Current location:	work
Current mood:	happy
Current music:	the blow
Entry tags:	finished, harry potter, history in the making

I finished HP (don't worry, no spoiler)
I've been reading the harry potter series now since 1999 or so when Prisoner of Azkaban (3) was on the shelves.  It might even have been when the it was only chamber of secrets.  Now about 8 years later i have finally finished the series. 

As i've come to the end of the series, maybe for the last 2 - 3 books or so, i've been continually blown away at how much everything ties together.   J.K. Rowling must have had the plot laid out for all seven books since at least the second book, but i'm guessing she had it from the start.  As details from the early books that had slipped by almost unnoticed twist the plot in book seven (while my brain was straining to remember) i am so blown away with her genius.  I doubt that future generations will fully understand this - i felt the 8 years between when i started and when i finished the series... each time waiting for a new book for ages and then devouring it in a few days.   I know that she had to have this planned in detail for 10 years.  But that will be much harder to understand when all the books appear in front of you at the same time (how many of you know how long it took Tolkein to write the entire LOTRing series, or C.S. Lewis to write the entire TLTWATWardrobe series...).

The other thing that really blows me away about Rowling's writing is that she really manages to capture the age of the narrator in the language and complexity of plot.  Each book is succesifly more complicated than the last.  This includes the plot, the descriptions, and the decisions that must be made by the characters (and how they view those decisions).  Its something i've never seen before in any other book i've read.  Its genius- especially because she is so successful with it.

Now that i'm done, i suppose i will reread all seven in a row at some point.  As my books have become dispersed to different borrowers over the years, i'll probably wait until a christmas gift pack 'special edition' of the entire series comes out or something to do so.  But i'm going to have to get used to life without the excitment of another Harry Potter on the horizon... an excitement i've been living with since 1999.  I thought i was really going to miss the characters, who i can't help but think of as friends (i mean, i've been with them as they grew up, through the good times and the bad right?) but now that the series is done, i realize that rereading it a second time will be just as good as the first time.