Last night at 3:30am, we finished The Book That Must Not Be Named here at the Potts/McCoy house. Today, I have a Harry Potter hangover.
This entails a generally bloated feeling caused by drinking too much caffeine and eating too much sugar to stay awake. Other perks include a messed up sleep schedule, an aching lower back, and general feelings of bloodshot bleariness.
I was worried for the first 300 pages, because I was not enjoying the book. I did not experience the general sense of delight that has come in the past from watching the gang return to Hogwarts. It's pretty bleak, in a Frodo and Sam journey to Mordor boring kind of way.
However, the last half of the book darn near makes up for it. A good, exciting, and fitting end to the series, with a startlingly high body count, too. A few tears were shed, and a few moments of silence were taken during the course of the night.
And now I have my life back, at least until the Blogathon next Saturday. This was just practice for getting up early and staying up all night.
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6 comments:
Yeah, a good part of the middle of the book could have been summed up in a couple of chapters that basically say "They spent a long time being frustrated b/c they couldn't figure out what to do next."
I hope that doesn't count as a spoiler. It really isn't, I don't think.
But I agree, the second half of the book pretty much makes up for the drawn-out part.
Yeah, I really did not understand the passage of time for the first half. It was somehow exceedingly long while still devoid of details about what they were actually doing that whole freaking time.
But by the end I felt completely satisfied. I have a few complaints dealing with magical logic (as always, and to the endless annoyance of those around me) but not enough to detract from the lovely feeling of closure.
I think Rowling wanted to follow the pattern where each book took place over a full school year, but she didn't have enough stuff to actually need that long to get it all done. Given that they weren't even at Hogwarts anymore, I think she should have stopped worrying so much about dragging it out for 9 months and should have made it seem like a more natural progression of events.
I picked it up down in Chicago on Saturday - saw lots of the costumed types downtown on Friday, but I abstained - and read a good chunk of it on the bus back up to Mad-town on Sunday (along with several others); so I was living the whole "road thing" as I read it. Gotta agree, though, the ending was fantastic.
I could see the cinematography on the last chapter (not the epilogue) even as I read it. Ralph Finnes will chew up the scenery in that scene.
Plus we got the best of both worlds at Wrigley: the Cubs won, and Bonds hit 2 home runs.
Don't get me started on that 'roided-up nogoodnick...he's two homers shy of Hank Aaron's record, and this Mobile expat is unhappy about it, yessir.
But yeah, that final sequence in the book was, shall we say, cinematic. Almost as if it was in the back of her head while she was writing it. . .
Bonds is a big fat cheater, no doubt; but he only played one game in Chicago and it was kinda cool to see history.
Even if it deserves a big fat "*".
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