Harry Potter and the Cash Cow of Azerbaijan - posted at 20:17

I've put off writing about this for a while, but now I feel it is safe to, as the book has been out for multiple weeks and all of you who could complain about me giving things away have had ample time to read it. I mean, even I of taking-ten-months-to-read-the-Baroque-Cycle fame was able to read it in a matter of days. And I was in targeting, for chrissake.

But Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is something that must be written about, for I have many thoughts regarding the book. To get this party started, I'm just going to throw this out here: Rowling has really painted herself into a corner now -- how is she possibly going to be able to finish the series in one more book? The most unlikely sounding answer seems like the only one that is feasible: Voldemort is going to smoke Harry's ass. How else could she possibly hope to finish this up in less than 2000 pages? However, she is far more of a genius -- especially when it comes to this writing thing -- than I am, and she will probably find a way. This assumes, of course, that she decides to kick her habit of killing off increasingly important characters. Perhaps my assumption is wrong and she'll snuff out the most important character of them all! I still doubt it though.

Moving on.

My jury is still out on Snape. My initial reaction was that he was a total bastard, through and through, but after talking about that with Jared and Chrissa, I'm harboring an idea that he might still be good and planning to take out He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named himself. Perhaps Dumbledore was just someone who needed to be sacrificed so that Snape could get closer to this goal -- but I still think that you don't sacrifice your queen unless you're really bloody certain that you're going to be able to get that checkmate without her.

Having read #6 (HBP), I am now starting to get rather frustrated about #5 (OotP). Not much seemed to happen in that one -- it was as if the book was sitting around, biding its time, until the Death Eaters were strong enough to really start messing things up in HBP. Nothing really significant happened, and some things that I thought would grow to be significant really weren't -- Neville's improvement as a wizard, for one. Now that HBP has been released, it is apparent that OotP just doesn't build on or be built upon as the others have. I suppose that the same could be said about #2 (CoS), but now that HBP is out, it makes more sense and fits in with the others better. Hopefully I'll be saying such redemptive things about OotP in a couple of years.

On the whole though, I thought this installment of the Harry Potter series was excellent -- it was dark in all the right ways, showed off the badass-ness of several of its characters, had several surprising twists, and set the stage for an excellent seventh book.

A book that Cory, a staunch anti-Harry Potter person, thinks should be called Harry Potter and the Cash Cow of Azerbaijan.

Chrissa commented:

Damn good entry. I can really enjoy something if it contains the words "bloody" and "badass-ness". I didn't reread books 1-5 before reading HBP but I'm convinced I'll find more reason to believe Snape is actually on the good side and less of a reason to think that Harry will die in book seven. *sighs* Maybe I'm just hoping that I'll catch onto something I didn't read before. Anyway, let me know how you like the penguin movie