Texas Pages

The Associated Press says:

A court ruling in favor of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has set the stage for a trial on whether publication of photos taken of her young son violates his privacy.
The Court of Appeal in London says children of famous parents have the same right to expect privacy as children of parents who aren't well-known.

For the first time in 10 years, there are no Harry Potter books on The New York Times best-seller list.

The post on The Times' blog notes how the paper had to keep inventing new lists to keep J.K. Rowling from overwhelming them.

(Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.)

The Washington Post is reporting that the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the U.S. will reveal Monday that none of J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

I've always been a fan of young adult books and hope this study draws more attention to the genre.

How did your favorite books fare?

If the words "Harry Potter," "Aldus Dumbledore" and "gay" make your pulse quicken, get over to the Religion blog, where Jeffrey Weiss discovers some thoughts on J.K. Rowling from Connie Neal, a conservative Christian author who had been one of the first to publicly defend the Potter books.

According to The Associated Press, J.K. Rowling angrily defended her rights as an author as testimony ended today.

The Times of London notes the broader issue at stake in the ongoing courtroom drama between J.K. Rowling and the author who wishes to publish a Harry Potter-related book (today's update on the case is posted below.)

The Times notes:

A generation has now grown up besotted (©Milton) with Quidditch and Hogwarts. However, it is not astonishing that J.K. Rowling is using a court case to remind the writers of a zany (©Shakespeare) Harry Potter lexicon, now making the jump from cyberspace (©William Gibson) to print, that it is not common property and she did invent it all. ... However, unless she employs a mole (©le Carré) to oversee our every conversation and written exchange, she should not try to suppress a collection of her invented words. For Voldemort, Muggles, Horcruxes and all Rowling's other serendipitous (©Walpole) coinages are ours now; it would be pig-headed (©Jonson) not to let us use them as we wish.

Interestingly, our own Jeffrey Weiss made a similar argument not long ago.

(Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the spot.)

NEW YORK -- A Harry Potter fan who wants to publish an encyclopedic guide to the wildly popular fantasy novels broke down and cried on the witness stand Tuesday as he faced off in federal court against his idol J.K. Rowling.

(More from The Associated Press follows.)

She took the stand today in her federal lawsuit to stop publication of stop publication of Steven Vander Ark's "Harry Potter Lexicon."

And she is NOT happy.

"This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work," she testified.

Here's the complete Associated Press report:

This is not really a book-related item, except everybody loves Harry Potter.

So I will pass along word (via Bloomberg News) that Daniel Radcliffe is coming to Broadway to perform "Equus" in September, and yes, he will be naked.

Mr. Radcliffe, 19, will play opposite Richard Griffiths, another star of the "Potter" films.

Sorry fans. You can't major in Muggle Studies. Yet.

But you can find the world's most favoritest boy wizard popping up in college classrooms and textbooks, says CNN. Says the report:

Philip Nel, author of "J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide" and professor of children's literature at Kansas State University, started teaching the books in 2002.

"Harry Potter is unfairly maligned simply because of the audience for which it is intended. Children's literature is literature, and if people don't agree with that definition, it's sort of hard to have a conversation with them," Nel said. "They see things that ... are easily accessible as therefore not serious and therefore not worthy of serious inquiry."

The Los Angeles Times reports there will be eight Harry Potter movies, with two coming from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
As recounted by The Associated Press, producers are expected to announce Thursday that J.K. Rowling's last "Potter" installment will be split into two parts on the big screen. The first film is slated for release in November 2010, with part two following in May 2011.
"It was born out of purely creative reasons," producer David Heyman told the Times. "Unlike every other book, you cannot remove elements of this book."
Creative reasons. Yes, I am sure that was the motivating factor.

“I find it devastating to contemplate the possibility of such a severe alteration of author-fan relations.”

That's J.K. Rowling, speaking in court documents about a fan she once praised but now is suing for trying to publish a Harry Potter reference book.

(Tip to aspiring authors: If you are worried about relations with your fans ... don't sue them.)

And if you are a Harvard graduate this year, you'll get to hear her.

He made the list of Top Stories of the Year in The Onion.

An excerpt:

"NEW YORK—Delirium swept the nation this summer as the release of the seventh and final Harry Potter novel sent millions of Americans into a frenzy over some little wizard boy and all his flying wizard buddies going on another one of their little wizard adventures."

Fans (and children) might want to skip the rest. Muggles ... er, non-fans ... might get a giggle.

In case you missed them, Amazon.com has posted reviews of the five stories in its new prize possession: The Tales of Beedle the Bard, handwritten by J.K. Rowling.

It's not often than a writer is on the short list for TIME magazine's "Person of the Year," but this year J.K. Rowling is up there as second runner-up (behind Al Gore and TIME cover boy Vladimir Putin -- who bears an odd resemblance to the Harry Potter movies' depiction of Dobby the house-elf, btw).

Read the interview and the "10 Questions About Harry" that are answered.

