→ March 20, 2013
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The Magician King et al.

I have a new draft blog post up today, discussing two potential first-rounders I saw as well as former Mets draft pick Teddy Stankiewicz. Also, the Kindle edition of the indispensable cookbook Ruhlman’s Twenty is just $3.03 right now.

* The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel that was also a parody of popular fantasy novels, is one of my favorite books of the last ten years for the way it weaves (largely affectionate) satire of Harry Potter, Narnia, and Tolkien into an original story. In that book, Quentin Coldwater, an ordinary teenager in New York City, goes through a familiar series of events, becomes a wizard, and ends up visiting the land of Fillory, which he always assumed was fictional. Crossing the chasm into the world of magic and into this alternate reality brings with it all sorts of unanticipated problems, with some tragic consequences along with the successes and adventure.

Grossman followed that book up with a sequel, The Magician King, which he intended to be part two of an eventual Magicians trilogy. It does suffer a little from Middle-Book Syndrome, but that didn’t bother me as much as the split narrative that gives a lot of attention to the back story of one of the secondary characters from the first book, Julia. Denied admission to the magic school, Brakebills, that accepted her friend Quentin, Julia went through a difficult period of anger and depression, along with intermittent attempts to learn magic on her own, a path that ultimately brought her great pain even as she succeeded.

That pairing – triumph and tragedy, elation and pain – underpins both of the books in the series so far, something Grossman spells out more explicitly this time around when Quentin, setting off on an inexplicable sailing expedition within Fillory that lands him back on Earth when that’s about the last thing he wants, is told that becoming a hero can include tremendous sacrifice. This quixotic mission, which Quentin can’t even fully explain to himself other than to say that he feels like he has to do it, takes Quentin, Julia, and their crew of Fillorians to the barely-known Outer Island, and eventually beyond it to After Island and eventually to the End of the World, all in search of a set of Golden Keys that will save the known universe from the wrath of the gods, apparently themselves magicians of a higher order (although Grossman leaves their true nature somewhat unclear, likely wishing to avoid delving too much into the metaphysical) who wish to end the use of magic by mortals.

Grossman created and developed a strong set of characters in the first book, much as J.K. Rowling did when setting up the universe of Harry Potter in the first book in that series. In The Magician King, however, the only development we get is Julia’s through her history, as none of the few new characters we encounter is around for long enough to get that kind of development. I think ultimately that’s what made this feel like the second book in the trilogy – the story was still compelling, just a touch less so than the first book’s, but the character development and growth is largely absent. Quentin’s progress is halting until the book’s climax, and the others are just along for the ride.

That climax might not sit well with readers who loved the first book, but I think Grossman made a wise choice in how he wrapped up the story, at least for now. A big part of the first book’s appeal to me was in how Grossman would create a situation that would feel familiar, often directly recalling something from one of those great fantasy series I mentioned above, but would subvert it through an unexpected or unorthodox resolution. The Magician King is no different – very little is expected here, as triumphs can turn into tragedies in the space of a few sentences. There was one specific aspect that I would have preferred to see Grossman omit, an act of sexual violence that was horrific not just as it was described but for the way the act thoroughly debased the character who was victimized. Rape and sexual assault are valid tools for the fiction writer but should only be deployed when absolutely necessary. This time it wasn’t.

I think The Magician King will stand much more strongly when we get the third book in the series, given how many open questions remained at the book’s conclusion. It isn’t as thin as The Two Towers or, crossing genres, The Empire Strikes Back, stories that seemed to exist primarily as bridges from part one to part three. This book could easily stand on its own if we didn’t have quite so much of the Julia sideline in it. If you enjoyed The Magicians, this is a must-read.

