Harry Potter 7 - Finis coronat opus?

The seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter bildungsroman has been unfurled. All in all, I spent around 9-10 hours reading today. I might have a permanent crick in my neck, but that's all right, I've read through the end without being confronted by spoilers. Apparently some guy was handing out copies of the last chapter yesterday morning downtown. I don't understand why you'd put time and effort into something like that. Is the perverse satisfaction worth copying and standing on a street corner for hours? Admittedly, I thought this video from the HP6 release was pretty funny.

Jen put together an arrangement of the Harry Potter theme and played it from the clocktower at midnight. When I took a break from reading this afternoon, I was really thrilled to check my email and hear this. We'll never know for sure, but I'd bet that someone out there was passing by and was tickled by the bells emanating from the tower.

My two cents: some sections in the middle dragged or were otherwise awkward, but this is perhaps a factor of the characters themselves being unsure of their direction. Also, the epilogue was terrible, embarrassingly cheesy and trite. The book does explore some facets that I had never given much thought, like Dumbledore's character and Snape's history. Perhaps predictably, characters are never fully saintly or malicious, but merely human. And naturally, they seek and find some measure of redemption, which makes them all the more endearing. Except for Voldemort, of course. Actually, if Voldemort had shown twinges of remorse, that would have made the book more interesting by far. I never quite understood how he evolved into a power-hungry satanic figure, other than natural disposition and his so-called inability to love.

At any rate, I am newly inspired to incorporate more frequent everyday usage of terms such as "git," "wonky," "ruddy," and "queue."