Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Story

Here's a report on a new childhood affliction: the "Hogwarts Headache," sometimes accompanied by neck pain. It's caused by the increasing length of each new Harry Potter installment. (The latest weighed in at 870 pages.) Children are spending six to eight hours a day plowing through and getting headaches in the process, according to the august New England Journal of Medicine. The young reader at our house gave up on the lastest book at about the 400-page mark. "I'll wait for the movie," he said, exhausted.

But how will they ever make films of reasonable length out of these obese tomes?

Are you listening J.K.? Prolixity is not literature. Save the trees!