Late last night, Rob and I drove out to the bookstore to endure—I mean attend—the Harry Potter book release party. Wandering around a huge bookstore in middle of the night was certainly a thrill. It would have been even more thrilling if all of those other people weren’t there, too. Children were everywhere, running, yelling, and carrying on in other unspeakable ways. Some wore costumes and seemed to have mistaken the event for a Halloween free for all, while their parents clustered in the coffee bar and made no attempt to impose order. At midnight, the bookstore employees swept self-importantly up the aisles, pushing carts laden with the literary treasure. Pandemonium ensued as the cashiers frantically began ringing up sales, as if they were Scotty stoking the warp engine during a Klingon attack. “We’ll have ticket numbers one through twenty-five in line now,” announced Mr. Chekov. My ticket number was nine hundred thirty-five, and it was a long wait, but I did get my pristine copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

I’ve only read about sixty percent of it so far. Some of us have work to do, after all!