If you're wondering why there haven't been any profound thoughts or mathematical erudition coming from the Electron Blog for the last week, it's because I have been caught up in reading the seventh and mercifully the last book in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series. I am not a huge Harry Potter fan but I do like the fantasy world that was made up for the books, and I wanted to know how the story came out. So I have had my nose in the book for days, any time I was not working or sleeping, just like millions of other readers all over the world.

Even though there is still about 200 pages too much wordbulk in this book, it rolls along quickly, with a seemingly endless series of perils for the hero and his friends. They get into one deadly situation after another, and always escape through some sort of magic which sounds as if Rowling is making it up as she goes along. The magical system gets more and more elaborate, like a computer program overloaded with extra features and bug-patches. Meanwhile, there is a proliferation of magical objects which the characters have to find and either destroy or save: stones, jewelry, wands, goblets, swords, and whatever else pops up with power. I lost track of these around page 400. You need a scorecard. I'm sure that someone in the fan world has already made up a Harry Potter concordance, let alone a cheat sheet.

If I were off on a summer vacation, I would not have escaped this book, because I would have it with me as vacation reading on the proverbial beach or porch. It certainly has plenty of slam-bang action in it, a perfect piece of escape fiction. And even better, there's a clear sense of good versus evil in the book, and an earnest lack of cynicism and irony. The best parts of the story are the moral compromises made by good people in order to be most effective against evil.

I have no desire to make illustrations from any Harry Potter book, and no one has asked me to do so. As with almost every fantasy writer in English, the author gives an excessive number of her magical people red hair, which for decades has been the standard marker for "special status" and "giftedness." It's enough to send me back to the hairdresser for another dye job, in hopes that I will get magic powers if my hair is red enough. But fortunately the main female character, who has plenty of magic, has good old brown hair. Rowling's female characters, no matter what color their hair is, are some of the best I've read in fantasy fiction. They aren't all sexy babes, and not only that, some of the most fascinating of Rowling's women are middle-aged or even older. When was the last time you saw a really cool older woman in a fantasy TV show or comic book? As an aficionado of world-building, I missed a couple of very important elements in the Harry Potter world. There seems to be no religion whatsoever in the "Wizarding World," even though the magical school observes Christmas and Easter. I suspect this was a deliberate decision on Rowling's part so that it could be enjoyed by people of all faiths or no faith. She just leaves it out. She also doesn't say much about politics and royalty, other than the politics of the "Ministry of Magic." Is the "Ministry of Magic" the entire government of the Wizarding World, or do they have another government to deal with non-magical issues? Is there a royal family and a Queen in magical Britain? Again, the author probably left this alone rather than lose readers by mentioning controversial stuff.

I won't be taking a long summer vacation this year, due to work obligations. I might dash off for a weekend sometime in August, I'll see how things go. But at least I am through with Harry Potter 7 and can get back to stuff that is more important, such as the sine and cosine of an angle in the unit circle that has as its terminal point (-2 sqrt21, 4).

Posted at 2:47 am | link