Excerpted from the interview's ending:

Rowling has some rebuilding of her own to do. Her time, she says, will be divided among her children, her charities and her writing. But she has only to look at George Lucas to appreciate that the pressure to return to Hogwarts will be ferocious — and some of it self-inflicted. She's already had to cope with the pressure of not disappointing the fan closest to her: her daughter Jessica, 14. What will happen when her two younger children a decade from now discover the stories for themselves and know that Mom has the power to make more of them? "There have been times since finishing, weak moments," she says, "when I've said, 'Yeah, all right,' to the eighth novel." But she's convinced she's doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She's working on two projects now, an adult novel and a "political fairy tale." "If, and it's a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character," she says. "I feel like I've already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years and see how we feel then." It's a pretty safe bet how her audience will feel. But we'll just have to wait and prepare to be surprised.

Somehow, I suspect that signing up for one-click shopping was not an option with this one.

But Amazon is making the most of their $4 million dollar investment by gushing about the book and showing pictures at their site.

People are leaving rage-filled comments about the purchase. Which is surprising to me. The money went to charity after all.

But then, these are the same esteemed critics that some people think will replace professional book reviewers. So they can't be wrong, I suppose.

UPDATE: Full details on the auction are appended below.

Her handwritten book of fairy tales just fetched nearly $4 million for charity.

Bloomberg reports that she had a public reading of her handwritten "The Tales of Beedle the Bard,'" which is expected to sell for more than $100,000 at a charity auction Thursday.

Love her or hate her, ya gotta give J.K. Rowling credit: What other author could snag a spot on the cover of "Entertainment Weekly," much less be named the Entertainer of the Year?

The Guardian newspaper has images of J.K. Rowling's "The Tales of Beedle the Bard."

This is a little project of hers designed to raise money for charity.

We interrupt our coverage of the National Book Awards to bring you a Harry Potter interlude.

(Non-Sequitur appears daily in The Dallas Morning News comics section.)

Apparently, she has been busy with something besides filing lawsuits and counting large bags of money:

Associated Press

LONDON — J.K. Rowling has completed her first book after her wildly popular series on teen wizard Harry Potter — an extremely limited-edition illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled “The Tales of Beedle the Bard.”
Only seven copies of the handwritten book have been made, Rowling said Thursday. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children's charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.

Having won the affection of most of the world's readers, the author now seems intent on alienating them, one by one:

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Author J.K. Rowling and the maker of the “Harry Potter” films are suing a small publisher in Michigan over its plans to release a book version of a popular Web site dedicated to the boy wizard.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the author and Warner Bros. in federal court in Manhattan, claims that RDR Books will infringe on Rowling's intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan to publish the 400-page “Harry Potter Lexicon” on Nov. 28.

Blog readers, I know what you want. Don't deny it. I counted the page views.

So let's milk one more entry out of the what's-his-name is you-know-what business.

The trend now is witty columns "outing" other fictional characters.

Here's New York magazine's version. (Fozzie Bear? Schroeder? The Flash ?("... the Flash is both light in his loafers and flaming. No, really — he runs at superhuman speed and flames literally shoot out of him."))

They admit stealing the idea from Radar. (Happy the dwarf from "Snow White?" Willy Wonka? ("The Candyman lived alone with only his (all male) Oompa Loompas.... "))

The Albany Times Union offers its own send-up. ("Few commentators touched on the significance of where Rowling chose to let the secret slip: Carnegie Hall, the site of the author's packed-house reading, holds a hallowed place in gay culture. It's the stage where gay icon Liza Minnelli recorded her landmark 1972 "Liza with a 'Z' " album and TV special. It's also where Minnelli's mother, gay icon Judy Garland, recorded her own smash 1961 live album ... .")

And Publishers Weekly offers this roundup of Dumbledore thoughts. (I think some echo our own Jeffrey Weiss.)

Well, I think it's safe to say that Jeffrey Weiss has touched a nerve.

Just to focus in on one literary aspect of the debate: What are the other classic examples of authors who either overexplained their creations, or refused to?

The example of J.R.R. Tolkein came up in a conversation yesterday. He certainly offered a wealth of background on the world he created. But as it was pointed out to me -- he created most of that before he wrote "The Lord of the RIngs." And revealed it all in print (whether it was readable is a more subjective question.)

On the other hand, I seem to recall that Arthur Conan Doyle resented all the attention Sherlock Holmes generated. I imagine his audiences would have loved to hear him detail Holmes' grade-school years, ponder whether a demanding father caused him to be so pernsnickety and debate whether Watson was co-dependent by allowing him to use all those drugs.

To my knowledge, he never did.

The result is that a century later, a cottage industry of Sherlock Holmes biographies and further imagined adventures has sprung up.

Which may be precisely Jeff's point.

An amusing column from the Los Angeles Times looks at the clues that should have tipped "Harry Potter" readers about the world's most famous just-outed fictional character. Among them:

"Albus Dumbledore" is an anagram for "Male bods rule, bud!"

(I don't research this stuff, folks. I am just the messenger.)