* I’ve also read two other books recently in series I’ve enjoyed, Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot and Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. Fforde’s book, the seventh in the Thursday Next series and likely the second-to-last as well, follows the literary detective, still recovering from the assassination attempt from book 5, reentering the workforce in a reduced role, even as Goliath Corporation is as determined as ever to figure out her secrets and probably kill her once they’re done with her. Their plans involve sending out synthetic Thursdays that look and sound like the real thing to try to con her friends and family into revealing confidential information. At the same time, the town of Swindon is grappling with news that the Almighty’s recent series of smitings will reach their town in a matter of days, a problem that Thursday’s polymath daughter, Tuesday, is trying desperately to solve. The story is clever, as always, but I have noticed over the last three books that they’re becoming much less funny. The old jokes are wearing off and Fforde seems to be struggling to replace them. Fforde’s site indicates we won’t get book eight, which I think will be the end of the series, until at least 2016.

* I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, the fourth book in the Flavia de Luce series, has nothing to do with MLB’s postseason, but is another murder mystery involving the world’s most precocious prepubescent amateur chemist and detective. This time around, the murder occurs at Buckshaw, the estate of Flavia’s father, as half the town is snowed in during a charity performance by members of the cast of a film being shot at the house that week. There’s a surprising lack of chemistry in the main story here, as Flavia largely figures it out by deduction and old-fashioned snooping, although we get far more insight into the character of Dogger and hints of thawing from Flavia’s sisters, which I hope will continue in the next book, Speaking from Among the Bones, just recently out in hardcover.

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→ March 4, 2013
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The Night Circus.

I have new draft blog posts up for Insiders on Marco Gonzales and Alex Balog and on Ryne Stanek. I also held a Klawchat last week.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus mines its source material pretty heavily, stealing the circus idea itself from Ray Bradbury’s seminal book Something Wicked This Way Comes (#29 on the Klaw 100) while also borrowing from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (#17) and relying on the hackneyed chosen-ones motif found in far too much fantasy and science fiction, including, of course, the Harry Potter series. Morgenstern layers her own imagination on top of these familiar settings, crafting an immersive scene rich with color and detail, but the main storyline never lives up to the standard set by the novel’s background details.

The circus of the title appears only at night, without warning, moving from town to town as if by magic (or actually by magic), creating a furor wherever it goes and leading some fans to follow the circus around the globe like red-scarved Deadheads. The circus itself is just the stage for a battle between two magicians who are themselves pawns of their mentors – a girl trained from age five by her father, a boy adopted near the same age by a rival – in a fight to which they are bound by a magic tie that is never explained. As you might imagine, the two opponents eventually fall in love, an attraction forbidden by the rules of the game they’re unwillingly playing, and one that leads to unfortunate consequences for the other pawns, real people who work in or around the mysterious circus.

Romeo here is Marco, a young boy adopted from an orphanage by the mage Alexander, who takes him in specifically to raise him for this challenge, which may last for years and promises no other purpose for the contestants’ lives. His Juliet is Celia, taken in by her father, Prospero the Enchanter, after her mother commits suicide; Prospero, having no apparent emotional attachment to his daughter, sees in her the gift of magical ability and pledges her for the next challenge with Alexander, a game the two have apparently been playing for centuries. His lack of empathy for his own daughter receives no explanation, nor do we learn about Alexander’s motives – this is merely an academic or philosophical fight over the nature of magic. There’s a battle going on, and the two protagonists fall for each other, which seems to shock Prospero and Alexander because they’re blind to human emotions.

Where Morgenstern excels is creating the setting and background characters that exist behind Marco and Celia and their puppet masters. The precocious twins Widget and Poppet were born into the circus just as it began and grow up over the course of the book into its secret masters, learning much about its running from the inside even as the adults who populate it are largely unaware of its greater purpose – all except the contortionist Tsukiko, whose appearance comes without explanation until much later and whose understanding of the challenge exceeds that of all others. Morgenstern crafts two parallel narratives that don’t coincide in time until the end of the novel, when the battle and romance between Marco and Celia reaches its resolution and the fate of the circus lies in the hands of the twins and their new friend Bailey, one of the circus’ biggest fans.

