Entertainment Weekly's 100 Best Books of the Last 25 Years...

I zipped home for lunch this afternoon, and found the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly in my mailbox (a happy surprise--it usually comes on Saturday) featuring The New Classics--The 1000 Best Movies, TV Shows, Albums, Books & More of the Last 25 Years. I almost didn't make it back to the office I was having so much fun reading it. And look at Daniel Radcliffe/Harry Potter smack in the middle of the cover! I immediately turned to their book list.

Now, as EW would say:

SPOILER ALERT!!

If you want to read these yourself leave my blog right now (or at least shut your eyes and scroll way down).

Here are five books of note that made the list:

#2: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire because J.K. Rowling "went epic and evil."
#21: On Writing because Stephen King offers "some of the soundest advice to writers set to paper."
#40: His Dark Materials trilogy because Phillip Pulman offers "a grand, intellectually daring adventure through the cosmos."
#65: The Giver, by Lois Lowry because they agree with the Newbery committee (and it's a fantastic book).
#84: Holes, by Louis Sachar, because they continue to agree with the Newbery committee (and it's also a fantastic book).

Mixed in with the many fiction and nonfiction titles were several graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Fact that surprised me: The Da Vinci Code was on the New York Times Hardcover Best-Seller List longer than HP and the Goblet of Fire (166 weeks vs. 148 weeks--3 years-ish for each!)

My Saturday afternoon is officially taken--I have a date with this double issue.

HP7: Moving Right Along...

Here are some early sales numbers for last Harry Potter title released over the weekend. (You may have heard something about it.)

• Borders: 1.2 million (in first 24 hours)
• Barnes & Noble: 1.8 million (in first 48 hours with 560,000 in the first hour alone)
  
• Amazon: 1.3 million pre-orders
  

And what about the Friday night parties?

• B&N: 1 million plus visitors
• Borders: 800,000 plus
  

And guess what--someone already told me what happens. And the spoilers I'd read on the Internet the other day were wrong wrong wrong.

My First (and Last) Harry Potter Party...

Last night after I had dinner with my friend, we decided to pop in Joseph-Beth, our local independent bookseller, to get a glimpse of how the Harry Potter release party was shaping up. I'd never attended a Harry Potter event (since I've never purchased or read the books), but I figured this was my last chance.

It was only about 9:30, but the store was already abuzz--it was transforming. And it was not just the decorations and banners. As the mostly costumed readers filed in, you could feel something in there air. There was a buzz, an energy. The excitement was so thick you could cut it with a knife. There were toddlers with parents, teens, tweens and lots of adults.

A store employee told me they were expecting about 1,000 people and had gotten in "a couple thousand" copies of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows.

My friend ordered her book through Amazon. But she figured that UPS wouldn't deliver it until later in the day, so she planned to head to the grocery store first thing in the morning to get another copy so she could start reading as soon as possible.

We only stayed at the bookstore about half an hour. As I was walking out I began to have some regrets. I was sorry I wasn't in on this, that I hadn't read the books and that I wasn't going to cheer at 12:01 when the first person was handed the first copy and I wasn't going to stay up all night and read it. And I was sorry I had gotten online on Friday and read a bunch of spoilers.

Some (Very Exciting!) Harry Pottery Stuff in the News...

Interesting piece in the PW Daily today about Scholastic's investigation of Deepdiscount.com who apparently shipped copies of HP#7 to some 1,200 buyers--and the books began arriving yesterday. So PW is talking about investigating for breach of contract and asking readers who have gotten the books early to not open them until July 21 at 12:01 along with everyone else caught up in the Potteracious frenzy.

The kicker (and this is not mentioned in the Publishers Weekly piece) is that one of the guys who got his copy early (and apparently alerted the media) sold his book on eBay for $250 plus shipping to (wait for it)... Publishers Weekly. What fun!

I'm very amused by all of this--all the hyping and the party planning and speculating and counting down and the breaching of contracts. It's refreshing and wonderful that a book can cause so much commotion when it has absolutely nothing to do with Oprah. Perhaps one day, in a world free of Harry-hype, I will finally crack open book one and see if I can finally understand all the fuss.

Harry Potter in the News (surprise surprise!)...

Today I discovered a couple of interesting Potter pieces in the media. First The New York Times ran a piece saying the claim that reading the Harry Potter books helps turn kids into book lovers is overblown (which, if it's true, is unfortunate).

A Publishers Weekly article reveals that the Nielsen people have come up with a report offering all sorts of Potter-related statistics on books sales and movie sales, what they call The Potter Effect. Here are a few choice stats:

• Scholastic has spent from $300,000-plus to $900,000-plus on promotion for the various Harry Potter titles with a total of $3.6 million spent on U.S. promotion for all Potter-related books.
• 27.7 million copies of Harry Potter books have been sold in the U.S. since 2001.
  
• 51% of people in the U.S. are aware there's a new Harry Potter book coming out. (Do the the other 49% live under rocks or in biospheres or something? How do they not know?)
• 28% of people in the U.S. over the age of 12 have read at least one of the books. I am not among them--I've not read any of them.
  

And Emma Watson of the Harry Potter movie franchise is rocking some Chanel during the many appearances the cast is making promoting the upcoming movie. She's been all over the fashion blogs I read while I eat breakfast.

Harry Potter--Good for Sales, Not for Profits...

I've been talking about this with my co-workers lately: Do retailers actually make money selling Harry Potter? So I was excited to see a discussion of the topic on GalleyCat today. Seems not.