New Deluxe Illustrated ‘Goblet of Fire’

May 24, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Charles Dickens pretty much invented the profit-taking side of publishing new editions of his books for extra cash for only new packaging. Bloomsbury and Scholastic, though, with their new covers editions of the seven Harry Potter novels and the versions color-coded for each Hogwarts house are at least as shamelessly returning to the Potter well for a fresh infusion of fan dollars and pounds.

The latest round is Bloomsbury’s “Deluxe Illustrated” hardcover edition of Goblet of Fire in slipcase, illustrations by Jim Kay. No collection of Potter books will be complete without it. The deluxe book, if ordered today, comes with a “black tote bag with gold foil” and the Illustrated, plebian edition with a “cream tote bag.” The one you want costs £127 which translates to ~$160 US.

The twist beyond that price point? It’s only for sale in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Ireland, and Australia.

This offer is open to UK and ROI residents only, while stocks last. Terms & Conditions apply. If you are located outside of the UK/Republic of Ireland please order Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Illustrated Edition here, or the Deluxe Illustrated Edition here. Please note, if you are located in United States or the Phillippines, unfortunately we do not have rights to sell the book with title “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Illustrated Edition“.

Note in those gifs from the twitter announcement that both the Bloomsbury and the WizardingWorld logos are included in the bottom corners. It seems that Scholastic has been shut out of this alliance at least temporarily so that the only North Americans who can shell out for the slipcase book and black tote “with gold foil” will be citizens of Canada and Mexico that have cash to burn.

No big deal, I guess, unless you are an American who collects Potter editions — and I have to suspect that, as collectors, they are used to, even excited about, this kind of challenge. No doubt the more avid of this set of Potter-philes have friends or fellow collectors in the UK , ROI, or down under with whom they have mutual assistance agreements for exclusive release or limited edition products and books.

Will you be missing this chance to buy the Deluxe Illustrated edition? If you live in the privileged countries, have you ordered your book and tote? Let me know in the comment boxes below!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Rowling’s Outline of Order of the Phoenix: What Does It Really Tell Us?

May 23, 2019 by 3 Comments

Whenever I give a talk to a larger group about the ring composition structure of Rowling’s various works, inevitably someone asks about the piece of notebook paper Rowling has made public, a one-sheet snapshot of her chapter by chapter breakdown of what happens when in the various plot threads in Order of the Phoenix. If you haven’t seen it, it looks like this:

That’s pretty hard to read, right? Fortunately the mavens at The Harry Potter Lexicon have created a transcription that is crystal clear legible on a page devoted to this outline.  They include the helpful information that the picture of this piece of paper was posted at Rowling’s original website with the explanatory note, ““Part of the umpteenth revision of the plan of ‘Order of the Phoenix’… Some of the Chapter Names changed and there are a few ideas that didn’t make the final draft.”

C. S. Plocher of The FriendlyEditor.com and WriteLikeRowling.com has taken this transcription-to-legibility process one step further. Check out her fascinating ‘How Rowling Revised Order of the Phoenix‘ post in which she not only shares her transcription of the page Rowling had put up but her color coded guide to what of this plan survived, what changed, and what never made it to Phoenix.

Wild! That is some invaluable grunt work and follow-through for which every serious reader of Harry Potter should be grateful. I certainly am.

But what does it tell us about Rowling as a ring writer? Three things (at least).

(1) It’s obviously true that she works from a plan. This is not the work of a ‘pantser’ that lets her characters tell their story as she writes.

(2) There are no chapter correspondences noted on the page, i.e., it is not a confirmation of Rowling as ring writer. The chapters included on this one sheet, 16 to 29, include the story center (19), and the parallel chapters fore and aft (16-17 with 22-23, 18 and 21, and 19 to 20; see Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle, pp 79-82, 142-143), so, if this was Rowling’s principal concern as a writer, you’d expect there to be some lines or notes making these connections.

(3) That being said, I think the chiastic phrase “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is appropriate here. There are no notes about the alchemical structure of the work here, of the Christian content, or of literary allusion and her intratextuality, that is, references to correspondences with Philosopher’s Stone and with Prisoner of Azkaban. But all those things are embedded and make up the less-visible structure and scaffolding both of the book itself and the series of which it is a part.

