A Plethora of Potter

Last weekend I chanced to comment to some friends that, while I had seen all the Harry Potter movies to date, I'd only read the first book. There are various reasons for this lapse (which seems to be a complete lapse in sensibility and good taste judging from the breath inhalations and widened eyes that met my statement) but most of them revolve around laziness.

I enjoyed the first book. I also found it to be fairly accurately represented in the movie version and, since from what I could glean from press releases etc. Rowling continues to stay fairly involved in the movie versions of the books, I decided that I could probably forgo the rest of the reading and simply catch the movies. And, well, honestly, while they're cute stories, I don't see myself re-reading them and lately that's started to become a prerequisite for book purchases. The Sleepy Home Library is already in need of some serious attempts at thinning, so adding in books that, realistically, will be one hit wonders is just not high on my list.

Yes, I know, I need a library card. See original reference about laziness. Throw in another one about needing time. You could even add a third about how my county libraries are pathetic in comparison to the county just north of us, but that's probably irrelevant as I doubt they're so lame as to not have the HP books.

Anyway, I left that evening piled high with Potter books. I read two of them that weekend and found that essentially my thought process was accurate. The Chamber of Secrets and Prisioner of Azkaban were quite well replicated in movie form, though there were a few pieces of the latter (such as the stag explanation and the whole map authorship issue) that made more sense in the book, but the movie didn't suffer from the omission.

Now I am probably 1/4 of the way into the Goblet of Fire and I have to say, this movie is clearly pared down compared to the book. (Well, seeing the girth of the book was the first clue - the Potter movies are long, but you'd need a mini-series to really put that many pages up on the screen.) I still liked the movie, but I can see that this will be the departure point where I probably will revert to my usual feeling that books are always better than movies based on books. So that's kind of fun.

But I still don't know as they're re-readable. If that changes, then perhaps I'll look into one of the ginormous boxed sets they inevitably have at Christmas time. By then maybe it'll include the last one as well.