And so it ends

I received and read the last Harry Potter book yesterday. It took me only about 7 hours for a 759 page book. Finally I have something to thank my mother for. She didn't like me reading. I was supposed to be out in the fresh air when all I wanted to do was escape into a book. So the only place I could read was the bathroom and even then there was always an impatient 'what are you DOING in there' if I took too much time. I've often wondered what she thought I was doing. Cooking dinner? Ice skating? Finding a rent in the space time continum m(sp?). No. I was "gasp" READING.
So I learned to read quickly, gobbling down the words like a glutton.
And so I read Harry Potter yesterday.
Some observations.
I do not know how the author could keep up the quality of her writing throughout so many books. Too often I read a series where I'd get to book six or whatever and lose interest in the characters or the whole series and I'd stop reading them. Sue Grafton's 6th book did me in, as did the one by Patricia Cornwell where the medical examiner bungies into a neuclear power plant as if she was some James Bond Wannabee.. as if medical examiners actually DO that. I wont' even go into the last book of hers I read where this young hunky guy in his early twenties had the hots for two women in their 40's. As if... and as for the flesh eating bacteria that killed off a husband.... now that's fantasy for you. And yet J K Rowling managed to keep up the quality, managed to kep her characters as separate people (after awhile my characters tend to look alike) and while she didn't write down to her juvenile audience she, nonetheless, wrote in a way they could understand while capturing adult readers as well.
But what I like the best about the Harry Potter books, and something that warms my soul, is all the hoo ha about, of all things, a book. Paper and ink and print and words.... a book. No movie star or sports team or latest release. A good old fashioned book, one that you can turn the pages and feel the paper beneath your fingertips and smell the smell of the paper. A book. Hooray for her. She deserves every single penny she's made off the book, small recompence for her sharing her world with us. God wouldn't I love to just sit down and have lunch with her some day.
I'm sorry the series is over but there is something that makes me even sadder and that is the fact that magic, at least Harry's magic isn't real. Oh how I would love a world where it was. And when real life the mundane life gets to me I can always escape for a time into hers.



By the way.


I'm giving nothing away. No spoiler from me.