Verily, I just watched The Deathly Hallows sneak peak. It brought up all those warm, wonderful fuzzy feelings that only Harry Potter can do. I grew up with Harry, fell in love with his story, and reveled in every novel. The magic was too captivating to not enjoy. The story was too charming, too alluring, too mesmerizing. I went to the midnight release party of Deathly Hallows. Heck, we wound up buying two books, one for me and one for Keisha, just so we wouldn’t have to wait while the other one read. I finished the last book either the day I got it or the next day. I literally could not stop reading.
The truth is, the Harry Potter stories are some of the best stories I’ve ever read. I often omit them from my “favorites” category, but I’m not sure why. Human error, perhaps? Rowling’s humor was fantastic, her mystery intriguing, and her characters absolutely loveable. The books had everything you could ask for in a story: a villain you couldn’t help but hate and pity, a hero with a terrible burden of destiny, friends thicker and closer than brothers, and a world filled with magic. Just thinking about them puts me in a nostalgic mood of the magic of the story and makes me want to reread them immediately.
I wonder if Rowling will be able to stay away from the Harry Potter world. Will she write other novels with the familiar and beloved characters, or is she truly done? When things end, especially things that have held me captivated from the get-go, things like Lost and Harry Potter, I feel mixed emotions. I want the story to end, to have a resolution. The dénouement is, after all, a very important part of the overall story, and without a conclusion then the story is pointless. While the story ends, the bittersweet reality of “no more” sets in, which sometimes leads to despair, and other times to a “hallelujahamenandthankyouJesus.”
It’s just too complex. Using the anthropomorphic metaphor of a story being likened to a human life, in the end it must ultimately die. It’s a pitiful story when the end putters out and ends with a whimper. When a writer grabs a deus ex machina and throws words out, the story suffers. Or when a story goes on long enough that it grows stagnant, it ruins the beauty that once existed. Harry Potter did not do this, and the ending was perfect, albeit tragic.
Overall, I really love the Harry Potter books. I can see me and Keisha reading them to our kids, or bequeathing them to them to read. The story will never get old, methinks. I’m excited to watch the final installments of the Harry Potter films over the next two years, and I look forward to cherishing the story for years to come.
In an unrelated not, if you haven’t read the interview between Pat Rothfuss and Joe Abercrombie (available here), you really need to do it now. I died laughing a few times. In fact, using the Many Worlds Theory, I’m still dying and laughing, if you buy that stuff. Of course, also using the Many Worlds Theory I never even read the interview… Anyway, the general conversation was interesting, seeing how these two dudes think.
