My mentor at my undergraduate university teaches scenic design and script analysis on a number of levels, including an advanced course which students intending to become scenic designers (or who are particular masochists) generally take. The class ranges in size from two to thirteen, depending on the semester, and is actually more educational in terms of general theatrical theory than Directing and Dramaturgy combined.
(My mentor is an unyielding, unsentimental, impossible genius; I miss him terribly, and he wants me to find a job in Seattle so that I can come paint shows for him.)
The final he gives for this course is legendary, one of three rites of passage in our department. He selects a play of about ten to fifteen pages (we got Mountain Language, by Pinter) and gathers his students on an afternoon when they have no other exams.
We sat in the design classroom, well-stocked from previous courses and full of odds and ends with which to build models, and waited while he ducked into his office next door. He returned with a stack of scripts, four bottles of wine, and a pile of plastic cups. At the time I was teetotal, so he had brought a bottle of nonalcoholic cider for me.
"Drink," he said, "and design me a set."
We read the play, most of us for the first time, and were given two hours to draft a rough groundplan and build a model each. We knew, theoretically, that this was coming; we just didn't know what play.
There was an excitement which accompanied the anticipation of the exam. This was something one knew one could do; all one had to do was employ the mental and physical skills acquired during the class. Analysis, creation, fabrication, presentation. I enjoyed that exam more than I have enjoyed most actual courses I've taken. Wondering just how much you could accomplish in two hours, wondering what others would do with the same amount of time, but knowing that after this frantic period of gluing and painting and drawing, you were bound to pass. How could you fail? It wasn't a test. It was a challenge.
I remembered that feeling when OotP came out; the excited ride downtown on the T, buying the book at the civilised hour of nine am, riding home again with the book open on my knee. In fact, I missed my stop (Jamaica Plain) and decided just to go to the end of the line and catch my stop on the way back. Why not? More time to read before the walk home from the T station.
I remembered -- I remember -- not because it's a challenge to read the book in a day but because of what comes after. Absorbing the information, integrating it into one's personal view of canon, laughing at some parts and (lately) viewing others with horror and shock. It requires intelligent thought, once the first reactions have worn off. Writing fanfic for the next few months will be difficult as our worldview changes yet again, and digesting that change will not necessarily be easy either. I, for one, am going to find a lot of my fanfic outdated and incorrect, which will be dismaying but unavoidable.
Perhaps I'm overdramatising the HBP release; certainly it looks that way from where I sit, and my inherent instinct is to lock this post privately and laugh about it later. But to be honest, we are a part of a popular culture phenomenon which is occurring around us and will occur at no other time, once the next (last?) book is released. How many people, twenty years from now, will wonder what it was like to see each book as it came and anticipate its release with such interest and activity? Italo Calvino wrote an entire novel about the anticipation of an author's new works, and I know I've wondered this very thing about the Narnia septalogy and the Holmes stories.
So though it may be trying, difficult, upsetting, time-consuming, irrelevance-making, and as Jaida said, oddly frightening -- though I may not really want to plow through the book, as I find the universe more fascinating than the stories -- it is after all something to embrace. We rarely know, at the time, what will be History later, but I think we may be fairly certain that this is, in one way or another.
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