The conclusion of that central storyline remains a question mark for me as I considered the book after finishing it. To avoid spoiling it, I’ll say that Morgenstern doesn’t do anything too obvious with the main characters, nor does she choose a complete copout where the terms of the challenge are somehow voided so everyone can live happily ever after. There are vague hints earlier in the book of how the romance/challenge will end, but not enough to make that resolution logically consistent with the rest of the novel. As a result, the conclusion sits in that gray area where it wasn’t cheap or cliched, and yet wasn’t clever enough to feel satisfying on an emotional or intellectual level.

The Night Circus does read very quickly, as Morgenstern crafts visually compelling scenes and has a deft hand with the tension dial, creating sufficient narrative greed to help me race through the book. I wish it were a more original work, and that the story lived up to the quality of the settings, instead of feeling derivative and almost unfinished for the way she wrapped up the central plot.

I’m about three books behind on reviews, so I’ll try to post at least one of these a day this week until I catch up to what I’m reading now, which is Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School.

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→ December 23, 2012
→ By

Baldur’s Gate for iPad.

I have new posts up for Insiders analyzing the Nick Swisher and Edwin Jackson signings. I’ll write up the Pirates/Red Sox trade if and when the clubs finalize it and we know all of the names involved.

I’ve never gotten into role-playing games as a genre, even though I think I probably fit the stereotype of avid RPG players, aside from the fact that I never actually lived in my parents’ basement. I tried the pen-and-paper version of D&D in high school with some friends but found it way too slow for my short attention span, and most of the computer versions I tried were too focused on combat (“hack-and-slash” games), which becomes really monotonous over a game that’s expected to take 30 or 40 or more hours to play. I played The Bard’s Tale in high school, but that game was horribly designed (you had to keep fighting the same battles over and over again to make your characters strong enough for the final encounter), and also tried the first of the “gold box” D&D games, Pool of Radiance (bad graphics, some clever subquests, but once I got to the Big Foozle at the end of the game he treated my party like we were the 2012 Astros), but neither of these was good enough to turn me into a fan of the genre.

Baldur’s Gate remains the one exception, and I think the main reason is that its writing is better than those of other games in the genre. It’s a D&D game, both in mechanics and in setting, but contains a fairly well-written central story, lots of dialogue (much of it funny, at least the first or second time around), and enough opportunities to roam outside of the linear core plot (also of the Kill-the-Big-Foozle variety) to give the game some replay value. Most importantly, the game worked: Early challenges are balanced enough to give you a shot even when your character is weak, and later challenges are difficult but don’t require advance knowledge or cheat codes to survive them. I played Baldur’s Gate and its two-part sequel through several times, using different character types to vary the experience slightly from time to time. I’ve tried other games that were supposedly similar, but nothing lasted me more than an hour or so.

A group of the original Baldur’s Gate designers have now reissued the game and ported it to new formats, starting with an iPad versionicon, with good-not-great results. The game looks and feels just like the original, with some enhancements that were either only found in BG2 or that appeared in user-created mods, but retaining the original graphics (looking a little dated), voices, and music (both big positives). Aside from the creation of a few new NPCs, one in the base game and a few available as in-app purchases, this is the original Baldur’s Gate game in every aspect. If you feel a little nostalgia for the original game, you’ll love the reissue.

The story, in brief, is a little cliched for the fantasy genre – you’re an orphan, and you’re being hunted by an unknown enemy for reasons that don’t become apparent until much later in the game, but it turns out you’re something of a Chosen One. That’s all blah-de-blah, but the overlaid story of an iron shortage in the region and bandit attacks up and down the coast give the story some texture beyond the linear who’s-trying-to-kill-me plot that drives a lot of these games. You’ll also get a ton of subquests if you talk to every named character you come across, only some of whom want to kill you or pick your pockets, and the game is loaded with enough non-player characters and special items to allow you significant flexibility in constructing your party however you like.

