NB: This contains absolutely no spoilers, as I have not reached the end myself.
I love the Harry Potter books, and of course I had my copy by mid-Saturday, just like 8.6 million other people. (I feel so unique!) But I will not be blogging about it for a while, and here's why. Chip and I have a tradition of reading the Harry Potter books aloud to each other. We started with the first one in 2000, the summer that we moved to Prague. We brought the first three books with us, and I can still remember lying on the bed in our first apartment in Prague--a dismal affair, at least in location--and reading Harry Potter.
I can't remember exactly why we chose to read them aloud to each other, but I think it had something to do initially with realizing that we probably wouldn't have a television when we moved abroad, and even if we did, we wouldn't understand much. As it turned out, pretty much every furnished apartment in the Czech Republic comes with a TV, so we needn't have worried, but that didn't make the programming any better or more...you know...in English. So we read. Once we finished the three HPs, we tried to read some Bill Bryson to each other. The problem with his books is that there is a fair chance that you may end up laughing so hard together that you could be injured. This happened only once. Pretty soon we had started working and having a life in Prague and we stopped reading to each other. But we restart again every time a new HP book comes out.
That's why, even though I am almost literally dying to know what happens, I am resisting the urge to throw myself headlong into the book. And if I can keep from seeing what happens unti Friday, when we leave civilization, I just might make it through without having the ending spoiled. But that's the other advantage of reading this way. If I were reading the book on my own, I'd be through it almost immediately and then the HP experience would be done for good. I am physically incapable of slowing down and enjoying a leisurely read on my own. This way I have to.
So, if you're reading HP7, do me a favor. Keep it to yourself, OK?