Harry Potter

I have read them all, and was the one to turn my Daughter and Wife on to them. Anxiously awaiting the 5th book, and the movie comes out in November.
Also there are 2 supplemental books, out History of Quidditch,and another that the name evades me. Also there is a book, about J.K. Rowling, that is a quick but insightfull, read.

She is under-rated in my book, no pun intended.
Each book, gets more and more complex, and engrossing. Once I start one I do not put it down, until finished.
The only drawback is that she will, kill the series, once Harry Graduates Hogwarts.
But she has stated she will then move to do a Series, about the other Characters involved in the books.

I've read the first 3, and they were great. I just can't get myself to read that last looong one with all the other stuff there is to do...

My grandchildren, although very small, love Harry Potter, so designed three skins for ICQ,Winamp and Yahoo Messenger, so they can see him on "Daddies'" monitor while he talks to me.Put them on my website, just to see what happened, the results re downloads are amazing.
JK Rowling is English, so of course am a little biased() but have to admire this lady. She wrote first book,in a cafe, in Edingburgh,Scotland,'cos she had no money to heat the flat she shared with her young son,and has also stated she will only write maybe seven Potter books and then move on to something else.
Read yesterday, that TV rights for Potter are starting at 50 million dollars, in advance, whether film is success or not.That will buy lots of heating for her house!! Good luck JK, keep 'em coming

*crosses fingers*

Be gone daemons! I have this oversensitivity to hyped things, therefore I refuse to even look at the books, even though I'm a fantasy nut.

/me his crosses fingers too

I didn't actually read them, I Listened to the audiobooks to train my English... That takes up even more time than reading, but it gets you _very_ hooked... I can't wait till the fifth one comes out, but I'll probably read it, no way I'm going to wait till they finish the audio. And, crae and transmutate, they are _really_ good if you like fantasy. If I hadn't started them before the hype, I wouldn't have read them, but it was worth it.
By the way, I was wondering if any of you German speaking people have read something of Ralf Isau? He's in the same class or better as JKR. Don't think he's been translated into English though, wich is a pity.

Great, Great books, can't wait for the next one. Was thinking of doing a DX Theme baced on them.

mormegil,please design the DX Theme,am sure it will be great.You got one pre-booked download already;p

and a dx theme based on the silmarillion would be cool too, -mormegil-

I didn't know she was giong to kill the series after the 7th. I thought she might do stories that involved Harry Potter as an adult or something.

Though I agree, after 7 books she might be ready to go on. Book 4 could ahve really been 2 books. The first book is like 250 pages, book 4 is over 800.

I am positive, that given Her talents, She will make whatever She chooses, as enjoyable as what She has accomplished, thus far.

Like some of the others, I tend to avoid overhyped authors (someone once asked me how many Tom Clancey books I owned, I must have laughed a good 5 minutes). Oh well. I'm too busy enjoying Glen Cook's "The Black Company" series to waste time on sugar fantasy, anyway.

hehe, i knew Tolkien would have to come up in this thread ... and on that note, i never made it all the way through the silmarillion even though i've read LoTR about 5 times over the last 13 years hmm, i can't figure out why i never read sil. all the way through? =/

oh and yeh i guess i should read harry potter, but just even typing the name makes me think of it as a 'kids' book... (but i'm a big kid i guess)

ciao

Silmarillion is much much better than Lord of the Ring or the Hobbit (which was a kids book).

I agree. Silmarillion is a true masterpiece. Gandalf, blech, the elves from the old days could have kicked Gandalf's butt let alone Sauron. Sauron was the regular whipping boy of some of the Eldar.

hopefully, if the 3 lotr movies do -really- well, they'll make the 3 or 4 it would take to do the silmarillion.. the movies would be so much longer than the book, since the book favors narrative over dialogue to such a great degree.

Better than LoTR? Does he actually move the plot along instead of writing like a cheap hack? I once looked into the first book of LoTR, thought it was crap (and rightfully so, considering 150 pages in, that little twerp was still packing... this was also the point I gave up (I glanced ahead to around page 200, he was still in the same town) and took that waste of tree back to the library).

If you think LOTR is "Crap" then I really can't recommend any books I like to you.

Never read a Potter book but I did read all the Tolkien ones as a kid.

Ha, seems Fantasy is not for the 'vid!

hehe.. "and some watched as ess-vid stirred the pot, and some questioned the cleanliness of his spoon" ;]

potter seemed pretty cool, but we got interrupted reading it - it struck me as having the same atmosphere as 'dirk gently's holistic detective agency.' like others i've talked to, i feel it's a bit destructive to the suspension of disbelief to have some massively organised, heavily infrastructured subculture thriving away -totally- unnoticed by modern society (unless it's a bit tongue-in-cheek - then that's all good.)

in keeping with the mutation of this thread into a discussion of fantastic lit in general, here's a simple list of what i feel are the greats..

elric series - michael moorcock
cthulhu mythos - h.p.lovecraft
myth - robert asprin
middle earth - jrrt
lankhmar - fritz leiber
conan - r.e. howard
amber - roger zelazny
thieves' world - collaboration
gormenghast - mervyn peake
earthsea - ursula leguin
discworld - terry pratchett

Oh, I enjoy fantasy, I just enjoy authors that know when to say "It's time to start the plot now, initial setup needs to end." It is possible to be detailed without boring the reader silly (see McCaffrey), after all.

Who knows, maybe the rest of his books are great. That one, however, was a pile.

"Stirring the pot"? No, I just didn't like what I read. People are welcome to like him, and as you see, many do, but many -don't- as well (usually for the reason I have, or being sick of "good vs evil" fantasy).

Evil fantasy? There's no such thing. All fantasy is good in my book. Well, except Celtic fantasy ofcourse. That stuff is so boring I get sleepy by just looking at the cover.

Anyone read the Chronicles of Narnia series as a kid? I read them before the Tolkien series...