Read Harry aloud --

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Borrow a neighbor's kid if necessary, but read Harry aloud -- all four books, but especially the fourth and best: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire -- all 734 pages of it. Your audience needn't be a kid. You aren't reading aloud as an act of kindness to someone who doesn't know how to read. You are reading aloud to share the experience and hence enjoy and savor this unique work to its fullest. Just make sure that it's someone who has lots of time available -- you won't want to wait for that person to be free before reading ahead, and it is important to move ahead together, and that you have plenty of time together between readings to speculate about what could and should happen next.

Yes, reading aloud is slower than reading to yourself; and, aloud, at a pace of 30 pages an hour, it will take you about 24 hours to read it cover to cover. Yes, you will be tempted to race ahead, tempted to skim to get to the resolution of this problem and the next one. But reading aloud, you won't be able to skim, and hence will be forced to enjoy every last word of it, and you'll have someone who knows just as much as you do, and nothing more, with whom to share the pleasure of talking about the characters and what's likely to happen next and why.

Give the characters their own unique voices. The rhythms that the author has given to their speeches, and the care with which she has delineated their perspectives and personalities will make that relatively easy. Don't just read -- perform, while experiencing all the surprises of the narrative for the first time.

Maybe you'll become addicted to this way of enjoying stories, and nineteenth-century-style, wind up gathering as a family in front of the fireplace each evening to read the next chaper of Dickens or Mark Twain.

Have no fear -- you won't be bored. While the characters are children, the plot and the magical world in which it unfolds have all the richness of a Shogun. You'll find it quite easy to identify with not just Harry, but also his closest friends, Ron and Hermione, as they try to make sense of the bizarre world they find themselves in and as they struggle to sort out all the clues and evaluate who they can and should trust to survive and succeed as individuals, while saving their world from the forces of evil.

In this volume, as in the ones that came before, when the moment of crisis arrives, Harry and his friends have to depend on their own resources. They can't rely on any adult. They can't really know for sure who is on their side and who might be working for the evil Voldemort. And in this one, at times, Harry is very much alone, isolated even from those friends.

Part of that isolation comes from the fact that they are now older. Each book covers a year at the wizarding school of Hogwarts. So Harry and his friends, who in book one were age ten, are now fourteen, and boy-girl relationships and emotions and resulting self-consciousness and competition and jealousy begin to play an important role, and for them are at least as hard to understand and cope with as the spells they need to learn for homework and the devious traps set by arch-villain Voldemort and disguised allies.

And in the main plotline -- the struggle with Voldemort -- no matter what Harry does, no matter how courageous and brilliant and lucky he is, no matter how much help he gets from friends and from adults, no matter how well or how many times he saves his world, there is no guarantee that he will get any credit for it, that anyone, outside his core circle of friends, will believe his story. So what you might have expected would resolve all conflict, becomes just the start of the next episode and the last chapter is "The Beginning," which is actually the happiest possible ending to such an amazing tale. Let's just hope it doesn't take another full year for J.K. Rowling to write and publish the next one -- that's simply too long to wait.

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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