Harry Potter and the Inevitable Blog Post

So I popped open my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at about 5PM on Saturday and finished it before going to bed at a perfectly reasonable hour. Ever since then, it's seemed like I should do a blog post on the blog, but I think I turn out not to have a lot of interesting things to say on the subject. I'll second Ross' recommendations of these spoiler-containing posts by Russell Arben Fox and Eve Tushnet.

What's more, like everyone else I enjoyed Megan McArdle's piece on the poorly sketched economics of the Harry Potter universe. My general feeling is that the Potter books fall along a pretty symmetrical quality curve, starting off okay, then getting better as the series' ambition grows, but then getting worse again as the series becomes more ambitious than J.K. Rowling can really pull off. The storyline of Hallows winds up calling for a level of big-picture world-building -- not just the economics of the wizarding world, but the politics and the international relations, too -- that's far off from Rowling's core strength of offering rich micro-level detail.