by Years after most of the rest of the fantasy-reading world, I finished reading the Harry Potter series over the weekend. I would have been in there with the crowd had the Sorcerer’s Stone been interesting to me at the time. Sadly, it failed to capture my attention and I stopped there for several years.
In a way I’m glad that I did. Good books are rare things and so I’m glad I had them to read now. In fact, I almost think I enjoyed each book in the series more than the one before it. That feeling could be influenced by an increasing attachment for the characters as well as the stories themselves. Certainly the former is a major reason why I’ve come to love these books. Nevertheless, I feel Rowling’s writing did improve over time. It’s been said that parts of the Half-Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows are dry. I won’t disagree completely, but the slow sections are neither over-long nor irrelevant to the story line, so it’s not something that bothered me.
I’m not going to go on much more here, I think. When the Half-Blood Prince came out I went to a friend’s party where the book was the topic of the evening. When I stated that I don’t like to over-analyze fiction, the looks I received could only mean I’d been judged an intellectual lightweight. Still, questions like, “What did Rowling mean when she …” have no meaning. Books speak for themselves; the author’s meaning is on record, permanently, in the printed pages. What a book means to a reader is a different matter and entirely subjective.
For me I’ll say that the Deathly Hallows puts an end to Harry Potter’s adolescence in a very definitive way. Unlike the finale in many series, I closed the book feeling almost completely satisfied with the story. Rowling tied up all of the important loose ends and closed Harry Potter’s saga more cleverly than any other series I can bring to mind right now.
(True, coming from the perspective of an adult reader, I would have preferred that Ginny Weasley have a larger role in the Deathly Hallows. But that’s small criticism.)
In the end, I’m left in the state that tells me I’ve just read something wonderful: I’m sad that I’m done. The one outcome I hadn’t expected when I began the Potter quest a few weeks ago was to feel so strongly about these characters. Yeah, they’re only books, but in a strange way it’s almost like Harry has become my own son. Perhaps that’s the greatest magic Harry Potter could have performed on me.