That said, playing BG on the iPad has its frustrations. Using a touchscreen to play a game that expects the precision of a mouseclick is extremely aggravating – it can be hard to get your party to enter a building or to get a character to attack the right enemy. Sometimes I find my characters are just standing around in the middle of combat while their mates are being disemboweled. (I still don’t know if that’s a game error or mine.) The app crashes way too often, so you’ll want to quick-save (one click on the left-hand bar) as often as you can – and once or twice I’ve crashed while quick-saving, unfortunately. (I also crashed once because I tried to take Boo from Minsc. Squeaky wheel gets the kick, I suppose.) The port didn’t update the graphics, so zooming to try to tap more accurately on the screen just produces a blur. I’ve spoken with one of the designers about the touchscreen issue, which they were already aware of and are working on for future updates. I’ve had to fight certain battles, not just major ones, multiple times strictly because of that one issue – either a character went where s/he wasn’t supposed to go, or I couldn’t get a character to attack the right opponent. I’ve adapted to the latter issue by specifically selecting the weapon (turning its highlight orange) and then selecting the opponent, but that adds up to a ton of extra taps over the course of a game.

The base game app is $10, about the maximum I’d be willing to pay for a port of an older game that is available in a complete four-in-one boxset, with BG2 and the two expansions, for $15 on DVD-ROM for Windows. I’ve played probably ten hours or so in total – I just wiped out the bandit camp, for those of you who’ve played the game before, and don’t act like those little pricks didn’t have it coming – and appreciate the fact that starting and quitting the game is so much faster than it was on CDs when I played it around ten years ago. If it wasn’t so crash-prone, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, but even with that flaw I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it even if I decide not to go after the Big Foozle after all.

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→ August 21, 2011
→ By

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

I’m mixed on the final installment in the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. On the one hand, it was pretty true to the book, including a number of key sequences, plot points, and quotes, without feeling terribly rushed about it. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand well on its own – it is very clearly the second half of a film, not a complete film in its own right – and the pacing that worked fine on the printed page proved very uneven on the screen.

Harry has to jump through specific hoops to get to the final, climactic battle with Voldemort, and J.K. Rowling made sure to get several of his friends in on the action in that melee, although for some reason Ginny was barely present in this half of the movie. Some of those hoops don’t translate terribly well to the screen, or just lacked the necessary contest of the books, but the film jumps back and forth between action scenes and Harry’s more cerebral quests, creating pacing issues but also keeping the film from becoming incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the story. (That is, those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, they’re fighting. Everyone can grasp that much.) The battle sequences often seemed cut off by the need to get Harry back on screen, though, meaning it didn’t have the same intensity as part one, which remains the best of the eight films if we view these two parts separately.

The staccato cuts also mean that none of the actors beyond Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) gets to stretch out much, meaning we get more mugging and less acting from some outstanding performers. Helena Bonham-Carter looks certifiable as Bellatrix Lestrange but is largely left making faces at everyone, while Alan Rickman – as central to the success of the films as anyone outside of the three main characters – might end up hoping for a Judi Dench exemption if he wanted a Best Supporting actor nomination. I wrote in my review of part one that Rupert Grint and Emma Watson had shown substantial growth as actors, but here they’re reduced to bit players, and the development of their relationship earns little screen time and scarcely any explanation.

The movie looks amazing, both in scenery and in special effects, with the initial attack by the Death Eaters on Hogwarts the effects highlight of the series. (That scene was preceded by a necessary yet too-short return for Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall.) Rowling has always been one of my favorite authors for the depth of her descriptions, and the films have lived up to the prose in sights and sounds, including some of the more difficult settings like the goblin bank Gringott’s.

But that Gringott’s scene encapsulates why I found this second half somewhat unsatisfying. It looked the part. Everyone involved in the scene did his or her job. But there was so much time spent on setup and so little on the climax of the scene that even though you saw them escape (and do quite a bit of damage along the way), the escape doesn’t stick with you as much as the setup does. I can tell you how it looked, and the tension of the scene before the betrayal, but what happened after that didn’t have the same power.

