Updated with more space before the spoilers. And stuff.
The plan had been to buy the book at 8:00 yesterday morning and read. I got sidetracked a bit by the need to help a friend move, so I didn't hit the readathon until roughly 1:30, at which point I started playing catchup with my housemates.
Wire-to-wire time: 10 hours.
Actual reading time, subtracting a trip across town to drop the boy at a friend's, and pauses every four chapters until everyone was at the same spot: roughly 8 hours.
Total pages: 782.
Sustenance: handful of chips, teriyaki noodles with tofu, Breyer's Light ice cream, an Oreo.
Spoiler alert!
Crucial details revealed below!
*cough cough* you've been warned.
Deathly Hallows was okay. I got confused about the ending, as usual for me and every book in the Potter series. The unusual bit was coming into the book knowing that somebody important was going to get whacked. The former part-time housemate, who is an expert on all things Potter, warned at the outset that J.K. Rowling had said two major characters would die. So, imagine my surprise when my Dead Major Character counter ticked over to the three with a couple hundred pages left. And then four, then fivesix in quick succession. The woman killed off people left and right. Oh yeah, said the former housemate, she said at least two people would die. Fabulous.
Lupin? She killed Lupin and Tonks? What the hell? They were my favorites (!), and their deaths did exactly squat to advance the story and everything to totally piss me off. And Colin Creevey? That was just plain mean. Snape's murder was too abrupt to be satisfying, and his inevitable redemption left me kinda deflated, delivered as it was via the recovered memory in the Pensieve. I don't know. Maybe Rowling got tired and figured the best way to do it would be through the book equivalent of a flashback show. Same with the whole Harry and Dumbledore in... Purgatory? King's Cross Station? The light at the end of the long tunnel? Too much hurry-and-cram-it-in revelation. The two chapters coming on each other's heels felt like a cheap out after so much grand storytelling.
Even so, I realized I respect Rowling the most for creating nuanced characters that, rather than being one-dimensional stock good and evil children's book figures, were all deeply flawed and thus accessibly human. At the end of the Deathly Hallows, I am coming to believe Snape is the ultimate hero of the series. His choices made all the difference, and were far more difficult than the actions Harry believed were not choices so much as destiny compelled by his place in history.
Rowling's ability to spin such a complex tale and keep it consistently compelling and well-written through seven books and however many thousand people borders on the unreal. Final verdict on book 7? I don't have a regular rating scale, but let's call it... five Oreos. A nice handful. The complete series? It gets the whole package of Double Stuf.
Bye, Harry (and Remus, sniff sniff). It's been amazing.
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