My conclusion? It’s a fun chart and Rowling historians in future years, especially if they gain access to more of her drafts and outlines, will no doubt make a lot of it, even more than C. S. Plocher has. But the plot outline and sequencing, a kind of check-list preliminary for the story to make sure everything proceeds without a major glitch (as happened in the writing of Goblet) tells us very little about the writer’s formalist and iconological artistry which are under-the-hood, beneath the story-line.

That is Rowling’s greater achievement and to suggest that her tweeking and editing this graph paper is what makes her great is, I think, no little error, however important editing and time-line organization certainly are.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Ring Composition

‘Lethal White’ Wins CrimeFest Award

May 21, 2019 by 1 Comment

J. K. Rowling’s four Cormoran Strike novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, have pretty much appeared under the radar at least relative to Potter Mania. They don’t win prizes, they don’t set records for copies sold per minute at each successive book release, and there have been no fan conventions or academic conferences dedicated to them. It is still a commonplace when speaking with Potter-philes, even Potter Pundits, to discover the person you are speaking with has not read the Strike novels even though the books are written by their “favorite author.”

I shouldn’t say they don’t win prizes, though, because three of the four books — and the first before Galbraith was outed as Rowling — have won awards for the audio-book versions as read by Robert Glenister. I’ve written about that before (see ‘Lethal White: The Robert Glenister Audiobook’) and my family’s enjoyment of these versions, exceeding I think our delight even in the Potter audiobooks, as good as those were.

I write about this today because CrimeFest, the annual gathering of crime fiction writers and readers in the UK, has awarded the Audible Sounds of Crime Award to Lethal White for best audiobook against competition including the venerable Ian Rankin (no small influence on the Strike books: Strike can be read as another John Rebus, a damaged veteran with relationship issues in Rankin’s novels, set free in London rather than Edinburgh), the preposterously popular Stephen King, and William Patterson writing with side-kick Bill Clinton. Glenister and Rowling have won the award for every Galbraith novel except Career of Evil, certainly the most, shall we say, challenging Strike book thus far.

If you haven’t downloaded or purchased the CD version of Glenister’s readings, I’ll go so far as to suggest you really haven’t enjoyed and appreciated Cormoran and Robin’s adventures as you might. It is a surprising, I confess, and delightful thing to see the experts and award-givers agree with me here.

Let me know what you think of the Glenister readings in the comment boxes below!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Hog Pro Notes

Playing ‘Never Have I Ever’ at Hogwarts

May 20, 2019 by Leave a Comment

I receive email from a variety of Potter fan groups, one of which is the Harry Potter Society at Oxford University. Their facebook posting for ‘Casual Game Night’ this week featured the picture above from a Slytherin student gathering during Tom Riddle, Jr.’s years at Hogwarts. The captions show the thoughts of five young men playing ‘Never Have I Ever’ with the Dark Lord in Training.

If, like me, you live under a rock and have never played ‘Never Have I Ever’ with fingers or drinks, you can read the rules here. [You’ll learn there that, no, you cannot say in the game, “Never Have I Ever played ‘Never Have I Ever.” It’s a revealing self-contradiction.] It seems from the little I’ve read about the game that it’s often used as an icebreaker at social events but one with obvious dangers of becoming a Purity Test if ‘Dirty Questions‘ are allowed.

The question asked at this Hogsmeade soiree of boy Slytherins is, “Never have I ever killed someone for the purpose of prolonging my life using dark magic.” I think it is the young Riddle who thinks, “Some of these are feeling very pointed.” Rule #1 of the game supposedly is that players have to be honest but one of the players thinks to himself, “Just drink or else they’ll all know how little you’ve done,” so part of the game, forgive me, especially with this lot, is social posturing and positioning.

Forgive me for wondering, “What does Tom say? Why?” 

And, how about this for a test of canon knowledge? If Dumbledore’s Army played this game at their first meeting in the Room of Requirement, it would be pretty easy to isolate and eliminate Harry Potter in violation of Rule #3, “It is not allowed to pick out the players by making statements knowingly to be true about them.” What non-dirty questions could Harry ask, though, at that point in his education and experience, that would make the Army in training all take a drink?

