As part of the upcoming Manila Book Fair, the folks behind Read or Die have all sorts of activities lined up to get us excited about reading. One of these activities is a literary cosplay competition. If you haven’t heard of cosplay, the word is a combination of “costume” and “roleplay;” it is something that started in Japan where fans of manga, anime, videogames, TV shows and other popular Japanese media, dress up as their favorite characters. If you have been to comic or toy or science fiction conventions and have seen costumed characters walking around, then you know what cosplay is.

Now, instead of dressing up as Pikachu, Kenshin, or Voltes V, a Read or Die cosplay asks you to dress up as a literary character. It will be the first of its kind in the world. The Read or Die website has the complete guidelines for the competition. Characters must originally be from a book so that any character from anime, movies, or cartoons with book adaptations that came after are disqualified. Please choose a costume that is tasteful and appropriate for all ages.

Of course you can dress up as a Harry Potter character but chances are you will see many people in the same costume so go back to your library and pick out a character from another book that you like. Read or Die suggests characters from Noli or Fili or The Three Musketeers. There are millions of books to choose from.

If you have questions, please contact Read or Die. I imagine that characters originally from manga and comicbooks (e.g., Superman) will be allowed but this is something that probably has to be confirmed with the organizers. Also, we will try to find out if the contest is open to all ages.

If you have your own blog or website, you must know how much fun checking your site statistics can be. You can learn a lot from the many tools available that tell you how many people visited your site, their geographical location, how they found you, etc. As of today, most of our visitors access our site from Makati, then Manila, Quezon City, and Cebu City. Hello and thank you for visiting our site. We hope you that you come and read us regularly and that you enjoy your stay.

For those who received a copy of The Daily Prophet carrying the news item about a museum robbery with their copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, here is a clearer photograph of the scene. Since the picture is a bit fuzzy and some of you may not be able to drop by and look at the display for yourself, we have provided a few clues below. Remember, you will have to identify the objects in the museum and, if you can and it would be better if you could, provide a caption for each object as it should be in a museum. Answers can be specific or general, as in the name of a specific bird, or just what that bird is. The person who gets every item correctly and who can provide the best captions (as determined by our judges) gets as a prize one of the items on display.

Clues:
1. red and feathery
2. you need a broomstick to catch one
3. helps to catch flying keys
4. the size of a walnut with silver wings
5. a wizard’s weapon of choice
6. hourglass worn on a chain
7. silvery grey cloak
8. 10 inches in diameter
9. silver with rubies
10. used in Potions class
11. “…neither can live…while the other survives…”
12. sings a different song every year
13. postal service

Also, below is the text from The Daily Prophet. Thank you to Mercury, our resident Harry Potter fanatic, for introducing us to Professor Clio Curio.

Just before sunrise today, a daring robbery occurred at the renowned Museum of Witchcraft & Wizardry in Libis, Quezon City where magical objects, devices, and artifacts of all kinds from the Harry Potter books are on display.

“Everything…Everything is gone!” cried a shaken Professor Clio Curio, curator of the museum. Although the museum’s collection was intact, what the professor was talking about was how all the knowledge in the museum had been stolen.

Signs, captions, and descriptions of the collection, files and records, every bit of information was erased including, unfortunately for the Professor, the information in her head! She remembers nothing about any of the items in the exhibit.

While the top wizards and witches from all around the world are looking for a spell that will restore Professor Curio’s memory, perhaps you, loyal reader, can help out.

In the photograph are 13 items that have to be named and re-captioned. Place the name of the object/device/creature and your own museum-worthy description for it based on the Harry Potter books on the blanks provided. Your captions can be as long as you want. Use the back of this sheet for the captions.

Submit your answers to the museum (that’s Booktopia) or send mail to info at booktopia.com.ph. The correct answers with the best captions will win a prize!

You may have to visit the museum yourself to see the artifacts themselves. Photographs are allowed and photographs with the exhibit are also allowed but please ask first.

The museum is located at Intrepid Plaza, Libis, Quezon City and you may get in touch with the curator at 634-6544. Learn more about this quest from booktopia.com.ph.

To those who are availing of our free delivery service, please make sure that you have already given us your complete address and phone numbers. If we are unable to contact you on Saturday, we cannot deliver to your home.

Many have suspected that one of the Horcruxes can be found in the Muggle world. I think we may have found it while mixing a special batch of batter for this Saturday’s Harry Potter release. This may sound strange, but, it was in the form of a small cake. However, the Horcrux refuses to be revealed and has magically compelled us to make many cupcakes that look just like it.

Now we don’t know which one is the Horcrux and we need your help. Come on Saturday, at 7am, and have a cupcake. Bite into the cursed cupcake and you win a prize!

