Quick intro

[MARK SAUNDERS]

No: HPFGUIDX 34719

I'm 39, from the UK, and discovered Harry Potter after seeing the
documentary on JKR shown on BBC1 on 27th December. I needed a book to read
to occupy a 9 hour rail journey the following day, and TPS was it. I've
since read the other three, finishing GoF yesterday evening!

I think the books get better each one JKR writes. She has an easy writing
style, an eye for detail, and a good instinct for the structure of a story.
Her confidence in her ability to write and story-tell has obviously grown
through the years, as can be evidenced by the increasing page-count with
each book. I think the way she has obviously given a lot of thought to the
planning of the books as if they're one long story is a major strength. This
forces you not to ignore things that appear on first reading to be throwaway
scene-setting characters or events, in case they prove to have some bearing
on the story later on. The obvious one is Scabbers being just a fairly
useless rat until the end of PoA, when he's revealed to be something else
entirely, a character that then goes on to be quite important to events in
GoF, and probably beyond. This makes the books exciting, because almost
anything can happen. In the next book, for example, the reason why
Dumbledore has insisted Harry go back to the Dursleys instead of just
staying with the Weasleys may prove to have some greater significance.

I thought GoF, in particular, was a masterpiece. JKR maintains a quite long
and involved story, with various sub-plots, across a fairly large
page-count, and resolves all the necessary issues, while leaving us with a
cliffhanger setting the scene for the politics of the Harry Potter world in
the next book.

That said, I do have two bones to pick with JKR's writing style. Firstly,
her insistence on using a capital letter for the word "muggle". By my
understanding, you only use a capital if a word is a name of some kind.
"Muggle", surely, is just JKR's word for "non-magical human", so it should
be all lowercase. She, correctly, uses the words "witch" and "wizard"
without the capital letter, because these are words meaning "magical human",
so why does she insist on using a capital M in "muggle"? I've noticed she
does this with a few other words of her own creation, too. Is it perhaps
something, as a friend suggested to me, to do with retaining copyright on
the word(s)?

The other problem I have is with her use of punctuation, mainly within
dialogue. JKR doesn't always seem to know when to end a sentence. For
example, on page 81 of GoF (assuming you're reading the same paperback
edition as me!), when Arthur Weasley introduces Ludo Bagman to the gang,
this is how JKR punctuates it: " 'Everyone,' Mr Weasley continued, 'this is
Ludo Bagman, you know who he is, it's thanks to him we've got such good
tickets-' " Any English student knows that that actually should be
punctuated like this: " 'Everyone,' Mr Weasley continued, 'this is Ludo
Bagman. You know who he is. It's thanks to him we've got such good tickets-'
" (You could also use a colon after "is" as an alternative to a full
stop/period). This is because Arthur Weasley is making three different
statements, related certainly, but individual, and therefore deserving of a
sentence each. This one thing in particular spoils my concentration when
reading a lot of JKR's dialogue, because I find I'm automatically trying to
correct her use of commas!

That aside, though, the books are all excellent. They contain believable
characters, good, convoluted plots, and are both impossible to second-guess
plot wise, and make compulsive reading.

I can't wait for the next one - whenever it appears! :)

Mark S (UK).