Spoiler-Welcome Harry Potter Thread

I said I'd do this over the weekend but waited until I'd finished. I didn't want to see spoilers on a blog I was sort of compelled to read.

Try to keep anything juicy out of the first 100 characters so spoilers don't appear in the New Comments thing in the sidebar. After that, have a party.

Oh... Here's Anwyn's rebuttal to Megan McArdle's criticism of the inconsistent and make-it-up-on-the-fly sort of magic in Harry Potter. FWIW, I think Anwyn's way too much of a fangirl here; McArdle was persnickety here and there, but she was much closer to right.

Having read only two books, my main criticism is that these books would be much better starting off at page 400. The first 400 pages tend to be glacial. Awful, really. Supposedly setting up tantalizing mysteries which will later be solved, but the trouble is many of these mysteries don't seem particularly interesting. Over the course of 400 pages they may eventually become somewhat interesting, but usually not at first, and really intrigue me about them. \

On the other hand, once she begins paying those plot points off (each one padded by at least 50 pages of tedium or unnecessary diversion or unnecessary tedious diversion), the books really do begin to fly, and then I understand why people like them so much.

But really, the first 400 pages of any given Harry Potter book could be nicely edited down to spare and fast-paced 150, with the last 200 or 250 pages left mostly intact. Then they'd crackle.

PS: Yay Snape. I knew he wasn't evil. Even if it's all a little implausible, I like having him as a good guy.

posted by Ace at 09:29 AM

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