This is what J. K. Rowling said on her website after electronic copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appeared on the internet and also after copies of the hardcover were sold over the internet by an online retailer. The author also expressed disappointment when a review of the book (even yet unreleased) appeared in the esteemed New York Times.

She urged fans to ignore the unauthenticated information that started to spread a few weeks ago. She also gave thanks to the newspapers and bookstores who protect the secrecy of the book until the very minute it is to be released.

If you don’t want to run into spoilers, be very careful where you go on the internet. Sites like Ebay have pages of the book for sale, you can also find spoilers in YouTube and similar sites.

Do not worry, true fans, in a very short time you will know everything!

This seems to be a good year for young adult fantasy fiction crossing over to the big screen.  Aside from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, here are other books that you can expect to see in theaters soon.

I remember reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.   Maybe I was too young or I let my imagination run away with me or Susan Cooper writes a good story, because I know it scared me and I had to put it down a few times before I could finish it.  It is the story of a boy who finds out on his eleventh birthday that he is an Old One, someone destined to protect the world from evil.  The book is part of a series of five volumes.  The movie is scheduled to come out towards the end of the year.

Being released as a Christmas movie is Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (known in the UK as The Northern Lights).  The story is set in a world that is like ours, but isn’t, where humans have animal companions representing their own souls.  Lyra, a young girl, becomes the bearer of a compass that can tell you the answer to any question.  The story has missing children, daring rescues, and armored polar bears.  It should make for a good movie.

Coming sooner to a theater near you is Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.   It is the story of earnest Tristan who promises to fetch his lady love a star they saw fall beyond the enchanted wall of their village.

Here’s a new website from the nice people of Read or Die.  They describe it as “…an online Filipino literary portal and community…hosts blogs, author and group sites, reading guides, reading lists, reading challenges, podcasts, news of events on literacy and literature, online book clubs and digitized publications.”

The site looks nice and neat and is packed with information.  Anyone with anything to say about the local reading culture can and should use it.  You can visit it just to read what’s new in the Philippine literary setting.  You can create your own blog to, let’s say, promote your new book.  You can join the forums and discuss books, events, writers, etc.

Hey there.  5 days to go till Book 7!  Meanwhile, my meandering musings on the Harry Potter films…

I saw the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last Wednesday in Glorietta 4 (it had been a couple of years since I’d caught a flick there).  I’ve never been picky about how big or wide (or flat, for that matter) the screen/monitor I’m watching on is, but for the first time I found myself lamenting how the screen seemed to be undersized — disappointingly so.  “Creevey TV”, I thought. 

In comparison, my boss told me that he and his family (his eldest being the resident Pottermaniac) trekked to the Mall of Asia and watched HP5 at the IMAX theater.  Or perhaps the better way to put it is that they “experienced” HP5.  The gigantic (”Grawpy”?) screen and 3-D effects in the last 20 minutes reportedly were beyond awesome; his young kids were fully awake though the screening was from 11 p.m. to 1:30 a.m (as all other screenings were sold out).   

Oh well, good for them.  Tonight I get to watch the fifth film for the second time, courtesy of my buddy’s free passes to Eastwood. 

This movie isn’t my favorite of the five to date, though I thought it was a lot better than Goblet of Fire (which I just re-viewed on cable the other day).  My barometer for the films is how well they capture (what I consider to be) the essence of the original work, how well they “get it”.  For this reason, I think the first film Sorcerer’s Stone succeeds highly as an adaptation.  Admittedly, it is the simplest and shortest of the books and thus it was fairly straightforward to translate to screen. 

The Prisoner of Azkaban film would have been the best if it weren’t for a major bad call in omitting a theme at the book’s heart: Harry finding his connection to his father.  That the filmmakers didn’t feel this was important enough to keep is evinced by 2 of their decisions.  First: omitting the significance of Harry’s Patronus being a stag.  How many more seconds would it have taken to say that James’s animal form (whence hiis nickname “Prongs”) was a stag?  The other: Sirius’s parting words to Harry before the former flies away to freedom was “You truly are your father’s son” in the book, but in the movie this is shifted to Sirius telling Hermione “You truly are the brightest witch of your age.”  What the?!?!?  To have made these choices for the film, I feel, gutted the emotional heart of the story.  (As well, Sirius treating Harry as if he were his best friend James himself is key in the later books.)  All the 3rd film has going for it is the time-travel sequence (which for me is the most brilliant of Harry’s escapades in all the books), but this is really owes to the strength of Rowling’s story (pure genius to pull off the climax of a “children’s book” with this device!) rather than the filmmakers’ treatment.

