Asymmetrical Information

Ever see "Wonder Boys" (2000) with Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, Frances McDormand, and Katie Holmes? It's a great film.

The Douglas character is a creative writing professor who published one successful novel. He is unable to complete his second novel despite working consistently. His manuscript is already several thousand pages, and he isn't even half done.

The Holmes character, one of his students, reads some of the manuscript. She tells him that he didn't make any "choices" (i.e. cuts or edits) and goes into considerable detail about silly things such as the lineage of horses.

Maybe Rowling didn't know what to do with the main characters and got lost in trying to pad the book.

Are you and I reading the same book?

Maybe I'm just a fanboi - but I enjoyed the heck out of it. Finished it this morning at 6:30.

"the sheer amount of extraneous chitcat, lavishly highlighted minor characters, and painfully cliche description"

Funny you should mention Dickens...

and she didn't even get paid by the page

Spoiler alert!
Little Nell does die.

In all the time I've been reading asymmetrical information, I don't think I've ever disagreed as much as I disagree here. It isn't journalism where the point is to convey information. People read Harry Potter for the sake of reading it. They enjoy the stroll. Top say that there's extraneous information or that a lot of pages are used to describe minor characters is to say nothing very useful.

To say it's boring (which I guess you do with the cliche point) is one thing. De gustibus &c. But the rest? For my part, I'm glad I didn't miss out on the 125 of the first 200 pages you'd have cut.

Whenever I hear about The Old Curiosity Shop, I'm always reminded of Oscar Wilde's line: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

Harry marries Ron. Who'd a thunk it?

If anyone wants to know how it ends without buying the book, just check Wikipedia.

Frankly I had the opposite problem. A whole bunch happens right at the beginning, and then there's a few hundred pages with almost no secondary characters, and lots of darkness and moping. I loved the ending, although there were too many expository speeches leading up to the climax. And I want more of the epilogue.

Ha. Try reading Jean Auel. Clan of the Cave Bear is good. I really enjoy Valley of Horses. Mammoth Hunters gets wearing. Plains of Passage - wow that seems long. And redone and redone. Shelters of Stone, oh my, not as much on grass types as Plains or Mammoth Hunters, but not the character and story of Valley of Horses.

That will give you feeling for 'How much of this do I really need?!'

I like epics. Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), Sheepfarmers Daughter (Elizabeth Moon), even young adult series like Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. Rowling isn't that original, she tells a better than average story, and strings it out in an acceptable fashion. I have books I re-read way more often.

No Spoilers here, but having just finished the book I'd suggest everyone stop at pg. 749 and put the book away.

She pulls a Spielberg with the ending and tacks on one chapter too many.

-kd

I couldn't agree with kd more. The last bit was almost painful in its schlocky crappiness. Not to mention that 749 pages is far too many for everything that comes before it.

I tend to agree with the poster who said it was the journey that was pleasent. I don't really expect this one to be particularly good, I expect it to answer questions and give us closure and I think it's doing it nicely.

Also, I think that the last chapter was written for all of the people like me, we who are completely incapable of reading a book from start to finish but, instead, like to know what happened so we can enjoy the journey stress free. The last chapater did exactly that, without revealing anything about the journey.

A question for the Elite of HarryPotterdom: Can one read this last book and get a decent feel for the previous six that doesn't leave one floundering on a Grand Bank?

Or is it like going directly to The Return of the King and wondering why everyone was so upset over this guy called Boromir?

More the latter, I'd say. It's the last part of a long story, not a self-contained story in itself. While there are explanations of what's been going on, I think it's geared more to remind ongoing readers than to clue in people entirely new to the world and characters. Similarly, lot of the moments with various characters won't mean much to a reader who's never met any of these people before.

But, falkoyn, you could read the first book and the last book and figure out everything important that comes between.

I'm not so sure that's true Michael. There are lots of characters, Lupin, Tonks, Moody, Serius, Fleur etc. who get introduced in earlier books but no one knows during the first book. I think that the last book would seem pretty hollow, although you would get the general gist of everything, if you only read the first and last books.

The huge Potter publicity machine managed to get me to tune into about 15 minutes of one of the movies, several times. For some reason it felt like I was watching a poor imitation of "Young Sherlock Holmes." Rowling struck gold, and really knows the marketing game...I dunno if he dies, but I bet theres another book down the road...probably around the same time the Soprano's movie hits the theatres, give it 2 or 3 years.

Wonder Boys is also a pretty good book by Michael Chabon, though I don't recommend any of his other stuff, despite critical acclaim, it's mostly for the Potter crowd.

