One Day before His Eighth Birthday

This morning, one day before his eighth birthday, Miles finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He started reading The Philosopher's Stone back in August. We estimate that he read about 60 percent of it himself, with 40 percent being read to him by me or Andrea.

Now he wants to read Philip Pullman. There's an interesting interview with Pullman here.

Rereading in England; rereading Eugenides

Others can say whatever they like about these survey results; I'm going to say this: it is fantastic that three of the top ten re-read books in the survey of readers in Britain are Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. Let's hear it for Jane and the Brontës, authors of some of the greatest novels ever written. Admittedly, I re-read Jane regularly, but I hope to get to Wuthering Heights again sometime soon (which I have read at least twice), and someday I will re-read Jane Eyre as well.

Right now, though, I am re-reading Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, a book I was hugely impressed by when I first read it a few years ago. Here's what I wrote back then in an email recommending the book to friends:

"A book for Deadheads, hermaphrodites, runaways, people born in Detroit, people of Greek descent, San Franciscans, hitchhikers, lovers of silk, owners of Cadillacs, people who went to private schools, smugglers of bootleg liquor, sexologists, anyone who has ever declared bankruptcy, directors of horror movies, Ted Kennedy, future actresses, owners of topless bars, clarinetists, Stanford grads, Berliners, installation artists, career diplomats, anyone nervous about second dates, signalmen, people who were finally able to beat their Dads at ping pong, would-be kidnappers, obscure objects of desire, and everyone who has ever used a thermometer to try to influence the sex of a baby."

It's still all true, but it's not a great second read: the plot is not rich enough to drive the book on a second read (that is, JE's plotting does not stand up to Rowling's), and the proliferating details, so hugely entertaining on a first read, just seem like distractions on a second read. On a second read, in other words, JE's project of combining mainstream fiction with sophisticated post-modern fiction does not seem to come off as well as it did the first time around.

That said, I will finish it, since I have to mark a thesis on it that a student is handing in at the beginning of next month!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

26 hours after starting the book, I just finished it. I did not read without stopping: I slept, made several meals, and took Sara for a walk. I played cards with Miles, read the newspaper, and changed at least one diaper that I can remember. Andrea even got to read a bit, too.

As Ron said in The Half-Blood Prince: "None of us could've guessed ..."

Here are my two favorite bits:

"There it was again: choose what to believe. He wanted the truth."

"'Of course it is happening inside your head [...], but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'"

I don't think those two lines give anything away. :-)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"'None of us could've guessed Snape would ... you know,' said Ron."

That's the beauty of Rowling: we can toss ideas around about what will happen in Book 7; some people have even read all six published volumes with fine-toothed combs looking for hints and clues; many theories have been developed (some of which might be right in parts)—but when it comes to down to it, we can pretty much count on one thing from JKR: she will surprise us.

I have now finished rereading all six volumes, and I am ready for July 21. Perhaps chapter one will be about Bill and Fleur's wedding ... on July 21? :-)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

A few notes on The Order of the Phoenix, which I finished rereading today: 

1) Dolores Umbridge's punishment of Harry (having him magically etch his "lines" into his hand) is the first Kafkaesque moment I have discovered in Rowling: think of "In the Penal Colony." Would Umbridge implode if she inscribed "Be Just" on her own hand? 

2) Surely Neville's misnaming of the "philosopher's stone" as the "philological stone" in chapter 16 ("In the Hog's Head") is in part Rowling's slap in the face to her American publisher for having been so stupid as to change the title of the first book for the American edition. What does Neville say in the American edition instead of "sorcerer"? 

 3) This has to be up there with my favorite sentences in the whole series: "Hermione was going skiing with her parents, something that greatly amused Ron, who had never before heard of Muggles strapping narrow strips of wood to their feet to slide down mountains." That's been my joke about skiing for decades! 

4) Snape tells Harry: "Only those skilled at Occlumency are able to shut down those feelings and memories that contradict the lie, and so utter falsehoods in his [Voldemort's] presence without detection." So Snape is skilled at Occlumency, right? That would mean he would be able to lie to Voldemort without Voldemort's realizing it. And that would mean Snape could be a double agent. (I know he's a twit, but for some reason I want him to be a double agent. I want him to have actually killed Dumbledore, but to have done it in order to trick Voldemort. My pet theory.) 

 5) But then there's Ron's theory: Snape intentionally did not teach Harry Occlumency well. In fact, he opened Harry's mind to Voldemort. Harry repeats this theory to Dumbledore at the end of the book, who discounts it. (An additional point: rereading the books with the end of book six in mind makes Snape an incredibly complex character!) 

6) One point of contact with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: all the characters have their own individual Patronuses, just as the characters in Pullman all have their own characteristic daemon. 

 7) It's Snape's memory, of course, but Harry's future mother was right about the fifteen-year-old James Potter: "But you're just an arrogant, bullying toerag, Potter." I know bullying when I see it, and what he did to Snape was pure, unadulterated, nasty bullying of the first order.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

My second-favorite line in the Harry Potter books: "I like a healthy breeze around my privates, thanks."

In The Goblet of Fire, two other things worth noting: Here, again, Rowling is excellent at introducing things early in the book in such a way that I, at least, did not notice on a first reading that something was being set up for later use. I'm thinking of the portkeys, which are so integrated into the story of the Quidditch World Cup that they do not cast any shadow of foreshadowing, and when Rowling needs the portkey at the end, she just uses it, without needing to explain a thing.

Secondly, this, after Harry tells Dumbledore that Voldemort used Harry's blood to rejuvenate himself: "For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore's eyes."

