No Spoilers Here

I finished reading the last Harry Potter book on July 31, which by coincidence is Harry's birthday. He would be 27 this year in real time. I think.

Books 4,5, and 6 I read the day they came out, (I read 3,1 and 2 in that order in 1999, the year I discovered the series) but I put 7 off for a while. One of the chief attractions of these books is that you can't stop reading them -- you desperately want to find out how they end. "Harry Potter and the HBP" in particular ended on a note of great suspense, yet I found myself postponing the moment I would actually start the last book. Because then they would be over, you see. I thought I might feel sad. Or disappointed. I wasn't sure the author could really pull together all the various plot elements. In particular, how to resolve all the contradictions of Snape? And the mysterious correspondence between Harry and Voldemort? What was that all about?

Now that I am done, I can say I am not sad. Or disappointed. She made it work. She pulled it all together.

Now I think it is time to go back to the far more ambitiously historical series that I started reading earlier this year, the Patrick O'Brian books. I got to "The Fortune of War," in which Aubrey and Maturin spend most of their time landlocked in Boston, and then took a break. Not out of lack of interest but because I did not want it to be over too soon. Now I think I have spent too much time away from the early 19th century. It's time to go back.