Re HP5.  I have concerns whether non-fans (or, more accurately, those who haven’t read the book) will be able to follow the plot.  I imagine they’d go, “Who’s this friggin’ Mrs. Figg?”  The length of Books 4 and 5 doesn’t lend easily to film adaptation, particularly the action-packed Goblet of Fire.  But, whereas I felt the HP4 movie butchered then reassembled the story a la Frankenstein [for instance, it didn’t make sense that Barty Crouch, Sr. was found dead (a departure from the book), and yet they continued with the Final Task like nothing had happened], Order of the Phoenix was able to distill the key bit, which for me is how government/people in power can be absurd and as a result frighteningly capable of great harm.  How successfully (or not) each film conveys this is in large part thanks to the actors.  Again, HP4’s casting fell short of my expectations (mainly Crouch Sr., Cho and Fleur, maybe Moody and Krum too); in contrast, HP5’s Imelda Staunton as Umbridge and Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix were superb, spot-on choices, plus there were great moments from Alan Rickman’s Snape and Emma Thompson’s Trelawney. 

[Hmm.  What if they had kept Gilderoy Lockhart’s part in the 5th film?  Then we’d have Kenneth Branagh, his ex-wife (Thompson) and the woman he left his wife for (Bonham Carter, but they’re now exes too) all in the same flick!]

I’m looking forward most to seeing Luna Lovegood again.  When Jo Rowling dropped by the filming of HP5 and met Evanna Lynch (who plays Luna, after having beat out thousands in an open audition), the author had said Evanna was “perfect” for the part.  At the time, I had taken Jo’s compliment to be more generous than accurate.  [JKR had also said, years previously, that Emma Watson was the perfect Hermione.  Hermione Granger’s my absolute favorite character, but Emma Watson is easily too babe-licious to be Hermione (as a result, her “transformation” at the Yule Ball in the 4th film fell flat).  I mean, Cho Chang and Fleur Delacour are supposed to be the irresistable beauties in the books.   Even Hermione’s classmates Padma and Parvati Patil are said in the books to be “the most attractive girls in the year” (as attested to by Dean Thomas, at least).]   But in the movies, Emma’s Hermione is such a looker she gives those other girls a run for their Galleons… 

Anyway, getting back to Evanna as Luna, I was consequently skeptical of Rowling’s declaration that here was another girl who was perfect for her part.  But after watching Evanna’s Luna I’d have to say that Jo Rowling wasn’t exaggerating one bit about her being perfectly cast!  She’s got that dirty silver blonde hair, that odd but serene expression, and that dreamy voice to a tee!  Her performance really stood out in the midst of all these distinguished, career actors.  That Evanna Lynch is a certified Harry Potter fan (she’d been, er, crazy about the series since she was 8 and had even engaged in correspondence with Rowling) could have only added to the magic of the Potter phenomenon, and I imagine all Potterholics resonate with her.  I look forward to Evanna being chosen as the narrator of a retrospective that will look back on Harry Potter decades from now.   

–Mercury

Howdy.  My name is Mercury (Merc, to my mates), and I’m a Potterholic.  A true-blue, dyed-in-the-wand, honest-to-Hufflepuff Pinoy Potterholic.  And proud of it!

How much of a Potterholic?  Well, needless to say, I have all the books that comprise the HP canon (not just the 6 novels but also the 2 schoolbooks Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages).  I see the film adaptations at advance screenings or on opening day at the latest, and have watched them again many times since on DVD (original ones, of course) and HBO. 

I have all the HP videogames, in PC and PS2 non-pirated versions, and have spent hours immersed in them running through, creeping under and soaring over Hogwarts castle and grounds.  (And I plan to get a Wii just to be able to play HP5 using the Wiimote controller – as a wand!).  I even have the official Harry Potter Trading Card Game (from the same makers as Magic: The Gathering).  Naturally, my cell’s tone for incoming texts is Hedwig’s Theme, um, since 2001 (the first version was a monotone I encoded myself using my phone’s composer feature). 

A large part of being a Harry Potter fan (as with most fandoms nowadays) is the community experience via the Internet.  I was enrolled in an online Hogwarts simulation for 2 years, where I interacted daily with fellow HP nuts from all over the globe.  I was sorted into Hufflepuff where I became a Chaser on my house’s Quidditch team (Muggle translation - HP trivia team).  For running a HP trivia tournament for a big bookstore’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince release event I got my second copy of Book 6 for free as part of my fee (my first copy I had pre-ordered from Booktopia).  Both of these experiences were personally rewarding as I got to share and connect with so many other people who are passionate about these books… and all of this thanks to one woman’s imagination and genius.

Like millions of people around the world (likely, this includes you, as you must be a fan to have read this far) I’m counting down the days (and hours and minutes!) to July 21, when the seventh and final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, hits the stands.  Over the next week, I’ve been invited to journalize my thoughts on this blog.  (Fortunately for me, but maybe not for the readers, it wasn’t specified that said thoughts need to be publication-worthy!)  So I hope you’ll bear with me as I share theories and memories, raves and rants, and other random ramblings about any and all things Potter. 

 –Mercury