Priorities

(I feel like I'm just adding to a flood of posts about Harry Potter, but I wanted to put a note in here to explain why you probably won't be seeing any posts from me for a while. The only reason I'm posting now is because it's early morning and Les is still asleep so I can't be getting through Harry Potter instead.)

The new Harry Potter is out and every spare moment is being spent getting to the end of the book. We picked up our copy on CD this year, and are listening to it together during lunch and after work for a couple of hours a night. We're already done with CD 9 (of 17) and I feel we're making pretty good time, while not cruising through it "too fast."

Someone at work was giving me flack for buying it on CD instead of book form, "But it's so much better if you actually READ it." Although I am a big reader and am generally not much of an aural person, I have no regrets when it comes to the Harry Potter books. The audio reader -- Jim Dale -- does an excellent job, and in some ways I feel that I have a better picture in my head of Hogwarts now than when I just read the books myself. He also does different voices for the various characters, which was certainly something my husband and I weren't doing when we read it to each other.

We began the CD thing with book #5. We originally bought Order of the Phoenix in hardcover, and were reading it to each other in bed every night. After three days, it seemed like we were making no progress whatsoever and we felt like we would lose our voices before we got through the nearly 900 pages. We exchanged our hardcover for CD and got through it in no time.

The only bad thing about listening to these books on CD is that you don't really know how to spell a lot of the names in the stories, which makes any kind of Google search more challenging, or guarantees that you won't be winning any Harry Potter Spelling Bees.

It's also much easier to fall asleep while listening to a book than it is while reading it. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.