Metro Pulse/Cover/Summer Reading Issue

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Voldemore

The Mayoral Reader
Hizzoner's tastes run to history and biography

A Literary Thread Runs through It
This year's list from the Taylor Prize screeners

A Community of Books
In which our Pulp lover goes to BEA in L.A. and connects

Opening the 'Dore Record
A history of sorts

Ignorance... Not Necessarily Bliss
Recounting a relationship that refuses to resume

Voldemore
Harry Potter has captured the minds and wallets of most of the country. This is not a bad thing.

by Adrienne Martini

In towns all across America, midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show are empty. Instead of time-warping with Riff-Raff and company, on Friday, June 20, the same black-lipsticked patrons are in line, waiting for the release of the most recent installment of J.K. Rowling's obscenely popular series.

Bookstores have gone out of their way to cash in on the hype, which has been driven both by the release of movies based on the first two books as well as the two-year gap between books four and five. Across the country, almost every retail outlet that could have a legitimate claim to sell Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also hosted some kind of theme party in celebration of its release.

Then, at the stroke of one minute past midnight, eager readers got their hands on this long-awaited and very heavy tome. The pleasure-filled sighs from number-drunk accountants blew across the globe like a mighty wind. Barnes and Noble, in a Reuters report, sold 80 books per second that fateful night. Scholastic, the book's publisher, claims that five million copies of the book were sold by the end of business on June 21—and that's just in the United States.

Potter-love has not skipped over Knoxville. Borders, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million and dozens of lesser players stayed open late on Friday, and kept tweeners occupied with magicians, trivia contests and costume competitions. Lines snaked outside of all these establishments. Kids and teens and adults fell in line, each eager to snag a copy of their own.

What was most striking, perhaps, were the costumes. Some, clearly, were cobbled together at the last minute, like black academic robes from a high school graduation paired with an inspired by Aqua-net hairdo. A few kids went all out—crimping their hair to mimic Hermoine's movie 'do or dying their tresses red to honor Ron Weasley. Some grown-ups just didn't quite get it, choosing to drag out their Rocky Horror duds and inject a trashy, sexy note into an otherwise wholesome evening. There was, however, a decided lack of house elves. Perhaps an old dishtowel is a little too revealing for public wear.

Despite what the corporate PR flacks would have you believe, the opening night festivities at the two big booksellers in Knoxville were pretty much the same. At Barnes and Noble, there was a sorting hat; at Borders, mood music. While B&N had better staff costume (provided, one suspects, by the corporate office), Borders had free popcorn and the sort of atmosphere where you wouldn't be afraid to spill it on the carpet, lest you get yelled at. B&N's staff was a bit bossier but it seemed to stem more from feeling like wildebeests surrounded by hungry lions than from outright peevishness. Other than that, you could go to either place and see the same sights.

Like the 5-year-old blonde girl who kept asking her mommy why everyone was dressed up. "Is it Halloween?" she asked. Or the teenage girls wearing tight "Rupert Grint #1" t-shirts, standing on (and mangling) books to get a better view of the trivia contest. Or the TV cameras and daily paper reporters swooping in on the most colorful costumes in order to score a photo-op. Or the line of caffeine-jonesing parents at each store's cafe. It's exactly what you would expect and, apart from the occasional Potter wearing a Vols cap, you could be anywhere.

In a way, it's comforting to know that something still unites us on a global level and that Rowling's seemingly simple story about good and evil transcends culture. What's amazing about all the hoopla is that it is for a book. Not a star-filled movie. Not a rock concert nor a WWE match. A book. For every accountant who sighed when they saw the first day sales, there was also a word-lover who did the same. While there will always be the player haters who think that Rowling's work is pure, market-driven crap, most folks who love words also love Harry. He has made reading relevant again and reminded people how thrilling it is to want to know what is going to happen next.

"This is just sad," mutters the 10-year-old Alton Brown clone next to me. "It's just a book, people." Yet when the trivia contest begins, he is right in the fray with the most avid Potter-philes, forgetting for a second that he's getting to be too old for this stuff.

That may be the series' magic. It has an uncanny ability to make us believe that we're not too old to fervently buy into good always kicking evil's bottom, despite what greets us every day when we turn on the news. While each book has gotten darker, most readers still know that despite the losses, all will work out as it is supposed to, in some karmically satisfying manner. Perhaps this is why so many became so excited by the release of a work of fiction, simply because its ultimate ends are so absent in real life.