Before the Bloodbath

In visual art circles, you'll sometimes hear a critic or viewer dismiss an artwork by saying that it doesn't depict beauty—as if that were the abject goal of all art. In his Washington Post column, Ron Charles dismisses the Harry Potter series because it doesn't afford an intimate relationship between the reader and the author, a criteria for literature that's as myopic as the belief that the plastic arts must engage beauty. Here's my defense of Harry Potter as an episodic drama that is in an important sense about the reader's experience. The whole fun of it is figuring out whether Snape is good or evil, you know? And everyone reads these books exactly because everyone else is reading them—that's the other great fun to it.

Catherine and I just bought a few bottles of Felix Felicis to add to the stocks of butterbeer and The Drink That Must Not Be Named. (The liquor store doesn't sell bloody-mary mix, so no Polyjuice Potion.) With the final book in hand, however, neither of us can start reading the damned thing. Right now, I'm still reading book six and fine-tuning my case for Snape's goodness, the Hallows staring at me from the coffee table.

I'll get to it. In any case, the more wizards die, the better it'll be.