HP Source

When Best Beloved moved into my house (now OUR house) he brought his extensive book collection to merge in with my extensive book collection. Our house is tiny, and nearly all the wall space is now taken up with vast built-in shelving. Normally you'd think we would have a few boxes of doubled-up books to take down to the next school fete, but Best Beloved tends to read non-fiction (a lot of books involving: cults, sundry weird religions, Chick tracts, the CIA, India, and freaks. He has a love of all things kooky) and I'm hooked on all things fictional, so the only things we doubled up on were the Harry Potter series and Salman Rushdie's Fury.

We have become HP afficionados. We have read all the books privately, and out loud to Bumblebee; we've got four of the books on CD, and they are listened to on long car trips as well as when Bumblebee eats his breakfast (Stephen Fry does an excellent job, although I'm getting to the point where I may have to lock the cds in a cupboard for a few years); plus we have the Gameboy HP games, the videos of both movies, and various articles of HP costumery, including a wand that makes lots of magical noises but has only one spell (which is to drive me up the wall).

Best Beloved also has a fancy Google search to winkle out interesting facts about JKR and the upcoming book/s. This reports back every morning like a malformed lab assistant crowing about the latest gravedigging triumph. The latest choice tidbit postulates that JKR may kill off Cho Chang in the next book. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if she did. I have a lot of respect for her ability to kill off people and introduce new characters far later than other authors would. And I wouldn't mind seeing the back of CC anyway. I'm rooting for Ginny. But I wouldn't place a bet about it. Don't people have better things to do with their money? I'm sure someone in Sudan would like 100 pounds to see if they live or die.