If you’d like to know what hapens in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without having to read two hundred pages worth of camping-related program activities, there’s a slightly snarky scene-by-scene summary at Gibberish in Neutral:
Yaxley: HAI I IZ DEATHEATER NOT APPEARING IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. YOU HAS NEWS?
Snape: Of course I have news. I’m an evil genius of unaccountable intelligence.
YAXLEY: THAT IZ GOOD. WE B FRENDS?
Snape: Come on, Lord Voldiething is waiting.
YAXLEY: LOOK MALFOY BE HAVING ALBINO PEACOCKS LOLOLOLOLZ!
Also, and here is a sentence I thought I’d never type, I basically agree with Megan McArdle (writing before the big release):
The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?
The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling’s work, seems to be “she didn’t think it through”. The details are the great charm of Rowling’s books, and the reason that I have pre-ordered my copy of the seventh novel: the owl grams, the talking portraits, the Weasley twins’ magic tricks. But she seems to pay no attention at all to the big picture, so all the details clash madly with each other. It’s the same reason she writes herself into plot holes that have to be resolved by making characters behave in inexplicable ways.
There’s some element of the econ version of humorless dorkitude in this, and the same complaints can be applied to other, better works (Where do Sauron and Saruman get the food for their giant orc armies? For that matter, where does anybody in The Lord of the Rings get their food from?). But McArdle has put her finger on some of the things that I mean when I say that the Harry Potter books, for me, do not reward deep thought.