I haven’t read Harry Potter

(Well, it’s partially true.)

I haven’t read them all. I’ve read all the way up to Book 5 “The Order of the Phoenix”. But then I happened on a horrible mishap and had to stop, from which I never recovered. I will tell you the tale of my overly dramatic dilemma.

Several years ago, my little sister (a real Harry Potter-head) pressured me hard to read her beloved series until I finally acquiesced. I was gobbling up pretty much a book a night over the next week or so, and I was just digging my teeth into Book 6 – “The Half-Blood Prince” when everything came to a screeching halt. I was reading right along, la de da da, right to the bottom of a page, and when I went up from the bottom on the left side to the top on the right, the words didn’t match up. The sentence didn’t make any sense. I went back and checked again, nope – it didn’t work. Then I looked at the page numbers – the left said page 244 and on the right, page 277. What was missing were all the pages in between. I was missing a HUGE chunk of the story!

I flipped on through the book and found that further on down the line, page 277 repeated again. So, my expert detective skills deduced that the physical number of pages in the book was most likely accurate, but in this copy run, the printed pages from page 244 through 277 were actually duplicates of 277 through 324.

Fascinating, eh?

Anyway, the flaw put me off the Harry Potter books and I haven’t been back to the series since. Only now that I’ve gotten back to my regular reading have I thought about jumping back into it again, just for kicks.

My little sister will be so pleased.