Life Without a Laptop
My laptop decided to die on me this week, and I have no idea where to fix it in this country, so the time I spend on line has dropped almost to zero (by my standards at least).
This may be a good thing, since my Wonderful Niece is buying my son Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince as a late birthday present.
You don't see the connection? Well, since we are going to visit the family abroad anyway and originally planned to travel on the 24th, we thought it wasn't worth paying the extra for international shipping so it will be waiting for us at my father's. With hindsight, this was probably a poor decision.
Since then the start of the trip has been postponed a few days, so we are not arriving until the 28th. Although she's buying it for my son, I think I can probably manipulate him into letting me read it first (since if I go first he will probably get it within 24 hours anyway but if he goes first it will take him much longer and, my trump card, if I read it before him he can discuss details of the plot with me as he goes along but if he reads it first I don't even want to hear whether Harry's shoe size has changed since last year before I read it myself.
So here is my problem: in the best case I won't be starting to read it for 12 days after it comes out, so do I dare even look at any websites or blogs in the meanwhile? For every civilized person who avoids spoilers or moves them off their front pages there are bound to be a dozen who drop passing references to key plot elements in the middle of a post on something totally different just to show how cool they are. This could totally ruin the book for me. I already wish I hadn't heard the rumours about inside information leading to a run of betting on which character dies, though actually I take the whole story with a pinch of salt. (By the way, isn't there something a little weird about that? Everyone pokes fun at Victorians for their obsession with death in literature (Little Nell, etc. etc) but we seem to be back in exactly the same place.)
This may be a good thing, since my Wonderful Niece is buying my son Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince as a late birthday present.
You don't see the connection? Well, since we are going to visit the family abroad anyway and originally planned to travel on the 24th, we thought it wasn't worth paying the extra for international shipping so it will be waiting for us at my father's. With hindsight, this was probably a poor decision.
Since then the start of the trip has been postponed a few days, so we are not arriving until the 28th. Although she's buying it for my son, I think I can probably manipulate him into letting me read it first (since if I go first he will probably get it within 24 hours anyway but if he goes first it will take him much longer and, my trump card, if I read it before him he can discuss details of the plot with me as he goes along but if he reads it first I don't even want to hear whether Harry's shoe size has changed since last year before I read it myself.
So here is my problem: in the best case I won't be starting to read it for 12 days after it comes out, so do I dare even look at any websites or blogs in the meanwhile? For every civilized person who avoids spoilers or moves them off their front pages there are bound to be a dozen who drop passing references to key plot elements in the middle of a post on something totally different just to show how cool they are. This could totally ruin the book for me. I already wish I hadn't heard the rumours about inside information leading to a run of betting on which character dies, though actually I take the whole story with a pinch of salt. (By the way, isn't there something a little weird about that? Everyone pokes fun at Victorians for their obsession with death in literature (Little Nell, etc. etc) but we seem to be back in exactly the same place.)