All right. I’ve had it. I can’t read this drivel. I quit. I went an entire year finishing every book I started. I read Ulysses, I finished The Brothers Karamazov in five days, I laughed out loud while finishing up The Odyssey, but I cannot subject myself any longer to the fifth Harry Potter book. Ugh. It’s just such drivel. These are not mythical or magical books at all! They are just school stories and damned petty ones at that. The magic in them isn’t magical, it is mere technology disguised as magic. Manufactured flying brooms? With features that sound like they belong in a car commercial? Dull. Bureaucracy? Seriously? A “Ministry of Magic” with memos and sleazy office politics? It just shows how few kids actually have any taste. I can’t believe these made so much money. For a more complete damning of them read Harold Bloom.

I own The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Order of The Phoenix in hardcover. These books are in great-even gift-shape, perfect really, with nicely Brodarted dustjackets, so if you want them, let me know. If more than one of you wants them I’ll invent some kind of literary duel.