It’s the hot question all over the literary world. And not just the literary world, either. Everywhere you go—bookstores, supermarkets, coffeehouses, subway stations, restaurants—everyone is asking the same thing: What will Mike and I write about next?

But after that, if they have time, people sometimes wonder a bit about how the last Harry Potter book is going to turn out.

The seventh and last Harry Potter book is coming out in July, and the blogosphere (I love that word, don’t you? I always imagine it as a big purple bubble) is abuzz with speculation. (It’s a big buzzing purple bubble. Say that three times fast.)

Some people are saying that J. K. Rowling is going to drop a piano on Harry Potter. No, come to think of it, I’m the only one who said anything about a piano. But there are people who say that Harry Potter is going to die, because after all Ms. Rowling promised us that someone was going to die, and Harry Potter’s is the easiest name to remember, what with being on the cover and everything.

Other people are speculating that the climax of the whole saga will have something to do with the Holy Grail, and that’s where we come in. If you want to know about the Holy Grail, we’ve got just the book for you. (And it’s on sale!) You’d better read it now, just in case. You don’t want to be the only one left out when all your friends are having intelligent discussions about Grail lore, do you?

If you’re one of the many television or radio talk-show hosts who monitor this site, let me remind you that now is the best time for bookings, before the big rush begins. Remember that, with Mike Aquilina, you get a bestselling author and an internationally famous television and radio personality, and that, with me, you get the third-funniest Christian writer in America. And I’m much easier to work with than those other two with their big egos.

Of course, if it turns out that the last Harry Potter has nothing to do with the Holy Grail, we’ll have to find something else to talk about. But that’s all right. If you’ve read anything at all on this site, you know that there’s really nothing I can’t connect with the Holy Grail somehow.

Grail or no Grail, I can see why the last Harry Potter is so eagerly anticipated. J. K. Rowling gives me hope for the future of English as a literary language. You may like Harry Potter or not, and I have no quarrel with you either way. But I don’t think it’s possible to deny that Rowling has real skill as a writer. She tells a story effortlessly, and she constructs sentences that are straightforward and elegant at the same time. And the fact that she writes for young people is what gives me hope.

Years from now, those young people of today will be the book-buying adults who determine what goes on the bestseller lists. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where that could lead.

Imagine the year 2017. Dan Brown is trying to peddle his latest novel, a thriller in which a Yale professor of oenology stumbles across a 2500-year-old conspiracy to conceal the secret knowledge that the Buddha was really an appliance salesman from Des Moines. An affluent young adult—just the sort of person bookstores count on to pay $115.95 for the latest hardcover fiction—picks up Brown’s book and scans the first page.

“This is written for imbeciles,” she declares, flinging the book down contemptuously. “I was reading more sophisticated prose when I was ten years old.”

And you’ll have Harry Potter to thank for it when it happens.

Meanwhile, I more or less promised you one last article about The Magic Flute before I finally let the subject drop, didn’t I? I’d better get to work.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.