(Untitled)

[richenda]

People are saying that HP7 has been "spoiled" by some shop supplying the book early/someone putting extracts on the Net - but how can they be sure that the supposed early supply or the stuff on the net is/are genuine? Methinks it's a deep dark plot

Comments

[smellingbottle]

I agree with you, but rather less generously - I have very little interest in narrative suspense of any kind, and generally don't quite get the obsession with remaining unaware of the ending. I get impatient every year with students who appear to think that I should, in lectures, avoid any reference to the ending of novels or plays on my courses, because that somehow removes the point of reading them. I blame the net, and the concept of 'spoiling' for this. It's a significant choice of term, no? As though once you know, say that Snape turns out to be a reincarnation of Lily Potter, Hagrid's slavering hound is a Horcrux, and Professor Sprout, not Harry, saves the world, the novel itself would be somehow unecessary.

[richenda]

>>>>>I get impatient every year with students who appear to think that I should, in lectures, avoid any reference to the ending of novels or plays on my courses, because that somehow removes the point of reading them

It's many years since I read as a student, but in my day the principal object of those who hadn't read something was to conceal the fact from everyone except close friends - and most especially to conceal the fact from tutors, who had every right to expect that the set authors had been read before the lectures began. Even if you mean references in lectures to books outside those set, I can't begin to imagine a student objecting on those grounds.
I'm old - I'm very old.

[smellingbottle]

I'm afraid that at least in my institution, the pendulum has swung the other way - many of my undergraduates have a horror of looking as though they are trying too hard, and go to great lengths to conceal the amount of work they are doing, on the rare occasions they do any. And certainly the notion of reading the texts before the lecture is regarded as generally eccentric.

[mrs_redboots]

But isn't this actually rather an old phenomenon - it seems to have been current in Lord Peter Wimsey's/Dorothy L Sayers' Oxford!

Nevertheless, they did work; they just pretended not to!

[mrs_redboots]

I have to admit that I would rather not know the ending before I have read the book - I plan a very quick read-through just to find out what happens, and then, if the book is good enough (most of them are), I plan to re-read to enjoy the way she gets there!

[coritiacus]

well, the publishers have said -some- of the stuff on the net is real. I am not sure if they have specified which version of the spoilers that is. But I am also thinking, they might just say that to make it more of a big deal, get more publicity, sell more books.

tbh, I don't care about spoilers. The joy of a book is in the reading, not the ending. So many books have terrible endings anyway.