On my not-particularly-crowded bus home today, no fewer than four people were reading 'Harry Potter and the Deathly What-Whats.' Wow.
I realized something recently. For whatever reason, I don't do the 'light summer reading' thing. For the past three years I have set a goal for myself of how many books I want to read in a given year, and inevitably I'm going along just fine until about mid-May, when it all goes out the window. I can read light fluffy crap all winter and then late spring hits, the books get thicker, the content gets heavier, the prose gets denser, and the time it takes to complete a tome triples.
Examples:
In the past two months or so I have read (among other things) 'Middlesex' (Jeffrey Eugenides), 'Devil in the White City' (Erik Larsen), 'Nineteen Minutes' (Jodi Picoult), 'The Historian' (Elizabeth Kostova), 'Everything Is Illuminated' (Jonathan Safran Foer), and 'Lake of Dead Languages' (Carol Goodman). These are big and heavy and I read most of them in hardcover, dragging them with me to and from on the bus each day.
Comparatively, in February I read (among others) 'California Demon' (Julie Kenner), 'With Red Hands' (Stephen Woodworth), 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' (Brendan Halpin), 'Picking Up' (Kate Fenton), and shame of shames, 'His Wicked Ways (Samantha James). Two day reads, tops, all of them. And one of them is a freakin' romance novel. Kill me now. ( I read it based on a friend's recommendation. I will no longer be taking her advice on literary matters.)
So now I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. I want to read the new Harry Potter, all 784 pages of it. But I read the last two right when they came out, so that's a while back, and I have read easily two hundred books in between now and HP5. So I am faced with re-reading two HP 5 & 6, two giganto-books, before I move on to Deathly Hallows - by which point everyone in the world will probably have spilled some vital spoiler to me.
Sigh. Damn my parents for making me love reading so much.