I mentioned half-jokingly the possibility of Alan Rickman getting an Oscar nomination for his role as Severus Snape, one of the meatiest roles outside of the big three across the series. The films themselves were not Oscar-worthy, but knowing the Academy’s penchant for honoring successful series as they close, I did wonder if they’d throw one nomination at someone in the film just to acknowledge the series’ existence. (That is, something beyond a technical award or an award for costumes or design.) Rickman would be my choice, since Daniel Radcliffe would have a difficult time cracking the competitive Best Actor field. Helena Bonham-Carter was convincingly crazy, but she’s barely in the movie and her part was too thin to be award material. Then again, they nominate so many films for Best Picture that perhaps the academy will shoehorn Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two into that category as they did with Toy Story 3: we hope you feel like it’s an honor to be nominated, because we have no intention of actually giving you the award.

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→ August 7, 2009
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The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

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→ December 5, 2008
→ By

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

If books were players, I’d probably grade them out on just three tools, plot, prose, and characters (“personalities” if you want to keep on the alliterative tip). The plot must be credible, tight, and interesting, providing the “narrative greed” to which I often refer, that desire to know what happens next (or last) that keeps you moving through the novel. The prose can’t get in the way, at the least; the dialogue must be believable, the sentence structures can’t impede your comprehension of the topic, and if there’s room for clever turns of phrase or literary devices like metaphors, so much the better. There should be at least one character with whom the reader can connect; whether or not that’s the protagonist isn’t a big issue, but I need some sort of empathetic connection with one of the major characters for the book to hold my interest. For example, if the main character is an asshole, he’d better be a funny one, or I’m checking out before Chapter 3.

I rarely run across books that would earn scores of 80 across the board. The Master and Margarita is an obvious one. The Harry Potter books are probably 80s in plot and characters, although even I (a defender of Rowling’s prose) would have a hard time pushing that score above 60. To Kill a Mockingbird is a three-80s book, as are Emma and Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald’s writing might be the definition of 80 prose). At risk of standing accused of slapping high grades on a book too quickly – the literary equivalent of one-looking a player – I’ll add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel to the list.

In the book, author Susanna Clarke has given us two compelling characters, the magicians of the book’s title, the conservative, brilliant, condescendingly paternalistic Mr. Norrell, and the exuberant, handsome, and wild Jonathan Strange, who becomes Mr. Norrell’s tutor and later his rival. Both are richly drawn, with complex personal philosophies of magic and magical ethics, and, in Strange’s case, a marriage to help flesh out his character even further. Clarke is deft at imbuing even her secondary characters with deep colors and rounded edges to make them more real, yet never floods the book with so many personages that the core story gets lost in descriptive language.

The prose is very Victorian-Brit lit, with shades of Austen (remarked upon by most reviewers of the book, it seems) but also the gothic novelists of the time, such as Radcliffe and Brontë. Although the book has its share of laugh-out-loud moments, Clarke’s prose is suffused with dry wit throughout, and she melds it with strong descriptive prose, including countless brilliant images to evoke scenes in the reader’s mind:

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

If any of Jonathan Strange‘s grades was to fall below 80, it would be the book’s plot, and perhaps that is the inevitable consequence of the book’s length (1003 pages in mass-market paperback) and lengthy gestation period (Clarke wrote it over a period of ten years). The story does meander, and many digressions appear to be just that – digressions into character histories or side stories that don’t necessarily advance the plot. Clarke did employ a clever solution, using extensive footnotes to sequester some of her stories from the history of English magic from the body text, helping to speed the plough, and to be fair many seeming digressions end up tying into the main plot once the book heads into its final inning. Clarke’s use of the hoary “prophecy” plot device did exceed expectations both because of how she resolved it and the way she unfolded it in stages, almost giving us a coarse outline for the second half of the novel. If the plot doesn’t get the highest possible score, it couldn’t get lower than a 70; I flew through what is probably the second-longest novel I’ve ever read, and that doesn’t happen if the plot isn’t fantastic.
I wonder how the book will be perceived by the academic community in time – as simply a well-written work of popular fiction, capitalizing on the recent mania for all things magical as long as it’s not too far into fantasy-nerd territory; or as a thoughtful, clever story of two finely-developed characters, meditating on the natures of friendship and on morality, with a fair quantity of nature-based symbolism for deconstructionist-leaning graduate students to analyze to the nth degree for college theses and dissertations with ultimate audiences numbering in the low single digits. I’d like to think that it’s the latter, but there’s a sort of Nichols’ Law at work in literary academe, where the more popular and accessible a contemporary work is, the less it is esteemed by denizens of the ivory tower.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy).