Just finished "The Road", despite Oprah's props, I recommend it. About half way through my first Archer, False Impression, and it's pretty good.

I'm with Jane all the way on this issue. At the very least the last three books could have been cut by half. I don't think it is an inclination to pad. JKR just seems to have fallen in love with the idea of creating this huge structure and has gotten away from the idea writing good individual novels. This led to really bloated and meandering novels in five and six. Since the last two novels did most of the setup work, the final novel is more directed at advancing the plot or exposing character. One of the best of the seven. Still, it would be better a better novel at half the length. Any cool ideas she had to cut could be published as short stories - maybe free on her web site.

If you want to see what she is like with an editor, check out the latest movie. I think the compression really helped the story dramatically. It helped give a more balanced picture of Harry's emotional state (angry teen - anxiety about approaching war - feelings of isolation- sexual insecurity) that was obscured by all the subplots of the book. And the relationship between Sirius and Harry was an important focus (and well played by the two actors). (Standard buddy movie Hollywood fare, but law of comparative advantage says go with what you do well.)

And for those of you who think she could have done without an epilogue - go watch the Sopranos. It's a kids book for heaven's sake. Embrace the schlock.

Sopranos movie? God, I hope not. As they showed with Band of Brothers, far more stories/books belong on the screen as a miniseries rather than a single blockbuster. The same is true of LoTR - trying to cram all that story in to a scant 3 hour movie is silly. People should be pressure-tested before going into a theater for that.

My two biggest problems with it are (a) Deus Ex Machina every five minutes, including numerous never-before-seen magical powers and spells and things, and (b) yes, the characters aren't always right, but you'd think they'd have learned to trust each other after 7 years of grand adventure. Quit moping and ignoring obvious clues while angsting!

I can't say that I agree that the 7th book, or any of the others, should have been shortened. I think Rowling's strength is being able to weave primary, secondary and tertiary characters into all parts of the story, to the effect of creating a more realistic little society and storyline. So she goes on a bit to get them all in there, but I think the payoff to the reader is worth the extra verbiage.

The movies do a good job of transcribing the books without too much information loss, but I still perfer the books, because that extra bit of "extraneous" dialogue and action creates a better story. Plus, it's a kid's book, so it's not like I'm wading through hard material. It's still a lightning fast read.

Rowland has reached Tom Clancy turgidity about 5 volumes ago. Just look at the seven books lined up on your bookshelf. It's like a snake swallowing an ottoman. The tail at the end is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a slim 309 pages. Somewhere in the middle, where the volumes reach 700 pages plus, the snake figured out its blunder, but too late. Now it's addicted to down stuffing.

My wife and I have always read the books aloud to each other, a process that makes it painfully obvious how repetitive and clumsy the prose has become in the overstuffed sequels. I feel like the Dad in The Princess Bride wondering what happened to the "good parts version."

Almost as soon as Rowling began drawing out some of the mysteries set up in the first volume, it became clear that her fantasy world has no internal consistency, that almost all of the characters are idiots (villians included), and that Grawp is just Jar Jar Binks writ large.

Still, Rowling knows how to sketch out a character, set up suspense, deliver a plot twist, and hit you over the head with a climax. There is a good parts version in each book, if you're willing to throw away a few weeks of your life in finding it.

Grawp is Jar Jar? I thought it was Dobby...

-kd

Now I know how I'm going to read the Harry Potter books... via Wikipedia. I read the first and lost interest during the second. I tried starting it a couple of times but never succeeded in getting very far.

I've read a number of long series of books that would have been helped by having a companion encyclopedia published along with them... the author could cut out some of the exposition from the stories and readers could look up minor characters, places, etc... Making the encyclopedia would be a good exercise for the author, too...

Three out of three coworkers who finished the book agree: the forest scenes around pp. 250-400 were too damn long. At least Tom Bombadil enlivened his pointlessness with song.

The last thing I read that I thought really needed pages shaved off was "The Historian"...

"At least Tom Bombadil enlivened his pointlessness with song." As I recall the first book of the Lord of the Rings, the Tom Bombadil chapter wasn't totally pointless; the Nazgul would have had the hobbits within 12 hours if they hadn't lucked into Bombadil's protected valley. It broke their trail, and gave them a chance for rest and a few hot meals. However, Hemingway would have handled it in five sentence or less, because Bombadil really wasn't even in the same world as the rest of the story. It would have made a nice little story in itself, but the movie producer was quite right to cut it. Likewise with "The Scouring of the Shire", which was sort of a first of two epilogues in the final book, and was cut from the movie. I would like to see short films made from these two chapters, but a series of three 3 or 4 hour films is quite long enough without adding anything unnecessary.

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