Reading is alive and well

Yesterday I went to "An Evening With Harry, Carrie and Garp" at Radio City Music Hall, a reading by authors Stephen King, John Irving and J.K. Rowling. It was awesome! First of all, there were surprise celebrity guests on hand to introduce the authors. You know how I feel about surprise celebrity guests, and these were good ones: Whoopi Goldberg (who says she has read every single one of the books written by all three authors! Who know Whoopi Goldberg was such a reader?), Kathy Bates, Andre Braugher, Soledad O'Brien and Jon Stewart. (Who was hilarious as usual. About emerging from backstage: "I was just on the phone with my friend Mel Gibson, and he wants to wish everybody here nachas." About his five-month-old daughter: "She has been in line for the seventh Harry Potter book for just over three months now. We miss her terribly...but I want that damn book.")

Stephen King read a selection from "The Body" (better known as Stand By Me), John Irving read from A Prayer for Owen Meany and J.K. Rowling read from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the scene where Harry and Dumbledore go back in time to the moment when Dumbledore invites Tom Riddle to become a student at Hogwarts. (I thought it was kind of a weird choice, but whatever.) Then they all answered questions. Skip past the bullet points to get to the end of the evening, but for the Harry Potter fans among my loyal readers, I present:

Intriguing Things Said Or Hinted At by Jo Rowling About Harry Potter and the Seventh Book

• The first question asked of her was, "What would Hermione see if she looked in the Mirror of Erised?", which I thought was a really intriguing question. According to Ms. Rowling, at this point in time, Hermione would see her, Harry and Ron well and unscathed and Voldemort vanquished...and, she added, she would probably also see herself "entwined...with a certain...someone...you can figure out who." Ow ow!
  
• On a related note, at a certain point she mentioned fans who want to see Harry and Hermione end up together, and when there were cheers in the audience, she said, "You're still out there, come on!"; then she smiled approvingly to cheers of people who want Hermione and Ron to end up together.
  
• She said that other than Voldemort, she thinks that almost all of her characters have the potential for redemption--and as for what this means for Draco Malfoy, we'll have to wait for the seventh book to find out. Insert collective gasp from the audience here. (She also said, "What is it with you girls and Draco Malfoy?", like, are there really girls out there who are attracted to Draco Malfoy? Because ew.)
  
• Random fact about the Harry Potter universe: Someone asked if Muggles would be able to brew potions if they had all the proper ingredients and followed the right steps, but she said there's always some magical element that would prevent this.
• Someone else asked a long and involved question about Ollivander's wand cores versus other wands, and the answer basically boiled down to that she just picked her three favorite ingredients to make up the cores of Ollivander's wands, but she did also talk about how there's a very special and unique relationship between a wand and its owner, and we'll find out more about that in the next book. Which is intriguing (there's that word again) in light of the fact that we already know that Harry's and Voldemort's respective wands will not battle properly against each other.
• She is "well into" writing the seventh book and has discovered that there's "a lot" left to explain. The upside to this is that I've already rhapsodized about how I admire Ms. Rowling for being such a careful writer, and I would appreciate a long, well-plotted seventh book. The downside is that Jon Stewart's daughter could be out of diapers before we see this thing.
• Someone asks how she knows when to stop writing and editing, and she joked that some reviews of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix suggest that she doesn't. So I suppose that means it's considered the weakest book by critics other than me...?
  
• And some rehashing of things we already know: The final chapter of the seventh book is already written; characters will die; blah blah blah. At a press conference before the reading, both Stephen King and John Irving urged her not to kill off Harry, but she only responded with the same song and dance about understanding why authors kill off their characters at the end of a series, etc. She did say that in most of these kinds of series, the "hero goes on alone," and right now Harry isn't alone because he still has his two loyal sidekicks in Ron and Hermione. A statement which makes me very nervous.
  

Other highlights: Someone asked Stephen King, "What scares you?", which I thought was a cool question, and he responded, "Everything"; John Irving was far and away the most entertaining reader of the three even though lots of people got up to go to the bathroom at the start of his reading; some kids dressed up in Hogwarts outfits even though it was 100 degrees out (no, literally), a sure sign of true devotion; this is J.K. Rowling's first trip to the U.S. in six years; the two readings are expected to raise $500,000 for the Haven Foundation and Doctors Without Borders and all the entertainment was definitely worth my $12.50 to sit in the last row of the third balcony! Most of all, it was genuinely cool to be among 6,000 other people who were so excited about reading!