i guess i gotta do my mandatory post about harry potter. yeah, i'm a fan of the books, but i won't be buying #7 this saturday. back in 2001, coming back from mali i bought a potter book in the heathrow airport. it was a great way to pass the time on the plane and i was totally hooked, but the copy i bought was the british paperback.
the problem is that the british edition of the book looks a bit different than the american edition.1 it's a different size and has a different style spine than it's american cousin. there are also a couple of minor changes to the text itself (british spellings, etc. the first book even has a different title "harry potter and the philosopher's stone" not "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone"). for some reason it bothers me if the books on my shelf from the same series don't look the same, so that meant that i had to get the british edition paperback of every book in the series. as a result:
(1) i always end up reading each new harry potter book about a year after everyone else (the british paperback, like the american paperback, comes out later than the hardback. though usually the british paperback beats the american paperback by a few months)
(2) by the time i read each book--at least the last two--i've always known who dies at the end. despite all my best efforts to avoid spoilers, that particular one would slip through. even though i know that i still manage to enjoy the book.
(3) instead of buying some discounted american copy, i gotta order it online and ship the damn thing over the ocean. actually, i've only done that a couple of times. most of the time i find a way to pick it up during one of my trips. british editions are sold all over europe (and canada too!) so i often can find a way to pick them up with i switch planes somewhere. i bought book 6 in sweden when mrs. noz and i had a layover on our way to estonia last august.
(4) this whole british edition thing can come across as being really snooty. however, i'm not the only british edition paperback snob. elayne apparently does the same thing. i've never found out the source of her british-edition preference though.
okay, now an unrelated story. back in 2003, just before i went to uzbekistan, i read this article about how people were paying top dollar to buy harry potter translations from around the world. the weirder the language, the topper the dollar. i had this crazy idea of buying cases of uzbek translations of the harry potter books in tashkent and then shipping them back to the u.s. where i could sell them and make a bundle. i even wasted a half day in tashkent looking for a freaking book store that had harry potter books. all i found was a beat up russian translation of the first book. i didn't even buy it, what was the point? russian wasn't weird enough for me.
thus my dreams of retiring early were shattered in october 2003. i've remained a bitter broken man ever since.
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1-actually, the british have two different editions, a "children's edition" and an "adult's edition"--the only difference between the two is the cover art. i collect the children's edition.