Examples: “Never have I ever completed a year at Hogwarts without a fight to the death with a dark wizard” works, but “Never have I ever had a Potions class taught by a benevolent professor” (none of them have and in Phoenix Slughorn is two years away).

Your turn — and feel free to share your thoughts about whether young Tom owns up in front of his Slytherin drinking buddies to murdering folk!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Speaking of Disappearances – Whatever Happened to Stephenie Meyer?

May 19, 2019 by 1 Comment

A good friend from the Twilight years here at HogwartsProfessor keeps me up to speed on the author of that series, Stephenie Meyer. This week he let me know that she is now posting updates on her website about projects she is excited about (check that out here if you are interested). Meyer is super-enthused about a Netflix television series, The Umbrella Family. She doesn’t share a single thing about the series, oddly enough, to move the reader to share that enthusiasm but the GIFs used in the blog post are impressive. Kind of?

A frequent guest at my Muggle job is a short older woman who is a huge Twilight fan. She catches me up on announcements about fan gatherings in Forks and the like when we meet. She has a brilliant smile and fun sense of humor especially about her love of sparkly vampire stories. I asked her earlier this year if she had read Meyer’s latest book, The Chemist. “You mean The Host?” “No, there’s a new one; a science and spy thriller.” “You’re kidding me.” She went out and bought a copy. Next time I saw her she still hadn’t finished it.

How unusual is that? Not very unusual, I’m afraid. One of the best-selling authors of the 21st Century publishes a book in late 2016 with a major house (500,000 copies printed…), just in time for Christmas, and uber fans of hers haven’t heard of it in 2019. Wikipedia, believe it or don’t, still doesn’t have a page dedicated to it. She announced in February 2018 that her movie studio, Fickle Fish Films, was starting production of a television series adaptation of the book. It seems that didn’t work out.

I read The Chemist as soon as I heard about it, which is to say, more than several months after it was published (my Twilight correspondent assumed I knew). It’s a fun read, though as I suspected, real-world chemists found it a real-hard struggle to get through. The reviewer at The Guardian thought the thriller a big improvement on Twilight, if largely because this book’s Bella is a beast of sorts; The New York Times review in November 2016, ‘Sorry, Twilight Fans, Stephenie Meyer’s Latest is a Twisted Spy Thriller,’ focused on Meyer’s conflict with Twi-hard fans that want nothing but a return to Edward and Jacob. And the author’s writing process and insecurities:

So why did Ms. Meyer decide to write a pulpy spy thriller, an ultramasculine genre that is notoriously tough to break into, particularly for female authors? “I get a little bored,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Arizona. “Stories kind of run out, and you want to do something very different. It’s like, after ice cream, you want pretzels.”

Ouch.

She rarely holds book signings, and no longer reads reviews or online comments about herself. “At first I read everything, and I learned that was not superhealthy,” she said.

You would think that selling 10s of millions of novels would calm her insecurities, but success has only heightened her self-doubt.

“I’ve always been hard on myself, and now that everyone is reading my stuff, half the people hate it,” she said. “It’s hard when you start doubting yourself, and a few million people are telling you that you’re right, and that you should doubt yourself even more.”

And?

A few years later, Ms. Meyer returned to the idea and decided to write it as a novel. She keeps vampire-like work hours — a residual habit from when she began writing “Twilight” while she and her husband were raising their three sons — and worked on “The Chemist” from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. The plot flowed quickly, but she struggled at times to devise unusual ways to kill, maim and torture people, so she consulted several experts in biochemistry and molecular biology, including Kirstin Hendrickson, a senior lecturer at the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University.

“I would send her stuff and say, ‘What if I wanted to kill someone this way?,’ and she would say, ‘You can’t do it that way, but you could do it this way,’” Ms. Meyer said. “If anyone looks at my web history, I’m going to jail.”

I don’t know where J. K. Rowling is or what she’s thinking or doing now that she is abstaining from twitter-dom. It’s been a refreshing silence, frankly, and we can only hope it has been and will continue to be a refreshing and rejuvenating respite for The Presence.

I’m equally clueless about Stephenie Meyer but at least as hopeful about her continuing to write wherever she may be. Let me know in the comment boxes if you’ve read The Chemist or anything by Meyer post Twilight. Big points for your House if you can share any 2019 celebrity spottings of her!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Twilight