As far as I know, Harry Potter has just finished his fourth year at Hogwarts and Lord Voldemort is making his comeback ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," right).
This isn’t fashionably late to the party. This is showing up after it’s ended with people passed out on the couch and a few stragglers watching whatever is on “Comedy Central” at 2 a.m.
For Potter, the party started back in 1998. It was a strange time: The swing revival was in full bloom, “The Simpsons” had defied the odds to make it to a 10th season and we even had — get this — a white guy in the Oval Office.
Thanks to the kindness of Daily Republic reporter Heather Ah San, I’ve recently become deeply invested in J.K. Rowling’s book series.
I’ve never read it. I had always wanted to, but never taken the time. Heather’s tremendous enthusiasm helped. She still hopes that her acceptance letter to the wizarding school Hogwarts is on its way, but perhaps her owl carrying it or the Muggle (aka human) post made a mistake.
We agreed that I should start with the books first, owing to the notions that A) The book is always better than the movie. The exception that proves this rule is “The Godfather.” B) Doing it the other way prevents my imagination from running wild like an untamed unicorn.
Considering the last book will soon have been on shelves for five years, reading them now is like arriving at Plymouth Rock after the Mayflower Pilgrims were there for generations. Everything is new and exciting to me while to the rest of the Muggle universe, Potter’s fate is settled. Heck, the last movie was released last summer.
This isn’t a terrible thing. Much like when I watched the entirety of “The Wire” and “Battlestar Galactica” during the course of a few months in 2010 after both series had concluded, a person gets a different view of a serial work when devouring it as parts of a whole instead of waiting for each next installment. Both were awesome and I got the opportunity to put the pieces together in a succinct way.
In particular, “Galactica” shined when absorbing it not as seasons or individual episodes, but, really, as 75 installments in one epic saga. “The Wire” had tiny elements, which were easier to remember when spacing out the key details over a few hours instead of a few months or years.
This can be a problem when consuming serialized works as they’re released. Fans of 63-year-old George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” book series (left), which has made it to the small screen as HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series, have waited years in between books. “Feast of Crows,” the fourth installment, arrived in 2005 after a five-year wait and the next book, “A Dance With Dragons,” hit shelves last fall after a six-year wait.
Another DR colleague, Photo Editor Brad Zweerink, said he planned to re-read the predecessors to “Dance” to refresh himself. This is necessary when someone takes more than half a decade between books.
Due to his age and the fragile nature of life, fans speak in hushed tones about their fear that Martin’s final two books in the series, “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring,” may not come to pass. Martin is somehow hip to this, assuring his audience that he’s told key plot points to the makers of the HBO show in case anything happens to him.
The “Song of Fire and Ice” is another party to which I will arrive late and, much like Potter, I will read them before I watch them.
It’s a strange thing to know that answers to both series are already out there. I’m like Potter himself, learning charms and spells to deflect the attacks of others.
There have been setbacks. There’s an entire Wikipedia site devoted exclusively to the Potter universe. When merely visiting Harry Potter’s profile to find out when he was supposed to have been born, I accidentally saw him listed as “married.” Pfft.
Coming after the party has ended colors a person’s judgment. They see the whole rather than the parts in a way the person who made the trek and hungered for each little piece can never see or appreciate. I will see the whole of the Harry Potter tale in a way others can’t because I didn’t have to wait years between novels or films.
I’m pretty sure that Harry is going to ultimately survive — his name is in the title of all seven books and eight films, after all. And he gets married.
Hopefully, an owl doesn’t deliver Heather’s Hogwarts letter before I finish borrowing the books from her.