Around the Common Room

I finally started work on my second Master’s Degree this week – an M.S. Ed in Secondary English and Special Education – a degree that, in three years, I hope results in my teaching Harry Potter (among other books) professionally. This makes writing a bit slow here this week, but here’s a few updates from around the common room:

• My next post, which I plan to be much shorter than the previous ones, will be called “Snape Saves.” It’s a result of the discussion following my posting the Life Debts essay over at HP Essays LJ community.
• I should have time to get Podcast #2 up this weekend.
• Felicity has done some tweeking of her “Fantastic Potions” essay, which you should check out.
• Pat’s continuing to blog through CoS, and she’s got a new post up about Harry’s dreams, a fascinating topic that I’ve not had the time to investigate thoroughly.
• I’m still listening to the Stephen Fry recordings, and I’m on OP now. I think I like Stephen Fry better than Jim Dale (I’ll post more on this at some point), but Dale definitely does better with the house-elves.
• Michael Spencer, iMonk, has graciously pointed to my new podcast in his recent Internet Monk Radio podcast, which you should listen to. I’ll thank him in this weekend’s podcast, at which time I will also insult his accent. (He’s also helped me with some technical stuff, and this next podcast should be in mp3 rather than m4a format. Thanks, Michael.)
• I’ve added two new essays, “Pro Harry Potter” (Michael Spencer) and “The Good Spell of Harry Potter” (Leif Rigney) to the “Articles” page.  Check them out.