Ten years later, Harry Potter is no longer a bestseller
According to the New York Times, Harry Potter is finally off the best-seller list after 10 years. (Personal prediction: It won't be that way for long -- the movie is coming out soon, and Jo's encyclopedia will surely make the list when it's published.) It doesn't feel like nearly 10 years since I first heard of Harry Potter, but I suppose it has been.
The first book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” crept quietly onto the bottom of the hardcover fiction list on Dec. 27, 1998. (How far back was that? Eight days earlier, Bill Clinton had been impeached by the House of Representatives.)
I remember the first time I heard of the books -- I was doing my first internship in the summer of 1999, and I remember us doing a spread on "Prisoner of Azkaban." I kind of pooh-poohed the books at the time, automatically rejecting anything that had that much of a mainstream furor. (Little did I know that the intensity of the furor had really only started.) But someone gave me a copy of PoA, and I was bored, so I read it. And I went and got the other two books soon after.
And ever since then, I've been an avid fan. Actually, avid might be too weak a word. When they scheduled Order of the Phoenix's release on June 21, 2003, no one thought to ask me if I might have plans that day. (I did.) So, immediately following our wedding reception that day, we went to Barnes and Noble, still in wedding apparel, and my bridesmaids and I bought our copies. (We got a few reactions -- my favorite was one little girl who walked up to me and asked me if I was there for Harry Potter, too. Another woman got very indignant that I was there on my wedding day.) We got on a plane to London the next day, and my husband put a one-chapter-a-day restriction once we got off the plane overseas.
When the last book was released, I was there at midnight, in costume, for its release. (Tonks, of course.)
I've met tons of people, online and in real life, because of Harry Potter. I've spent many wonderful evenings reading the books out loud with my husband in an effort to get him interested. (It worked.) And I can't wait to one day do the same with my future children.
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