After dodging the reviews and internet coverage, I got the last of the Harry Potter books on Tuesday night. I finished it yesterday after work, coincidentally just as I was struck down with a severe allergy attack. Yessir, it was definitely the pollen and not anything else, so just shut up and pass the kleenex. Sniff.
The person who described JKR's prose as "sturdy" was right on the money, but this book had fewer clunkers, overall, and I enjoyed certain scenes immensely. I've bitched in the past about JKR's reliance on punctuation to inject drama, what with the endless exposition broken up by em-dashes or ellipses, and there's certainly some careless copyediting, as there was in the previous book's first edition. I hope that "comprised of," which started a short-lived spasm in my left proofreading muscle, will be corrected in the next edition, as "the site of [person]" was in Order of the Phoenix.
But the truth is that I inhaled the book in one glomph, as I did each of the preceding books. The story caught me up, so part of my mind was thinking twitchy editing thoughts but the majority was actively irritated if I had to stop reading for any reason. I hope that Rowling follows through on her promise to create some sort of appendix to the books to explain what happened to all the surviving characters, as Tolkien did for LoTR (Rings spoiler: rocks don't fall, but nearly everyone dies). There was too much to fit into one book. Maybe that's cheating, but who cares?
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2 comments:
She just needs a little Strunk and White. Omit... needless... words... and -- ellipses. And don't misplace your modifiers, or you won't be able to find them later.
I can't think of an author who must be more relieved to have the book done, though, and I imagine that she wasn't hot on rereading it for heavy copyediting. Why do a big edit on the most profitable writer of the age, after all?
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