Harry's Death

Hot on the heels of J.K. Rowling's ridiculous announcement that people will die in the last Harry Potter book, Ros Taylor at the Guardian has produced several hilarious scenarios for Harry's own death. My favorite:

Harry embarks on a gap year teaching quidditch at Durmstrang, the German school of magic. The trip starts badly after his attempt to divert a Ryanair flight away from a cloud of Death Eaters is misunderstood by the Muggle authorities. Extraordinarily rendered to a detention camp run by Draco Malfoy and an army of house-elves, Harry spends months being tortured with Blast-Ended Skrewts. He manages to liberate the elves, but as they quarrel about whether freedom is worth the effort, Malfoy tips off the Muggles and Harry vanishes on board a dragon somewhere over the Atlantic.

We'll miss you, Harry. As for Rowling's need to blab about the book: first off, her characters have been dying left and right, so what's the news? Second, why can't she keep her mouth shut and just let people read the book? I'm not saying she has to pull a Pynchon and learn to disappear completely, but really, just keep quiet.

Quite the opposite on this side of the Atlantic, where it is nice to see that Harper Lee has published for the first time in many years, though why she did so with Oprah's magazine is a bit of a mystery. I love that she still loves books, even in this age of technology, as it gives me hope that I too can hold on to the paper and glue for years to come.

In other book news that I can quickly link to on the Guardian website, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife is now buried beside him, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's hometown has wisely rejected an attempt to rename the city after the fictional Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. All seems right with the world.