With the second to last movie coming up, Harry Potter has been in the ether:
And I finally got around to picking up The Sorcerer’s Stone and starting the series again from the top, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Holy crap. J.K. Rowing has owned me these past two weeks. Me, a person who has read this entire series at least half a dozen times – a person who knows perfectly well how it ends! – and I couldn’t stop my pell-mell rampage through the pages.
Mockingjay arrived and stared accusingly at me from the top of my TBR pile, saying “Don’t you know who I AM?!?” But I could not for the life of me put down Harry Potter.
Be it the speed at which I read, or the late night hour I often find myself reading in, sometimes I miss little bits and pieces here and there, which means every time I re-read a book, I can find small nuggets of undiscovered treasure – this time it was this:
They hurried along the corridor to the place Dobby had described to Harry, a stretch of blank wall opposite an enormous tapestry depicting Barnabas the Barmy’s foolish attempt to train trolls for the ballet. “Okay,” said Harry quietly, while a moth-eaten troll paused in his endless clubbing of the would-be ballet teacher to watch.
How can you not love these books?
I was up until 2 AM three times, to get to the end of various installments. The waterworks turned on in all the right places, and yesterday when I closed the last page of Deathly Hallows I was elated, extremely satisfied and slightly depressed that it was all over. My brain savored the flavor of these books for hours after I finished, like the taste of a good dessert that lingers on your tongue.
THIS is what I call a great story, one that grabs you by the lapels every time you read it, be it the second time or the twenty-fifth.
I think with YA we have a tendency to lower our expectations, being as they are “kids books,” we expect less of them. Harry Potter is where the bar should be set – the character work is just superb in this series. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Snape, Dumbledore, and the rest, all are fantastically flawed human beings who make mistakes, who can be petty and selfish and wrong, and whose heroism is all the more meaningful for it.
Harry Potter knocked my socks off all over again.
So then, of course, I scurried to the web to remind myself what happened to all these wonderful characters after the books ended. According to J.K. Rowling:
(SPOILERS – DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T READ DEATHLY HALLOWS!!!)
– Harry, along with Ron, went to work at the Auror Department at the Ministry of Magic and revolutionized it, and after all these years, Harry is now the department head.. Ron also joined George at Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes, which became an enormous money-spinner.
– Hermione began her post-Hogwarts career at the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures where she was instrumental in greatly improving life for house-elves and their ilk. She then moved (despite her jibe to Scrimgeour) to the Dept. of Magical Law Enforcement where she was a progressive voice who ensured the eradication of oppressive, pro-pureblood laws.
– After a few years as a celebrated player for the Holyhead Harpies, Ginny retired to have her family and to become the Senior Quidditch correspondent at the Daily Prophet
(The Leaky Cauldron has a great list of everything J.K. revealed after Deathly Hallows came out – you can find it HERE.)
These books are eminently, utterly, and superbly re-readable. Make sure to pick them up again sometime – you’ll love them all over again.
Like Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling is here to stay.
Leave a Reply