Mr. Dale said.

This Friday night, in the run-up to the release of “Deathly Hallows” at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, Mr. Dale will appear at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in Manhattan, where he will invite children onto the stage to do impressions of his voices. After the book is released, he will do a tour of Houston, Washington, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.

Since attracting a fan base for his “Harry Potter” readings, Mr. Dale has been recording other children’s classics, like “A Christmas Carol,” “Peter Pan” and “Around the World in 80 Days.”

“So if we can encourage the children who follow Jim Dale to listen to other books he records,” Mr. Dale said, “then we are really encouraging them to read or listen to other books that they may never find on their own.”

This fall fans will also be able to hear Mr. Dale’s voice as the narrator of “Pushing Daisies,” a new television series from Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of “Men in Black.”

But it is his role as the aural embodiment of Harry Potter that has brought Mr. Dale a chance at the kind of immortality that many performers crave.

“We have been part of history — big, big history,” Mr. Dale said. “It’s like the people who were connected with Lewis Carroll or the people connected with J. M. Barrie when ‘Peter Pan’ came up. It has been marvelous. Now my voice can be heard in hundreds of years’ time. We all need to leave something behind, and I am leaving behind a legacy of the ‘Harry Potter’ audiobooks.”

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