Out of the Frying Pan

Well I finally got to and finished the fourth in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Here’s my sparing comments about the first, second, and third books.

I said the last book was a decent leap in size by going up 100 pages. Well this one makes a leap from that one of around 300 pages. And you can tell it. I don’t just mean the physical size of the book either. The characters, descriptions, plot development, and critical thinking have all improved greatly in this one step. Although I will say the book didn’t have to be this long, the additional environmental development was enjoyable. There is still weakness in the storytelling, but taken as a series it is working out well.

I want to read the rest, but I only have one more book before I am caught up with the movies. I hoped they might finish the movies before I finished the books, but that doesn’t seem likely. I don’t usually hold books and movies to the same light of scrutiny. They are different media and require different handling. The first three movies weren’t too far a departure from the books, but this one, with its length, you really start to see where they had to compromise when they translated it to movie form. There is far more obviousness in the movie, but that again is a limitation of the media. When an author wants to call your attention to something it can be accomplished by merely including it in the text. Then the author can fill in other details to hide, but not completely obscure the important data. Movies are filled with so much visual information not included in books that the pertinent visual information can be lost in the low signal to noise ratio. So maybe I’ll get the next one around the time of the movie. Then I probably won’t be able to wait for Deathly Hallows.