I think I must be the last person in the Northern Hemisphere to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon. (Or should I say the Hogwart’s Express? Nah, that would be way too clever and precious, and may even induce vomiting in some of my more sensitive readers…) I simply haven’t had much interest in reading children’s books, nor have I been able to quite fathom all the grown-ups I’ve seen on the train who seem utterly engrossed by them.

However, I’m a sucker for a good pop-cultural groundswell, and with the final book and fifth movie in the series debuting in the last few days, and the constant buzz of excitement coming from practically everybody I meet, well, I’ve finally given in. I started reading the series for the first time a few weeks back (I just began Book 5 today), and yes, I did attend one of the midnight release events on Friday. I’ll be writing more about my experiences with Harry soon.

In the meantime, I was really amused to see that not even Sith Lords are immune from hype. No matter what one may think of J.K. Rowling’s writing style or the stories themselves — Harold Bloom, I’m thinking of you, you sour-pussed old killjoy snob — you cannot deny that this weekend was a remarkable, watershed event. Millions of copies of the same book were distributed all around the world in a single weekend, a good percentage of them in a single night, and a significant number of those books were read cover-to-cover before Monday morning. That’s almost unbelievable. Has there ever been any other mass entertainment that has come so close to being a ubiquitous experience, i.e., something that everyone was doing? Maybe the mini-series Roots back in the ’70s, or the initial surge of Star Wars‘s popularity (although both of those played out across longer timeframes than this single, three-day orgy of reading…), but I’m not sure even those things were so big. It’s truly mind-boggling, and I doubt it will ever be repeated.

(Credit where it’s due: the photo came from here — I also like the one of Vader in the shower — and there’s an explanation of that photo set here.)