Potter rerun

I just finished rereading the Harry Potter series. It took under a month, and most of that was spent reading two of the book (Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows). And the thing that really blew me away was how incredibly tight the series is. The old adage is that if you see a gun in Act One, it's going to go off in Act Three. That was just all over the place. The smallest thread from a book very well might show up two books later. I remember reading Goblet of Fire and being bored with the whole house elf subplot, but the actions of house elves--responses to how they were treated--were crucial in Phoenix and Hallows. The author of a textbook we first see in Sorcerer's Stone is a point in Hallows. Even the Time Turners from Prisoner of Azkaban are specifically destroyed in Phoenix so they can't be a plot point later. Reading it, over and over I'd encounter a name or a curse or an incident from a previous book and it was just exactly where it needed to be.

It's just really good to see. Rowling obviously plotted these things out incredibly before setting pen to paper for Sorcerer's Stone. There are stories of people asking her questions about some random character, and she'll give a detailed answer. It's clear that her knowledge of this world and the people in it extends far deeper than what she included in the books.

Which makes the epilogue of Hallows that much more frustrating. It annoyed me then, it annoys me now. I should not have to have read in an interview with Rowling a week after the book came out what Harry and his buds had chosen for careers. According to Rowling, "It would have been humanly impossible to answer every single question that comes up." Well, that's true. But I wasn't asking the names of Harry's great-great-grandparents. I just wanted to know his job. That information is WAY more interesting than the names of his kids, and Ron and Hermione's kids, and even Bill and Fleur's kids. Good Lord, woman. We learn that. And we learn that Neville is a professor at Hogwarts. Yeah, that isn't what I wanted to learn in the epilogue. Harry and Ron revolutionized the Auror Department? That's awesome! How? What did they do? Even just a hint would be better than them seeing each other at Platform 9 3/4.

(I won't get into Harry and Ginny. Let's just say that I don't feel it in the books or the movies. Even a little.)

Still, it's hard to quibble with a few missteps when literally thousands of pages are so good. I mean, I found it hard to put the books down, even having read all of them before--some of them quite a few times. Kudos to you, Ms Rowling, and I look forward to you releasing the Potter encyclopedia.