I have been working on thesis tasks the last six months but that effort is finally at the stage of awaiting judgment from the external and internal readers. My  unforced sabbatical from posting at HogwartsProfessor did not mean that I wasn’t thinking about articles I would be working on except for the need to review and revise work I had already written.

Today I sketched out the ideas that have most been haunting me and tried to figure out where to begin; my preference is with the Troubled Blood subjects but a writer is obliged to think of his audience. Hence the question of this post: What do you want to read?

Let me know by email, contact page, or in the comment boxes below which posts from the following list or about which topics of your own interest you would most be interested in reading. I’ll consider your votes, believe me, as I try to catch up from half a year of neglected posting. [Read more…]

And something extra for the Tom Burke fans out there:

As noted the day before yesterday, The Rowling Library‘s March issue has as its cover story Patricio Tarantino’s article on The Wizarding Almanac to be published this October by Bloomsbury. I’m pretty sure it’s the best coverage of this story done to date; he notes the shortcomings of the volume that are evident from the few pages readers have been shown in publicity materials while admiring the concept and the beautiful illustrations. Read the whole thing at TheRowlingLibrary.com, available to be read online or to download as a pdf.

There’s more to that issue, of course, my favorite being the re-visit to the conversation about a film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Warner Brothers, for obvious reasons, really wants it to happen and to cast the original films’ trio of Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson. The TRL writers explain why that isn’t going to happen, reasons that might not occur to everyone, and I enjoyed it very much. I think you will, too!

Bloomsbury announced late last week that they will be publishing a book this October, The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac. For all the details from that announcement, your one-stop resource is TheRowlingLibrary.com; follow that link to TRL’s summary of what to expect in the book, an article I’m told more than 200,000 Potter fans have read. (Patricio Tarantino has already written up his thoughts on the Almanac which will be in this month’s TRL e-zine.)

If any doubters remain who are skeptical about the vitality of Harry Potter fandom, not the official Woke crowd but the gazillion readers who love the story, doubters who think that Rowling has in any way been cancelled, or who do not believe that the Hogwarts Saga remains the Shared Text of the new Millenium, the excitement (and sales) of Hogwarts Legacy and the Wizarding Almanac, not to mention ‘The Witch Hunt of J. K. Rowling’ podcast’s popularity, should help them see the light.

While the new book, available for pre-order, is only #337 this morning on Amazon’s best-seller list and #13 on the sub-category of ‘Children’s Fantasy,’ the #2, 9, and 12 slots on that list are filled by Harry Potter titles, #2 being the seven book series set in print now for fifteen years. Two of the top three titles on the Amazon Children’s ebook list are Potter books and all seven are in the top 25. A guide to Hogwarts Legacy is #39 on the current bestselling book list, the only gaming book there, of course.

I’m not excited about the Almanac, frankly, which promises to be a very beautiful book and an excellent Christmas present for Harry Potter fans. From what I have been read and been told, though, there is nothing new in it from the Rowling Vault miles beneath Gringotts and I doubt very much that its seven chapters, fan-service repackaging of canon material, however exciting the pictorial re-presentation of that information will be, will be anything to be shared with my grandchildren in our read-aloud time. I may buy a copy to review here if no one else does.

That being said, I am delighted by the show of enthusiasm for a new Bloomsbury Potter tome. Fantastic Beasts has been something of a bust relative to the original series, but reader engagement and interest in the Hogwarts Saga continues and seems to be making the essential jump for a classic text as Generation Hex grows up and shares it with their children. Three cheers for that and for the new and vibrant empirical evidence that the Rainbow Reich’s crusade to burn Rowling and her books at the stake has failed.