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→ July 22, 2007
→ By

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows full review.

So I’ll do my best to review this one without spoilers, although if you still intend to read the book, you may want to stop here to be safe.

Even after a good night’s sleep, I still think this book was the best of the series. When I evaluate a book, I focus on three things: plot, prose, and characters. I’ve always thought Rowling excelled at prose – more on that in a moment – which propelled the first two books through some fairly simple plots and characters that were a little one-dimensional. Whether it was part of a plan or just Rowling’s growth as a writer, her plots became significantly more involved, with multiple subplots and a number of additional characters getting more screen time. And her characters really started to develop in the third and fourth books, with most of the central characters becoming three-dimensional by books five and six. Deathly Hallows didn’t disappoint in any of these three criteria, although I did find it odd that the character who develops the most is one who’s already dead when the book opens.

Rowling’s prose has come under a little criticism recently, although it’s possible that this has been going on all along and I just missed it. (To see what I mean, Google “Rowling clunky prose” and see how many hits come up – it’s almost as if one writer used that phrase a few years ago and every blogger on the Internet has picked it up.) The CNN.com review said “Rowling has attracted much criticism for her often clunky prose;” I couldn’t disagree more: Rowling’s prose is straightforward and descriptive, evoking images in a way that no other writer I’ve encountered is able to do. When I read a well-written book, I “see” the action in the book, almost like a movie playing in my mind as I read. The clearer the movie, the better the prose must be, and I have never run into an author who produces such incredibly well-defined images with her prose. That doesn’t necessarily mean she spends the most time on describing the scenery – I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens has that title sewn up – but that she strikes a perfect balance between descriptive text and active text. I understand that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are more literary, but for readability, Rowling destroys Tolkien, who hails from the Dickensian tradition of giving us too fine a level of detail. Clunky prose gets in the way, slowing you down, throwing you off of the story, whereas good prose lets the story stand for itself. A good story is like fresh fish or a high-quality steak: You don’t foul that kind of food up with a heavy sauce or with overrich side dishes or with less-than-fresh ingredients, so why foul a good story up with prose that gets in the way? You want clunky prose, go read James Joyce or Henry James – if you can stomach it. I’ll stick with Rowling’s because it gets the job done.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot for fear of introducing spoilers, but I’ll speak a little in generalities. In the context of the entire series, I don’t think Rowling could have done much better. The resolutions for the main characters worked for me, although I echo one commenter’s post on the prior thread about the epilogue being a bit too sparse; the deaths Rowling promised/threatened were reasonable, and clearly a few of the “good guys” had to die for the plot to have any semblance of believability, even within the fictional world.

The action sequences were some of Rowling’s best, with none of the muddled details and running about that made book five my least favorite in the series (due to the entire sequence at the Ministry of Magic towards the book’s end). What really worked for me in book seven, however, was the way Rowling uses a couple of major anecdotes and a few recurring characters to give both the global view of what’s going on in the wizarding world and the local view of what’s going on with Harry in the search for the Horcruxes.

She also works heavily with a few major themes – including the related themes of disillusionment and of faith – making this probably the deepest of the seven novels. Harry learns some unsettling details about Dumbledore’s past while he’s struggling to formulate a plan for locating the missing Horcruxes, leading him to wonder about the wisdom of continuing to carry out the mission Dumbledore assigned to him before his death. Harry’s relations with Ron and Hermione and the relationship between those two vacillate for much of the work as the quest goes less than smoothly and the three spend an inordinate amount of time together in uncomfortable conditions. I’ll be honest – I’m not reading these books for their deeper meaning, and while I thought I sensed some allegory about faith and trust, I was too busy enjoying the story to worry about any of that.

