Harry Potter
I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!
I'll try my best not to "spoil" it, but here's what I thought...
It was a lot darker than the others, which was to be expected, but I loved it.
It's incredible to think that this book, which is astonishingly different from the Sorceror's Stone, is the end of the series. Reading the Sorceror's Stone when I was eight, I had no IDEA that the final installment would turn out this way -- I didn't even know there was going to be a sequel. A lot of the characters have really become so much more dimensional than in the first one, and it's amazing to think that one woman had this whole universe in her head, a universe that is as well thought up as the one that actually exists.
So now the series is over...and strangely enough it came at the perfect time. For me, at least. I read the first book when I was eight years old, and Harry was eleven, but by now I'm seventeen, and so is he. As Harry grew up I grew up, and as the novels became laced with darker plots, romance, and complex twists, I grew into the audience that Rowling was writing for. I even read that Rowling first started on the Harry Potter books in 1990, so essentially, Harry and I were "born" at the same time. When I have kids, it's going to be so different to just hand them all seven novels instead of discovering the first by chance, finding the pleasant surprise of a sequel and buying it in Ireland because I couldn't wait until we got home, waiting in line for J.K. Rowling to autograph the first three, waiting in anticipation each summer for the next book until the date marked on the calender when I could pick it up by midnight, and fighting sleep while finishing the last installment. It's unavoidable that Harry was -- and is -- a part of my life; I've even named my cat after the freaking poltergeist.
But what makes me truly love the Harry Potter books is that they aren't just kids' books: each one displays little bite-sized bits of philosophy; for example, when Ron's injured by the brain, and Madam Pomfrey tells him, "Sometimes thoughts are more scarring than physical attacks," or when Dumbledore explains about Voldemort's unstable soul that resulted from his attacks against love, or when Harry realizes that coming back from death would be only to a ghost-like, footprint existence....Rowling is dealing with some seriously heavy stuff that's packaged into an appealing, oftentimes eccentric medium.
Actually, a lot of the time that I was reading this, I was reminded of Animal Farm, the Holocaust, and other such events that involved coups, propoganda, and unjust oppression. Mark Twain's observation that, "Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so..." holds true as well. It just goes to show that this fantasy world ISN'T such a fantasy world; it's happened before, and maybe this is a message to us to try and avoid it happening again.
Wow, so that was a lot more tangential analysis than I was aiming for, but I felt that this chapter of my life deserves a respectful goodbye. It's hard to say goodbye, because there's so much I want to know...about the veil in the Department of Mysteries, about "going on," about Sirius's background that J.K. Rowling claims she could write a whole other book about. But I guess the good thing is that now we can fill in the gaps ourselves, however we like.
I'll try my best not to "spoil" it, but here's what I thought...
It was a lot darker than the others, which was to be expected, but I loved it.
It's incredible to think that this book, which is astonishingly different from the Sorceror's Stone, is the end of the series. Reading the Sorceror's Stone when I was eight, I had no IDEA that the final installment would turn out this way -- I didn't even know there was going to be a sequel. A lot of the characters have really become so much more dimensional than in the first one, and it's amazing to think that one woman had this whole universe in her head, a universe that is as well thought up as the one that actually exists.
So now the series is over...and strangely enough it came at the perfect time. For me, at least. I read the first book when I was eight years old, and Harry was eleven, but by now I'm seventeen, and so is he. As Harry grew up I grew up, and as the novels became laced with darker plots, romance, and complex twists, I grew into the audience that Rowling was writing for. I even read that Rowling first started on the Harry Potter books in 1990, so essentially, Harry and I were "born" at the same time. When I have kids, it's going to be so different to just hand them all seven novels instead of discovering the first by chance, finding the pleasant surprise of a sequel and buying it in Ireland because I couldn't wait until we got home, waiting in line for J.K. Rowling to autograph the first three, waiting in anticipation each summer for the next book until the date marked on the calender when I could pick it up by midnight, and fighting sleep while finishing the last installment. It's unavoidable that Harry was -- and is -- a part of my life; I've even named my cat after the freaking poltergeist.
But what makes me truly love the Harry Potter books is that they aren't just kids' books: each one displays little bite-sized bits of philosophy; for example, when Ron's injured by the brain, and Madam Pomfrey tells him, "Sometimes thoughts are more scarring than physical attacks," or when Dumbledore explains about Voldemort's unstable soul that resulted from his attacks against love, or when Harry realizes that coming back from death would be only to a ghost-like, footprint existence....Rowling is dealing with some seriously heavy stuff that's packaged into an appealing, oftentimes eccentric medium.
Actually, a lot of the time that I was reading this, I was reminded of Animal Farm, the Holocaust, and other such events that involved coups, propoganda, and unjust oppression. Mark Twain's observation that, "Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so..." holds true as well. It just goes to show that this fantasy world ISN'T such a fantasy world; it's happened before, and maybe this is a message to us to try and avoid it happening again.
Wow, so that was a lot more tangential analysis than I was aiming for, but I felt that this chapter of my life deserves a respectful goodbye. It's hard to say goodbye, because there's so much I want to know...about the veil in the Department of Mysteries, about "going on," about Sirius's background that J.K. Rowling claims she could write a whole other book about. But I guess the good thing is that now we can fill in the gaps ourselves, however we like.