Sunday, January 9, 2011

will be getting harry potter on audio cd

11:11 PM 1/9/11

So there's this new thing that I'm going to get, something I'm waiting for. This is an example of a 'gift.' It's something that 'they' suggested to me. I'm always complaining about how I hate the radio but I need something to listen to while I drive. I don't have lots of music CDs right now, and I need to do a CD project where I get all the best songs onto a couple of CDs so that I don't have to skip all the songs on the CDs just to get to the ONE SONG that I like.

I've been rereading the Harry Potter books. I am avoiding reading lots of new and unfamiliar fiction books. There could be a million possible books out there that are all wonderful books, but I'm not reading them. I don't usually buy books and take them home, because of drug residues eventually ruining most things that I bring home. So I don't buy the books, I just read them while sitting in the store at Barnes & Noble.

'They' had the idea the other day to suggest that I order an audio CD of Harry Potter. I've already got the movies, so they are my passive entertainment at home. But I can't watch DVDs while driving. They suggested I get the books on CD and listen to them.

I searched for them and found out they're very expensive, so I am only getting one of them. My favorite movie is Prisoner of Azkaban, so that's the one I'm getting first. I might gradually get more of them over the years. A CD in my car won't get contaminated much, not like a book. There are certain things where I don't worry about them getting contaminated, things where it's a non-porous easily wiped surface, or something you don't have to touch and handle very much.

So it's like watching a movie. It's passive. I don't have to really pay attention to it, and it keeps going on its own. But it's better than the movies in a way, because it's unabridged. In all the movies, they remove a large amount of material that was in the book. These book readings will have every detail in them. When I hear them, I will notice things I never noticed before while reading.

The Harry Potter books are like the bible to me, in a way. Christians read the same bible over and over again, for thousands of years. Everything they need, they have to somehow extract it from the bible. And nobody is writing anything of that quality nowadays, so there aren't any more new bibles being written with new wisdom as good as the old bible. So they just read the bible again and again, and look deeper into it, and then read people's new interpretations of it. It seems like it would get boring after a while. And yeah, I occasionally get bored after too much Harry Potter and not enough of anything else. So this audio CD will be something new - passive, in my car, fully detailed and unabridged (unlike the movies), and no worries about ruining it (which is why I don't buy the books). But yeah, it is the same old Harry Potter again, just in a new form.

I got trapped in a phase of 'don't buy any stuff for entertainment' in the past few years. Don't buy anything nonessential. Entertainment is nonessential. I've had to live that way for a while now.

Well, it was only a couple days ago that I ordered it, so I'm still waiting.

I'm sure people would wonder why I am reading Harry Potter over and over again and immersing myself in it. Why would I limit myself to only one group of fiction stories? It's partly because I don't want to spend a lot of money or time buying and reading lots of new books. It's partly because I want to understand 'What's the formula?' Why are these books so popular? How did J.K. Rowling become so wealthy from these books? How are they different from other fiction stories? What needs do they fulfill? Why do so many people need these books so much? It's partly because I want to 'copy the formula,' in a way, to provide something that large numbers of people need badly. This is something you need to know if you want to send an important message to huge numbers of people.

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