I've long considered the Harry Potter series to be little more than an advert for public school, but millions of fans have taken the whole thing rather more seriously. So the news that JK Rowling has completed a sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been greeted with breathless excitement by muggles around the web.
Fan site Mugglenet's announcement of the news generated 558 responses within hours, almost all containing one or more exclamation points, with one quick-witted fan working out that it would be only 206 days and 15 hours to the July 16 publication day.
JK Rowling told her fans yesterday that she had finished the book, that is if you were determined enough to answer the series of riddles that took you to the news. Mugglenet did, and found a note from Rowling under a Christmas tree on her very clever site.
For the truly dedicated, the Harry Potter Lexicon is the place to go to pass the time until July, with a wizard's world atlas, books of spells and potions, and as much information on the books as you could ever hope to see on all this Potterish. The site run by Scholastic, her publisher, is a bit low on magic and heavy on marketing. Skip it.
Potter has his critics, though, such as Christian fundamentalists, who feel the books promote occult practices at odds with Christian thought. One fan set up the Anti-Potterism and superstition site to tackle the arguments one by one.
For those looking for an excuse to hate Harry Potter, try Anti-Wizards Inc. It doesn't seem to have been updated for a while, but it does offer a sense of belonging to those who won't be standing in line next July, waiting for the chance to submerge themselves in a magical world of strange beasts and doubtless exorbitant tuition fees at Hogwarts.
