From the queue.

“1:00 in the morning on the East Coast & I've been waiting for Harry Potter since 7:30. They've just called my wrist band color. But I hear that Barnes & Noble is total chaos, whereas we actually have an orderly line, so hopefully I'll have my book soon. Apparently, it's only 1/2 an hour from where I'm now standing. I wasn't going to post until I got this but whatever. So, anyway next post will be when I have the book in hand, later.”

At last!!

“Well, after seven--no, nine--years, I finally hold in my hands the final installment of Harry Potter, and I'm very sad, and I can't even bear to read the entire table of contents. Which is unusual, 'cause usually I read the whole table of contents, which is how I figured out that Dumbledore died in the sixth book. And, yeah. I don't know. It's quite the scene in the bookstore; people in ball gowns and costumes. There was this one Druid guy with a skull and a stick and then he put like a paper crown on the skull? It was weird. And it's 1:22 now, so--yeah, if I'd been smart I would have gone here at 2 in the afternoon when I saw the people queueing outside Barnes & Noble. The cops are here too actually; I guess they're keeping public order. But, yeah, I don't know. Wow. I feel a strange reluctance to read, actually. But--oh god, my back cover is bent. That's kind of sad. Whatever. Anyway. It's mine, it is mine. Yeah, okay. Off to the 24-hour Starbucks with the units 'cause apparently we're going to read through the night, or at least I am. And we're having Three Buck Chuck at home. So, yeah. I don't know. Potterdammerung, someone called it, and it makes me sad. Sad, but also excited, because I want to find out what happens. But whatever. Yeah. Okay. Off to read Potter. Bye.”

All is true.

The sun has risen over New Jersey and I finished the seventh and final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, about ten minutes ago. I disagree with Michiko Kakutani about "clunky chunks of exposition," I thought this book slithered along with a fleetness and an inevitability probably not matched since Goblet of Fire, which is now dueling in my heart for the position of "my favorite of the lot" with this final entry of the saga.

Without revealing too much, I will say that all the little odd details that seemed telling and memorable throughout the first six volumes came home to roost in this seventh, although a disproportionate number seemed to be from Sorcerer's Stone, which seems only fitting. At several points I was laughing outloud at how bits of memorable verbiage from that first book were made real in this last. In the beginning was the word, indeed. I am pleased with the high number of guesses and wagers I had made with myself that turned out to be true, although on at least one I was completely wrong. And on at least one important question, everyone was right, and everyone was wrong.

I don't think I've ever read a book that has made me sob like this one did. Just--sob. I have wept at books, yes, but I have never sobbed like I did for this one: Sob at the thought of these characters' fates and of how they met them, and also because it is over and I have loved every minute of being a Harry Potter fan since I first bought that first book nine years ago because from the first words it was impossible not to love these characters, even the most broken and damaged among them. But then, the ones who love us never leave us, and nor do the ones we love. All is well.

P.S. After years of JKR saying she would never write about the Potterverse again, recently she's changed her tune and said, "Well, maybe," and in my opinion the pessimistic could take the end of this volume as leaving the door so wide open Hagrid could walk through it without bending. We'll see. I'm not sure what I think. Maybe I think what I thought after finishing Sorcerer's Stone: "Good ending. She could totally write another if she wanted to."