(Don't worry, no spoilers here!)
I finished HP7 at 12:47 this morning. With the breaks I took for meals, kid time, going to the bathroom, showers and an afternoon burst of scone baking (the mention of comforting cups of tea in any English book triggers the scone-making impulse in me), I figure I averaged about 60 pages per hour. I know it wasn't a race.
Yesterday was bliss--I picked up the book from Nicola's at 7:45 am and went to the gym and read while on the recumbent bike for almost an hour. And after this burst of activity I completely regressed to my 11-year-old self and hardly moved from a sitting position on a beautiful summer day. Some kids have summer camp, or playing baseball, or riding bikes (or in the case of my husband, digging a trench around his house, adding gasoline and a match and giving his mom a heart attack) as their most fond memories from summertime when they were kids. My favorite memory is of days and days of unlimited time to read.
My parents were tolerant of it then--yes, books were allowed at the dining room table so long as you also ate without complaining--and yesterday, god bless 'em, they enabled me to re-live a day of it. At about 11:30 am they came and took their two darling grandchildren away for a full day of granny and grandpa fun: playing at their house, eating lots of fruit leathers (which have replaced goldfish crackers in our house as "kiddie cocaine"), swimming at the pool. They brought them back at about 6 PM and then Brian took the kids out to eat at a local diner (and brought me home a huge Greek salad with grilled chicken).
I snuggled with the kids, tucked them in to bed and then went back to my book. I confess I did need a couple of Tylenols by the closing hours since there is only so much left-to-right tracking that my eyeballs can do before it causes my skull to throb (kinda like Harry's scar! But in a good way!)
I loved reading the book, but I loved even more the way I got to read the book--like a greedy little 11-year-old without a care in the world.
