Back from vacation!

I'm back, and should be blogging again regularly. My husband is back at work, and the two of us have finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from (let alone blogs).

My husband kindly went out and bought two copies of the book at 6:30am this past Saturday, and we finished it Sunday night. I think it's the best one yet, quite witty and funny in places, very archetypal/Jungian in spots, and leaving us with fodder for all sorts of speculation, mystery, and discussion.

J K Rowling has done very few interviews with regular journalists, preferring to be interviewed by kids and the leaders of a couple of major fan sites. Having read a few book reviews, it's no wonder she eschews the usual media. It's not that they're critical, it's that they do not pay attention to details and they get things totally wrong. One of these reviewers said something about book 6 teaching "the perils of love," which goes to show that this person completely missed the books' entire philosophy of love conquering evil, misunderstood what happens in the death scene (they should check out what the 12-year-olds are saying on the discussion boards before writing their next review), and basically came to exactly the opposite conclusion than was intended, I'm quite sure. Can't they get someone to review the books who's actually read them? Can't they hire a 9-year-old, next time around?

True, I'm a Potter fanatic for purely recreational reasons, but I've long thought that these books were increasing reading ability and vocabulary for kids the world over, probably along with ethics and morals. Also, the books are like mystery novels, full of clues to decipher, requiring reasoning and deduction and a lot of hard thinking. It took readers less than a day to develop a consensus theory on the identity of R. A. B., though I might never have gotten there myself (RAB is quite obscure in previous books). Someone on an online discussion forum excitedly pointed out that there was a locket that couldn't be opened at 12 Grimmauld Place, mentioned in book 5, which could be the locket. My husband and I were amazed-- it turns out that yes, a locket is mentioned, in a few words in the midst of a longer sentence, on a single page within the hundreds of pages of book 5. How on earth could anyone remember that? But at this point Rowling knows her fans will remember it, that they'll find that handful of words and make the connection, because they've been doing it now for years. We pore over the text like Sherlock Holmes, never overlooking so much as cigar ash, because it could turn out to be meaningful. That has to have some "educational" value as well.

All that aside, they're just hilarious and imaginative and incredibly fun to read. I'm still chuckling at Luna Lovegood commentating that Quidditch match....