Like with most enthusiastic Harry Potter fans, I read the entire book over the weekend. Amazon didn’t bother to deliver my copy until 6PM, and extenuating circumstances had left me exhausted, so most of my reading was done on Sunday. I wanted to give myself a few days to digest the book. My personal history suggests that when my excitement and anticipation are high, I cannot help but overlook a lot of errors and general badness on the first run-through. (To wit: I adored The Phantom Menace after the first time I saw it).
It’s been three days, though. Enough for various Biblical characters to arise from the dead, and therefore, enough for me to analyze Harry Potter. The next couple of paragraphs are going to be general statements about the book, the series, and the author. After the break I will have my more detailed thoughts, which will include spoilers. If you haven’t read the book yet, do not proceed past the break.
I really do feel like this is, in many ways, the best book in the series. It’s greatest (and, depending on perspective, only) weakness is a roughly 150 page section in the middle of the book in which there is not much happening. The narrative follows Harry throughout its entirety, and so when he and Ron and Hermione are stuck and frustrated on their mission, the reader must suffer through a seemingly interminable series of chapters devoted to very little action or plot development. This may have been easier to swallow if Rowling spent time with some of the rest of the wizarding world (the students at Hogwarts, the Order of the Phoenix members, Voldemort and his crew). She does not, however, and the book suffers, only slightly, for it.
There have been criticisms regarding Rowling’s prose in this book. Actually, there have been criticisms regarding her prose since the beginning of the series. The main criticism of her prose is that it’s “clunky”. I am uncertain what this means, exactly, except to say that, perhaps, Rowling’s prose is not naturally rhythmic. Personally, I don’t think her prose is any different, in terms of quality, than the other books, and I thought her prose was very good back then, too. It’s an unadorned style of prose, not given to long, fanciful metaphors or asides. It relies, instead, on clarity of thought. Rowling’s biggest gift, as a sentence writer, is to convey very clearly what she means at all times, and to evoke the images and feelings in her writer that the story demands. In some ways, I thought her writing had improved significantly in this book in one respect: regarding action. In Goblet of Fire and especially in The Order of the Phoenix, her actions sequences were confusing and unclear. This final book features more, and grander action scenes than any book previous, and Rowling delivers outstandingly.
Rowling’s greatest strength, overall, is that nature of her imagination. Her creativity is so boundless, and her storytelling so intriguing, that the so-called flaws of her prose are irrelevant. She has created a series for all time–to be treasured alongside The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. I was asked a number of years ago to describe the Harry Potter series, and the best I could offer was this: Imagine Lord of the Rings, with its vastness, its detail, its magic and wonder; with the wretched might of its villains and grace and courage of its heroes. Now imagine that the story had been written by Roald Dahl, with his own sort of magic, and wit and wonderment; with his touch gentler than JRR Tolkien’s, and more universal. I do not feel like I’m crossing a sacred line or being too generous by comparing Rowling’s work here to Dahl and CS Lewis and Tolkien. She has earned her place within their pantheon.
Harry’s nickname, The Boy Who Lived, is a stunning phrase, and a perfect term to sum up the series. A boy who lives is unremarkable. There are several billion boys on this planet right now. But it is the nature of the series, that something so simple, so ordinary and natural, should hold such magic and charm and allure. The Harry Potter series is not about a lost king or any sort of mythical beast of magic. It’s about an ordinary boy, and that’s what makes everything so extraordinary.
The series is complete, and its completion is as near to perfect as I, for one, could possibly ask.
I have written before about Joe Posnanski, a baseball writer for the Kansas City Star, and one of the finer baseball bloggers actively posting. JoePo started his baseball blog, 
The Kindly Ones is the ninth installment of Neil Gaiman’s landmark series of Sandman graphic novels. It is easily the longest in the series (at least, so far, though I cannot yet speak to the length of final volume). It possesses this distinction because it concludes (or continues) so many storylines from previous books, and because the story is structured, brilliantly, in the form of a Greek tragedy-even to the point where we’ve got a Greek chorus of witches (as you might remember from reading Macbeth in high school), as well as the 
As Michael Chabon would tell it, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed establishing a refugee camp in Alaska for persecuted Jews fleeing Nazi-Europe. Whether or not this bit of historical trivia is accurate, I do not know, but Chabon takes the idea and runs with it, presenting Sitka as the Alaskan home for the “Frozen Chosen”. The agreement was that the camp would last sixty years, and thus, this community of Jews gave birth to new generations who had never known life outside Alaska, and yet knew that their time in the place of their birth was coming to an end, as the contract was about to run out. The main character of Chabon’s newest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is Meyer Landsman-a modern day Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, but with the twists of being both Jewish and, it would seem, manic depressive. Like his predecessors, however, Meyer possesses a profound drinking problem, and a knack for luck and smarmy observation. The story begins as Meyer is awakened by the night manager of the Hotel Zamenhof, where he lives. One of the other tenants is dead, obviously killed, and Meyer, as both an obsessive policeman and paranoid king of a ransacked castle, start the investigation immediately.
Joseph Heller’s black satire, Catch-22, is widely regarded as one of the best war novels to come out of World War II. Heller’s style is impressive, displaying a near-constant string of juxtapositions and contradictions. Through these contradictions, Heller creates humor, but also creates a complexity in his characters that might not be possible otherwise. These contradictions start off humorously (“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous, and likable. In three days, no one could stand him.”), but as the book progresses, these seemingly innocuous conflicts become a matter of desperate frustration, as we view the world through the eyes of Capt. John Yossarian, the protagonist.
It is a very minor coincidence that Kurt Vonnegut should die the same week I find myself in the midst of one of his novels for the first time. Of course, it would have been nice if that novel wasn’t 
In the on-going effort to add more material to the Curious Mechanism, we’re presenting a review. We’ll do stories from an era, of anything length (and, potentially, written in several languages), and we’ll publish our two cents upon them whenever we’ve read them. Hopefully, the bookshelf will get another addition every week or so, but if we get around to reading Les Miserables (1779 pages), War and Peace (1500 pages), or In Search of Lost Time (a mere 1.5 million words) you’ll forgive us if we need more than 7 days. Actually, if we read that last one, we’ll probably just review the sections as we go along.
