“What to do when your young cast hits puberty, one of your older stars dies, your original director drops out and the next promised book is going on a year overdue? …(Author JK) Rowling is still working on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is said to be longer than Goblet of Fire by a chapter and isn’t due to hit book stores until next year. Considering that, when Order of the Phoenix finally is published, it will be three years between books with two more still to come, by the time the seventh book is ready to be movie-fied, (actor Daniel) Radcliffe could be playing Dumbledore.” Yahoo! News

Apart from the problems of the actors’ aging, part of the charm of the series’ original conception, I thought, was the idea that, with a book a year each chronicling a year at Hogwarts, the characters and

the readers would both grow in realtime. That’s unfortunately shot to hell now, with two successive three-year intervals between the second and third and the third and fourth books. Not only will the readers grown up with Harry Potter, but it is beginning to look as if early readers like my son, with whom I’ve read each book aloud as it is released, will be too old to be interested in the conclusion of the series, if Rowling ever gets there.