Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but the midnight release parties for Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn pretty much snuck up on me, despite the fact that I have many friends that are bouncing off the walls in excitement. Probably because I won’t be going.
One thing I realized, however, as I got my Border’s email about the last chance to pre-order the book, is that I really miss being that excited about a book that I need to get it at midnight.
I was a Harry Potterphile, I’ll admit it. Once I’d read the first three I was hooked, and I went at midnight for the rest (first to Barnes and Noble, then Borders after the B&N near me closed). By the time the Half Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows were released, my obsession had toned down to the point where I went at midnight just so I could get the new book and read it before I was spoiled by every website known to man. But even so, I enjoyed the atmosphere, the kids running around with their costumes and the excitement of those final ten minutes before the bookstore employees could open the boxes of fresh new books.
The first glimpse of footage came out for the Half Blood Prince movie this week, in the form of a teaser trailer. That is my favorite book of the seven, and I’m looking forward to the movie, but I couldn’t even muster up enough excitement to try to find it in HD quality and instead I just settled for the Youtube postings.
I haven’t read any of the Twilight novels, I don’t have a particular desire to see the movie, but I miss getting so caught up in a book that the first glimpse of the cover art, months before it came out, was something to celebrate. I was debating reading Twilight and the other novel last week, so that I could experience the excitement with other people, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the effort. I don’t even know if Breaking Dawn is the third or fourth novel in the series, or what the other titles are. It just wasn’t something I was interested in and I couldn’t force it simply to get caught up in the frenzy of midnight book parties.
Have I grown out of being excited about books? I hope not. It’s just that the books I’ve gotten excited about recently are ones that have been out for years, sometimes decades. No one is going to through a release party for the mass market paperback edition of any book, even Harry Potter or Twilight.
Maybe I’m a book nerd for even entertaining the thought of reading two (three?) novels just so I could go to a book party. But I’m temporarily on antibiotics that prohibit alcohol, so I was in need of some other way to spend my Friday night. Maybe I can hire some kids to run around my apartment in cloaks and host their own trivia contests.
Speaking of trivia contests…that’s another entry on another day, once I’ve finished the book I’m reading now!
2 Comments
August 1, 2008 at 11:42 am
i feel the same way about midnight openings..but i found that it looks like BooksOnBoard is giving
away the Breaking Dawn ebook for free and i love it and i’ve already pre-ordered my
copy.
August 5, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I’m a huge Harry Potter fan (I read the books before it was “cool”) and I was determined not to read Twilight. Then, one horribly boring day, I succumbed, but resolved to hate it.
I just finished Breaking Dawn… It’s no HP, but it’s definitely worth a read!