I know, I just implied that Rowling does not foreshadow, but that seems like a pretty major teaser to me!

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"A day may come when you will be very glad you saved Pettigrew's life," says Dumbledore to Harry at the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (That was the line that stuck with me when I finished book three earlier this month, as part of my project of re-reading all of HP before volume 7 is published in July.)

In the light of that line, it doesn't surprise me that the Wikipedia page about Peter Pettigrew says that "J.K. Rowling has hinted that Pettigrew will make additional appearances in the final novel, and it is speculated that Pettigrew will repay his life debt to Harry."

But what this really reminds me of is Gandalf's response to Frodo when Frodo asks why Gandalf did not kill Gollum (here quoted from reading Lord of the Rings twenty-five or more years ago, so don't make fun of me if my paraphrase is off): "Many that die deserve life. Many that live deserve death. Who are you to deal out death in judgment?"

The first time I read The Fellowship of the Ring, I asked my Dad about that one, and he gave me a smile that, in retrospect, I found out was knowingly ironic, and he said something like, "Gollum may still have a role to play." (My Dad read Tolkien in the late fifties, long before the books become popular; in fact, he checked the books out of the Yale University library when he was there as a graduate student in mathematics!)

The other thing I rediscovered on reading volume 3 of HP is something I noticed about Rowling's skill with plot when I first read that volume. When I was about halfway through the book, something came to mind about the first two books: the exciting passages at the end of each book had depended on explanations of how particular bits of magic worked—and the explanations were always introduced earlier in the books, but without the slightest hint that any foreshadowing was involved. Hence, the exciting passages never had to be slowed down with explanations.

Right after I thought that, though, I came to the passage in Prisoner of Azkaban where the action stops and characters begin explaining things (the scene in the Shrieking Shack). It seemed to me that Rowling had just slipped up—but of course I read further and discovered that that scene was not the climactic scene at all, but a false ending, which made the barrage of explanation part of Rowling's own conscious toying with suspense. It was at that point, at the latest, that I ceased to feel any "high-culture" qualms about considering Rowling an excellent writer.

Thomas Hardy

Two interesting reviews of Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy have appeared recently: by Adam Kirsch in the New Yorker and by Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books (not available on-line). Kirsch's appeared in the January 15 issue, and I noted the following to comment on at the time:

"His novels, and especially his poems, describe a world from which God has already absconded, and for good. Because this is still the world we inhabit today, he remains one of the most vital and relevant of English writers—more modern, in some ways, than the modernists who succeeded and disdained him."

This was not my experience reading Jude the Obscure a few years ago. I came to it after having read all the Harry Potter novels that were then available. One effect of this was that I wanted to read some nineteenth-century novels—for the plots and subplots and all the social details (the kind of narrative J. K. Rowling writes). First, I read A Tale of Two Cities, and then I read Jude. I loved both, but I was also struck by how much Hardy's novel seemed trapped in a particular time period: it could not have been written much earlier, and its concerns were no longer important within a few decades after its publication. Jude's exclusion from higher education on class grounds is, happily, no longer an issue in England or the United States, and the impossibility of divorcing Arabella is also a dated problem. I feel closer to Stephen Moss's comment: "Hardy's mindset and the moral vision of his characters are alien to us."

Kirsch's review also contains a lovely quotation from Hardy: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

"And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed."

Well, it's February, so in keeping with my plan to read one HP book every month until the new book comes out in July, I recently finished HP and the Chamber of Secrets. Little did J.K. Rowling know when she wrote the above that it was her own book that people would be causing people to run into doors.

I was surprised to find this little bit of morality at the end of the book, which I surely noticed before but had forgotten:

"It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities."

Another spin on talent and effort? It also reminds me of this article by James Surowiecki, with its wonderful conclusion: "culture is what you do, not who you are."

Yeats again

Here's another case of William Butler Yeats as an intellectual reference point, this time in an NYT review, by Lee Siegel, of Mugglenet.com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7:

'Either way, this wonderfully enthralled, believing, open book makes me hope that Rowling ends Harry’s story, when she does, with Yeats’s tender lines in mind: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”'

The first chapter of the mugglenet book is also on-line. Perhaps the most fascinating bit in it is that, two months before Rowling announced the title of the book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), the authors predicted that the title would be Harry Potter and the Hallows of Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

In anticipation of the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on July 7, I decided to re-read the first six volumes, one per month. As the publication date gets nearer, I will stop paying attention to the world, so as to not have the plot of the last book ruined for me by reviewers or other inadvertent betrayers of surprise information. And I finished my January reading a few days ago, The Philosopher's Stone. As a result of reading it, I have resolved not to read the HP series again, as I realized that I do not want to have to read about Draco Malfoy ever again. That's too much like being bullied in junior high.

My favorite line in the first book is still: "Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you."

(It's cool that there is a detailed Wikipedia page about this unpublished book.)

(And now that I have written this, I have been unable to find on-line confirmation for the July 7 publication date!)

The Neighborhood Bully

Back when George H.W. Bush talked about the "line in the sand" after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I finally understood why I had always disliked him: it was because he was a bully.

Like father, like son, then: the morning after the election in 2000, a student asked me why I disliked Bush so much, and since I knew she was a fan of Harry Potter, I told her it was because he was a bully, just like Draco Malfoy. She immediately understood. :-)

It's nice to see others coming to the same conclusion; here's Paul Krugman on GWB:

"At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job."

And here's Joan Didion on Dick Cheney:

"The personality that springs to mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet."