Get all the details and see other images (including the UK covers with blurbs) at The Leaky Cauldron.
I am certainly looking forward to the release of this book. I bought a “Trust Snape” shirt to wear a few times during the next few months and for when I go to the midnight opening at Barnes & Noble (and probably at the Order of the Phoenix movie opening as well). That random people will understand the shirt’s meaning more clearly than most political slogans I could slap onto a t-shirt is a testament to the cultural significance that this story has.
One of the things that we often forget about the stories that are taking on a mythological significance in contemporary popular culture is that the current generation is mostly used to adapted stories. Anyone born after the original Star Wars trilogy will have been teenagers during the rise of comic-book adaptation films, The Lord of the Rings films, the disappointing return of Star Wars, etc. There are very few big mythic event films and stories that are original. The Matrix came close, but the overblown sequels squelched whatever power it had. When we went to see the Rings films, we did not need to ask “Will Frodo destroy the ring?” We knew. And if we didn’t know, we could read the book or ask someone who had. The big deal was seeing how Jackson could bring the story to life. The same thing with movies like Batman Begins, the Spiderman films, and the X-Men films. And even though the Star Wars prequels were original stories, we knew where everything was headed; the question was, again, “how?”
Not so with Harry Potter. Read the rest of this entry »
