"Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows"

Amazon.com has sent an eMail out about the 7th (and final) volume of the Harry Potter series. The last book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, is due out on July 20th. If you put in a pre-order at Amazon, you will get the book in your mailbox instead of standing in line with 758 people wearing purple wizard hats and fake white beards.

I opted for the pre-order. I've seen what happens here when a new Harry Potter book is released, and it isn't pretty. Honestly, you would think they were waiting in line for front-row seats to a Manilow concert. It's just a book! A good book, but just a book... and fiction at that! No need to get push-y and shove-y on those lines....

Our friends K and B are also Harry Potter fans... so much so that K has a bunch of Harry Potter tee-shirts which can be seen all around the downtown Houston area. Mind you, K is over 60, and quite an intelligent woman with more degrees than Harry Potter has charms and potions. I had the fleeting idea of having a Harry Potter lunch at the end of July or the beginning of August... we should have all read the last book by then. Trouble is, other than my husband and myself, and K and B.... I don't know who else in our group of friends will have read the 7th book by that time. Other friends of ours have read the series, but they wait till the library has an available copy, or they find one in a yard sale, or they wait till the crowds have dispersed at the bookstores. As K would say: Peasants.... what do they know....?!

I don't think I'll plan anything just yet. However, I do have a package of Victorian "crackers" in my party closet... each is wrapped in silver foil and decorated with purple wizard hats. Honestly. I found them in one of the gift shops around Halloween, and I couldn't resist buying them, knowing they'd be the perfect thing for a Harry Potter book review/lunch. So we just might have to do that... if only to soothe and coddle and friend K at the end of the 7th volume when she realizes that in order to get her wizard-fix, she will have to start re-reading J.K. Rowling's books.