This does­n’t need much in the way of an intro­duc­tion. On July 21, J.K. Rowl­ing pre­sent­ed a pub­lic read­ing of the first chap­ter of the new­ly-pub­lished Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows. It took place at the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um in Lon­don. Take it away J.K.

We’re try­ing out some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent today, and we hope that you’ll par­tic­i­pate because by giv­ing more, you’ll get more in return. (So far we have 18 peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ing, now it is your turn.)

We want to draw on the col­lec­tive wis­dom of our read­ers and find out what great books you’ve read, and which par­tic­u­lar one made a dif­fer­ence in your life. That is, what book has led you to look dif­fer­ent­ly at lit­er­a­ture, think­ing, career, love, friend­ship, death, or what­ev­er you con­sid­er impor­tant?

At some point lat­er next week, we’ll bun­dle the sub­mis­sions and post them for you. We’re hop­ing that this will give every­one a list of great and impor­tant books to read.

If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate, please make a sub­mis­sion in the com­ments below, or via email. In what­ev­er you write, please list the name of the book and the author, and then men­tion why the book mat­tered to you. (Your expla­na­tion can be as brief or as long as you like.) When we post the replies, we won’t use your names unless you oth­er­wise con­sent. And we’ll oth­er­wise pro­tect the pri­va­cy of your email address­es.

Final­ly, we’ll ran­dom­ly select one name from all of the sub­mis­sions, and send that con­trib­u­tor a nice $50 gift cer­tifi­cate from Amazon.com.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you, and thanks for tak­ing part.

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