 |
| Saturday, 21 July 2007 |
| I've got it! |
| "Sit down, Sue," said J. K. Rowling. "It is time," she said, "for me to tell you what I should have told you ten years ago." Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 00:33 |
|
|
|
| Thursday, 19 July 2007 |
| Rereading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince |
It was a thought I couldn't contemplate at time of first reading the book, but HBP feels entirely like the first half of a verrrrry long novel: the second half comes out in just 39 hours.
The back-story annoyed me. I felt that those interminable Pensieve scenes were unnecessary as well as being clumsy and repetitive: but perhaps the human angle of Voldemort will be important if Harry's going to defeat him. One gets the feeling that despite Dumbledore's insistance in the power of love, it might be knowledge that saves Harry. Otherwise, what is one to make of the Half-Blood Prince himself? It seems an awful lot of effort to go to just to get Harry to the top of the Potions class, and to win him the Felix Felicis (which Slughorn could very plausibly have just handed over to his favourite student!). One has to assume that Voldie's end is in his beginning - otherwise half the book was a waste of time - but I can't help feeling there's an awful lot of "twenty years ago, your parents..." yet to come.
I'm concerned, I have to say. I know (yes, I found the spoilers!) that DH is going to be a blood-bath, but I think we could all have guessed that. JKR is pretty big on the idea of sacrifice, and if you have to kill a big evil wizard, you're going to need a lot of sacrifices. But the game of Find the Horcruxes (surely, surely the plural of Horcrux is Horcruces?!) smacks right now of formula, "one for each of the founders but he'll never get goody-goody Gryffindor", a join the dots adventure. I've actually got what purports to be a copy of DH in a pdf on my hard drive right now: I think it's probably genuine, everything about it from the paper to the writing seems right, but I'm waiting til tomorrow til I can get my hands on the physical objet. It turns out that, after all, there's something about a book.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 09:02 |
|
|
|
| Tuesday, 17 July 2007 |
| Paying for Potter |
Bloomsbury have cancelled Asda's Harry Potter order over an unpaid bill. Or maybe not - in a spat rather reminiscent of the Google-eBay row, apparently the Walmart-owned supermarket have criticised Bloomsbury's £17.99 cover price as "holding children to ransom". Asda have promised to have the lowest price for the book, and to have enough stock "to prove that this is not a just a gimmick".
For myself, I paid €28,00, which works out at *more* than the cover price. I'd like to make that into a political statement about supporting smaller booksellers - and to some extent it is. I buy more books because I buy from Amazon too, but over an economic farce like the release of a new HP, I'll happily pay more to an independent retailer. But more importantly, I'll have the book in my grubby little hands at midnight.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 11:00 |
|
|
|
|
| Spoilers (doesn't contain spoilers) |
The Leaky Cauldron has a spoiler policy: don't. Digg has well-dugg threads about posting spoilers: please don't. It seems like just about every newspaper has some kind of circulation-boosting Harry Potter coverage, mentioning that spoilers for Deathly Hallows may be available online. And almost without exception, all those pieces say that Real Fans don't want spoilers, won't read spoilers, and will cut themselves off from the internet if that's what it takes to avoid them.
Bullshit.
Remember the Dallas driveby shouting, "Snape kills Dumbledore"? Now remember Half-Blood Prince? That one sentence bears as much resemblance to the plot of that book as "narrator can't keep to the point" bears to Tristram Shandy. It doesn't spoil anything: the interesting part isn't that Snape kills Dumbledore, it's how that comes to happen. This is why we have books, not just headlines.
Look, she's made me wait ten years to find out what happens. I can't sit quietly and wait for another three days: I'm like Cartman like that. So screw you guys, I'm going to search for clues again.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 10:09 |
|
|
|
| Monday, 16 July 2007 |
| Rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix |
I'd had the idea I'd have some huge Harry-fest before Deathly Hallows came out, but actually I've read the first four books so many times - and had Stephen Fry read them to me - that I could practically recite them in my sleep, and did manage to read Harry Potter à l'ecole des sorciers (book one in French) largely without a dictionary. So I thought I'd start with this one.
I didn't like OotP much when it came out. It felt huge and inadequately edited, with too many adolescent tantrums. The quote from Dumbledore ("now I am going to tell you everything") was the one on the back of the book, the one being widely quoted when it first came out, and that was what was driving my desire to read the book. The supra-volume story arc was what I was interested in, in Voldemort and Harry and Questions of Good and Evil. And because I had to wade through so much other stuff, I got pissed off.
Now I know what happens, it's actually a much better book. For one thing, I like the moral ambiguity: I've always liked Snape because it's not certain which side he's on, and even if he is ultimately against Voldemort, he's still not a very nice person, and let's face it, that's much more interesting that the nicey nice characters in the book (Weasley family... yawn). And here, Rowling takes great pains to emphasise that there is more to evil than Voldemort: she uses that exact word about Umbridge, "she's evil!", about a dozen times. Fudge too, well - fudges. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,* especially when they really don't want to believe that the evil is actually happening. I've long wanted Harry's world to become more complex: it seemed completely ridiculous in the earlier books that "the most evil wizard ever" could be defeated by a couple of first year students and expelliamus.
I remembered the book as full of Angry!Harry, which didn't strike me so forcibly this time. Instead, it seemed like rather a good portrait of what being fifteen is like: confusing, arbitrary, and caught up by other people's rules and priorities.
The scene in the Department of Mysteries, however, still leaves me utterly unmoved. I can't imagine how Rowling can have reduced herself to tears "killing" Sirius like that, because he seems less to die than to trip over and fall through a curtain (and naturally now, there are a million theories all over the internet saying that he isn't actually dead...). I'm rather dreading the at-least-three deaths we've been promised in DH, because I don't think she does death scenes very well. Voldemort's "kill the spare" in GoF was chilling and repulsive as a line, but like Cedric himself, it was just a throwaway, totally superceded by Harry Being Heroic.
What she did do well was Bellatrix Lestrange. Beautiful. I feel fanfics coming on... Is Bella/Voldie just too weird?
By dint of having moved country since my last reading of it, I've managed to lose my copy of Half-Blood Prince. Fortunately the replacement has just arrived from Amazon, so I'm taking the afternoon off to read it.
* A friend of mine, another eBay seller, has the sig line "all that is required for eBay to triumph is for good men to sell nothing", which has me in fits every time.Labels: Harry Potter |
| posted @ 11:58 |
|
|
|
Suzie's Book Pages | Blogger Templates by Gecko & Fly.
No part of the content or the blog may be reproduced without permission.
|
| |
|
|
