[MRM]

I quite like the Harry Potter books. The first one was very well written. It had a tight, deceptively simple style that was very easy to read but conveyed complex plot twists that were just plain fun to follow. The second one was almost as well written and was just as much fun to follow the plot twists, although by now you knew that there would be some final battle between Harry and the bad wizard, whose name escapes me. I know, some fan I am.

Anyway, the rest of the books have also been good, but you can tell she no longer has a serious editor and that she has final say in the editing process and she has fallen in love with her own writing. The books have ballooned in size and she now uses ten words to convey what she used to express in one.

But the stories are still fresh and fun and they keep you racing to see how it ends. I very much respect her as a writer, even though her later books are a bit bloated.

By the way, Star Wars was a conscious recreation of the WWII air action movies of the 40s and 50s (Indiana Jones was a nod to the same era of adventure film) and the WWII airplane action movies were conscious adaptations of the old cowboy and Indian westerns. Just change horses to P-51s and the P-51s to X-Wing fighters and you get the drift.