Your Potter Roundup

Jonathan Last has all the predictions you'll need. Megan McArdle and Kieran Healy, meanwhile, remind me why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - where the Lost-style "everybody acts like idiots" phenomenon they identify was at its worst - was far and away the most irritating book in the saga. Meanwhile, this old John Holbo post identifies the pastiche (actually, one of several pastiches) that's at the heart of the Potter mystique.

As for me, just like with The Sopranos finale, I'm going to be behind the pop-culture times: I'll be occupied all weekend and won't even get to start reading the book till Sunday night at the earliest. So expect blogging to be light till then, since I'll be on something of a media fast.

Comments

As long as we're talking about Harry Potter characters acting like idiots, why not bring up the huge plot hole in the middle of Goblet of Fire?

Barty Crouch Jr. impersonates Prof. Moody all year so that he can get Harry to win the Triwizard Cup, which Crouch has turned into a portkey straight to Voldemort, right? So why doesn't Crouch just turn any old thing into a portkey and trick Potter into touching it the very first day he's there (Potter, will you hand me that quill, please?)?

Nevermind, I shall go on enjoying the books anyway.

Posted by Phil | July 20, 2007 3:39 PM

I had high hopes of re-reading the first six books prior to reading the seventh on Saturday. But then the enormous nature of the last three books - close to 2300 pages - tripped me up. I am now in the middle of the Order of the Phoenix and it is the worst of the series. Harry is just pissed off all the time and the story just drags.

Combine this with the British Open being this week and I won't likely be reading the book except on Saturday and Sunday nights. I will join Ross in media avoidance until I can finish it.

Posted by Kevin Holtsberry | July 20, 2007 6:39 PM

Actually, and this is not a spoiler, the Harry/Voldemort narrative pretty much overtakes the Harry/Hogwarts narrative in volume seven.

Posted by MattF | July 22, 2007 5:16 PM

"Barty Crouch Jr. impersonates Prof. Moody all year so that he can get Harry to win the Triwizard Cup, which Crouch has turned into a portkey straight to Voldemort, right? So why doesn't Crouch just turn any old thing into a portkey and trick Potter into touching it the very first day he's there (Potter, will you hand me that quill, please?)?"

Exactly. "Goblet of Fire," instead of being a million pages long, could have been a pamphlet. But who cares about plot holes when you're JKR and her publisher and her marketing company and are about to make a gazillion bucks? The book must be written, and the longer the better--so there will be more characters, more places, more
everything so even more cheap crap can be sold.

Two-dimensional characters, everything plot-driven, far too many holes in the plot to begin with, these all bother me. But what really bugs me is her limited vocabulary. Read (if you can stomach it) her dialogue for Percy Weasley. Every time she has him speak in "Goblet" or "Phoenix", it's "....he said pompously," or "...he said importantly," and she does multiple times per page, sometimes even in the same paragraph!

In hindsight, I think she had a pretty good--if incomplete--tale to tell right up through "Azkaban," but after that hadn't thought out what would happen once Riddle actually returned. "Goblet" and "Phoenix" seem contrived and bloated, even by her standards. She reined herself in a bit with "Half-Blood."

Posted by Claudius | July 23, 2007 10:45 AM