I can see where you'd find that surprising. I don't generally like fantasy -- until the Peter Jackson movies, I'd managed to go my whole life without having an opinion about Tolkien, and I'm not even lightly tempted to watch Game of Thrones.dws1982 wrote:This is the most surprising thing I've read here in awhile. It's at least as surprising to me as my avoiding The 15:17 to Paris was to you.Mister Tee wrote:I read all the Harry Potter books and saw all the movies, but even with that I have trouble remembering anything about the look of the Half-Blood Prince. By me, Prisoner of Azkaban was the only one of the series hat had any distinction as a film.
The Potter thing was one of my periodic attempts to understand popular culture. I'd never even noticed the first two books, but then suddenly they were number one on the Times best-seller list for what seemed eons (The Times literally changed its method of ranking books to get the Potter books shoved off elsewhere), and I was curious enough to look into them that my wife gave me the (then) three existing books for Christmas. I found them extremely easy to read (Rowling was no innovator, but she knew how to construct a page-turner), and, after the three, I was invested in the saga, and followed the series to the end. (The movies, of course, were initially things I had to see for potential Oscar nominations, and then my wife -- who never read the books -- had the same "I've got to see how this turns out" curiosity that I'd had about the books, so we followed them through to the end. Though I think the last 3 or 4 were strictly home viewing.)