The seventh book’s character development is middle-of-the-pack for the series, in part because the three major characters were already pretty well developed by the end of the sixth book. Ron does end up maturing during the seventh book, but the point where he loses faith in Harry wasn’t much of a surprise and I felt like I’d seen it in an earlier book. Harry himself shows some growth towards the end of the seventh book, although this was a necessary element for the plot to reach its denouement. The character who develops the most is Albus Dumbledore, who dies at the end of book six, but whose character and background were never fleshed out previous to this book, with him serving as more of a benefactor and protector than as a full-fledged character. What you see in the back half of book six is a taste of what Rowling offers on Dumbledore in book seven. We also get some more insight into Snape’s character, but like that of Dumbledore, it’s by flashback, rather than by the characters developing as a result of the action and dialogue in the book’s present. The fact that the Big Three don’t develop much, and that the necessary direction of the plot means we don’t get to see as much of the better secondary characters (the various Weasleys, Luna, and Neville), made the lack of character development and the very heavy focus on Harry and Hermione the one big disappointment for me, although I’m obviously very invested in those characters and still ended up completely engrossed in their actions.

As I mentioned at the top, if a book has good plot, clean prose, and compelling characters, I’m in. I’ve been hooked on Harry since book one and if anything, I’m disappointed that the series is over, and the characters I know so well have seen their stories come to a close. (I did spend today in my typical post-Potter melancholy, which always hits me after I finish one of the books for the first time.) But before I let the subject drop, let me throw one story at you about what that first Harry Potter did for me.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Rowling’s work from people (including Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt) who say that because the Potter novels aren’t real literature, they’re not going to lead people to read the classics or to otherwise up the quality of their reading materials. I can only speak to my own experience, but for me, that is absolute bollocks. I was a bookworm when I was younger, but my tastes were typical teenaged-boy – science fiction with a strong dose of countercultural books like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and any number of books by Vonnegut. The “great books” forced on me in high school bored me to tears, and as soon as I got free of those requirements, I stopped reading them altogether (which isn’t to say I read everything that was assigned to me, either). When I got into my 20s, I more or less stopped reading fiction for pleasure, period, reading nonfiction when I wanted a book for a long flight.

In the fall of 2000, my wife picked up the first two Harry Potter books, tore through the first one, and gave me the old, “You have to read this!” line. So I took it on a business trip to California and started it on the plane ride home – and I was hooked. In 2001, I read the next two books, but also found myself getting back into the reading habit; I discovered P.G. Wodehouse and started perusing used book stores for the first time in a few years. I read Goblet of Fire in January of 2002, and ended up reading 75 books that year, including Moby Dick, Silas Marner, and The Sound and the Fury. Since I read that first Harry Potter book, I’ve read over 300 books, hitting Tolstoy, James, Dostoevsky, two Brontës, Fielding, Hemingway, more Faulkner, Stendhal, Hardy, Nabokov, Morrison, Eliot, Foster, Defoe, Proust, Flaubert, and the entire catalogs of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The universal statement that the Harry Potter novels will not lead anyone to read the classics is wrong. J.K. Rowling reminded me that I love to read, and I will forever be grateful to her for that.

Indeed, I think that the criticism of Rowling’s work is a bit of literary snobbery, a reflection of the dismay that the exclusivity once offered to those who put the time into reading “great books” is losing currency in a world where great storytelling trumps metaphor and symbolism and all of the other things that our English professors told us were important without ever telling us why. Reading the classics has become its own reward, rather than a prerequisite for graduating from Eton before moving on to Oxford and then a job in the City, and our definition of “classics” is likely to change as well, with verbose authors like Richardson and Trollope sliding from view while new voices emerge from outside the Western canon. I won’t deny that there is tripe to be found in the fiction section of every bookstore in the United States, but lumping Rowling’s output with that tripe is unfair to her and to those of us who have loved her work to the point that it kindled – or rekindled – a love affair with the novel.

UPDATE: JC Bradbury weighs in on the Potter book – and its possible effect on baseball attendance over the weekend – on the Sabernomics blog.

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