Anything said in retrospect of J.K. Rowling's momentous Harry Potter novels would risk underestimating, as opposed to the common rule, the momentous and against-all-expectation momentum these books rode on when dumped on the bookshelves, strictly short-term. I remember myself perfectly well, walking into a store in Uppsala in 2000, finding a stack of the second book - then just translated into Swedish, with the wonderful - and far less vexing than the first - cover by Tiden's Alvaro Tapia, as well as the original letter font, and being told by the nice lady that, as of that date, I couldn't have one.
Being en route to Santorini (as I persist in calling it; if Mussolini be pleased to hear the word, who am I to deny that?) and with no ability to get a Swedish copy until our return, my mother insisted. And got through. As the wheels were turning to make contact with the tarmac on my journey home, I very memorably pushed through the scene where a shrieking, palsy-ridden Tom Riddle is lost in thin air as the first of many his horcruxes is destroyed by a yet again mortally wounded bespectacled boy of twelve. The first novel I mostly remember for jogging and spooling through in competition with my dear cousin Lotta - though not skipping, except for reading that short, fateful first sentence of the last chapter, "The Man With Two Faces", perhaps the best part of the novel, I must admit, and the only one I didn't quite enjoy reading (the fifth being a chunk of slough, but so was Godfather II the first time). The second through sixth, as far as I got before Tom Törnblom - "Thornflower", a surname being almost Harry Potter-adequate in its Englishness and brusqueness, and revenge I got years later, if somewhat imbued by the whims of Stephen King - ran across the stone-covered Hogwartsian hallway and cried out the words signalling the demise of Dumbledore, and by whose hand (I wonder, now more frequently, whether he actually got through to the momentous chapter which outlined whose hand, or rather words, guided that venomously self-loathing uttering of Avada Kedavra) it was. Then there was silence, and as I discovered many other things - the English language, for one, which I hadn't really tasted throughout those first six years - while Harry remained on the shelf.
And then came the year 2009 and the sixth film. I had missed out on the fifth, in part a demonstration of which I had already, if just as passively, expressed against the more profound novels, but soon came to regret (and regret still, if not for the narrative or storytelling qualities of Mr. Yates, great as they may have been already then, and whose faults seemed to be identical to those of the one-off Mr. Goldenberg). Not for the sixth installment though, which for indescribable, inexplicable reasons I looked very much forward to watching, and did watch - somewhat troubled, as the only film where I had not, painstakingly, not fully read - with two dear friends and a great candy bowl which I believe I still possess (the contents being, through force of cinematic endurance, vanished as through magic, with other things). It was a slightly transcending experience, or at least enough for me to recommend it to a drove of people, including the (perhaps superior) novel on which it was based, and which had - I must admit I felt the gist of this, and lived it fully as I turned those pages to a conclusion already told, at least twice - resurrected Harry from the half-dead spun into my mind, quite more alive than he had ever been. Upon discovering this, I was only too late, in my judgment at the time, but precisely two years late (as I had, I guess, for the English edition regarding the first book) to acquire and read the final of finales, and in an experiencing only passably able to rekindle and appreciate the fact that it remained unspoiled but for the predictions of my mind, and oh... what a conclusion. Perhaps not so much as I expected, but in hindsight I can say I truly enjoyed it, and had the pressure been on my shoulders to conclude this adventure, and preferably quickly, with the gazes and desires and letters of the world adding to that pressure, I could only and justly have felt quite alright at penning those last words (not of the epilogue, which I fully believe preexisted them, in a reflection of that other writer, George of the lands in the West, where Catelyn and Robb were proclaimed dead before the party had even ceased).
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