Well done J.K. Rowling

(this story contains no spoilers)

After valiantly declaring my intentions to ward off unwanted media spoilers by purposely ruining Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, I found myself at a crossroads Saturday night as I held the book in my hands.

It was a now or never moment. I knew once I cracked the binding I needed to read the final chapter immediately lest I turn to page one and fall under Rowling's spell one last time.

Fortunately I turned to page one.

I started reading Harry Potter seven years ago, as suggested by my younger brother and sister. My memories of reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone during a harsh Boston winter are vague, but I was immediately hooked.

Considering the tremendous pressure Rowling faced in delivering her finale, I think I would have been happy with a good book. That she delivered a great book is all the more incredible. And as I read The Deathly Hallows I savored the little things - Rowling's descriptions of the Weasley brood and Luna Lovegood's weirdness, the author's wit and humor, and above all the banter among Harry, Hermione and Ron. All the while I recalled my experiences reading the entire series.

Not long after reading The Sorcerer’s Stone I ordered the second and third books. We still lived in Beacon Hill, and one afternoon I came home from work to find a UPS note waiting for me. A moment later the big brown truck turned down my street, roared down my street and turned the corner. I raced down the narrow brick sidewalks to catch the truck, and I did, and the delivery man fished through the back of the truck to hand over my new-found treasure. One of these books traveled with me on a daytrip to Providence, Rhode Island, the other accompanied me on a train trip to Washington D.C.

A few months later we unexpectedly moved to Seattle. I had never been further west than the Twin Cities. Seattle was a foreign city to me. The first book I bought was Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. Reading the Goblet of Fire was like having a local greet me, and it remains my favorite book of the series.

Flash forward a few years and I picked up Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Madison. I recall waiting for the midnight release party at Canterbury Books to begin at the Terrace with my wife and sister. We ran into an elementary school friend of mine, a good omen.

And then two summers ago in Fort Collins, I picked up Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at another midnight party not long before we moved to Denver. Which is where I picked up The Deathly Hallows at the Tattered Cover, and the final secrets of the Harry Potter universe were revealed to me.

It's fitting that as my wife and I crossed the country and back on our odyssey that Harry went with us. And as a fan - not a fanatic - I can only congratulate J.K. Rowling for creating such a wonderful universe and reading experience.

The Case of the Missing Books

The Case of the Missing Books: A Mobile Library Mystery
by Ian Sansom

Israel Armstrong is your other-than-average man about Londontown; at least he'd like to think so. He knows a great cappuccino when he encounters one, loves art house flicks and can speak at length on Dostoevsky.

But can he run a small, Northern Ireland public library? Especially when that library happens to have been shuttered for years, is now on wheels, and, most distressingly, all the books have disappeared? It'll take more than a bibliophile's knowledge of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to recapture the missing library in a hilarious whotook'em that relies more heavily on Sansom's memorable characters than the mystery that envelopes them.

At a time when the literary anti-hero is most often a leather-clad, drinking and smoking, but ultimately big-hearted rebel, the passive aggressive, less than gifted Israel Armstrong is truly enjoyable precisely because he is so utterly unlikable.

Sansom also succeeds in depicting modern Northern Ireland without succumbing to the specter of the Troubles. His junk food munching bureaucrats, small town bullies, knowing baristas and seductress journalists humanize the region in a way that a more overwrought narrative might not. The effects of the Troubles exist in these characters, but they do not dominate their quotidian lives.

Thankfully, my sister passed The Case of the Missing Books on to me, which, after a slow start, I delightedly sunk my teeth into. With a baby at home my recent fiction reading experiences have been filled with false starts, frustration and boredom. For some reason nonfiction has been easier to hang with while sleep-deprived and listening for the tiniest sounds emanating from the nursery. Fortunately, book two of the Mobile Library Mysteries, Mr. Dixon Disappears, is available in the States next month.

On the web:
Ian Sansom for your information
Ballykissangel

Should we talk about the weather?

When we moved to Colorado from Wisconsin somewhat unexpectedly nearly three years ago, I turned to the literature of the West to help me understand just where it was we now called home. In the ensuing years I have read several Wallace Stegner novels, reread My Antonia and tried to delve into Katherine Ann Porter. Contemporary novels Augusta Locke by William Haywood Henderson and The Willow Field by William Kittredge, along with the wonderful Fort Collins journal Matter, have also helped me get my bearings.

One quote that resonated with this transplant in particular comes from Stegner, who bluntly informs us that when living in the West:

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

For the most part I agree with his assessment, it is a far different environment in Denver and Colorado than the upper-Midwest I grew up in. Unfortunately I have not gotten over the green, not yet, and I do not expect to any time soon. And so, with Denver in bloom it seemed natural that I would pull my rarely used copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac to read up on Wisconsin in March.

Writing in the 1940s, Leopold's March entry is a love letter to geese. He opens by telling us:

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."

Though Leopold's writing is like home cooking for me, I couldn't help but wonder how much the state's climate and environment has changed since he wrote those words, and since our awakening to the effects of global warming.

Oddly enough, my former hometown rag, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story this weekend that answered my question. The Journal Sentinel reports that Leopold's daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, has taken up her father's mantle in chronicling the natural events of her father's old stomping grounds. The article reports:

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Take, for example, the Canada geese. Leopold wrote that they "tumbled out of the sky like maple leaves" in March.

But records by his daughter show that migratory geese are returning home more than a month sooner - now arriving about Feb. 19.

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Obviously this is a grim prognosis. I am not comfortable preaching about the consequences of global warming - I need to get my own house in order - but I can say that when you encounter its effects in an individually familiar setting, the reality becomes all the more stark.

...

Whatever the future holds, today we witnessed a beautiful spring day in Denver. The view from here: