tfl: The Flatiron Life

Like a lot of the commenters at Asymetrical Information, I’m just not sure I understand the adult excitement surrounding Harry Potter these days. I thought the first book was great and was fairly excited about the second and third, and then I sort of lost interest. Jane Galt has a humorous take on where J.K. Rowling may have lost me:

For example, I cannot be the only person who found myself unconvinced, to the point of queasy embarrassment, by this passage at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

“But did you not wonder why it was not I who explained this to you? Why I did not teach you occlumency? Why I had not so much as looked at you for months?”
Harry looked up. He could see now that Dumbledore looked sad and tired.

“Yeah,” Harry mumbled. “Yeah, I wondered.”

“You see,” Dumbledore continued, “I believed it could not be long before Voldemort attempted to force his way into your mind, to manipulate and misdirect your thoughts, and I was not eager to give him more incentives to do so. I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was - or had ever been - closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me.”

This could have redeemed only if Dumbledore had continued:

“You realize, Harry, that this makes no sense. For one thing, I have been coddling you for years, despite having known all this, until I—suddenly and for no apparent reason—decided to drop you this year like a hot rock. Too, you might ask why, if I was so worried, I had allowed you to learn many so things that it would be incredibly useful for Voldemort not to know, such as the fact that a cadre of wizards is plotting against him. Why, in fact, the one secret I kept from you is that Voldemort can read your mind, when presumably this is, by definition, the one thing that Voldemort certainly already knows.

But had I displayed the sense God gave a mussel in this situation, you would probably have acted more like a normal teenager, and less like a severely brain damaged refugee from The Dirty Dozen. And then there would have been no book. So I am sorry that you were upset, and Sirius had to die, but publishers get very shirty when you slip your dates.”

I confess, I am afraid to find out how Harry Potter ends. It seems all too likely that Harry, and th rest of his band of merry madmen, expire–not through the evil agency of Lord Voldemort, but through forgetting to do something basic, such as breathe.

I’ll get around to reading them all some day, they’re just not at the top of my reading list.