Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
When I started through my morning blogroll today, I was amused to see a post on the latest Harry Potter book over at Calpundit Monthly (Warning: Spoilers). Put together with all the other speculation and commentary floating around the Net, this started me thinking about the book some more.
This is not a particularly good idea, as these are not, for me, books that reward deep thought. Whenever I end up thinking about the details of the Potter universe, I end up finding a whole bunch of things that strike me as stupid and annoying, and I wind up thinking less of the series than I did when I started.
In the interest of cutting this (somewhat) short, then, I'm going to bang out a quick booklog post, and move on to other things (I'm halfway through Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson right now, which is just a little bit of a change of pace...). In the interests of politeness, I'll keep the main body as spoiler-free as possible, and put all the spoilery stuff about the ending in comments. That's probably the most interesting bit, so do make sure to look, if you're no longer worried about spoiling the book. I will, of course, be happy to respond to comments here, though I'm going to try to avoid reading much of anything else about the book after I post this.
So, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was better than the last volume, that's for sure, though given how little I liked the last book, that's not actually saying much. The hormonal teenager bits are still excruciating, but at least they're not used to drive an idiot plot (a sub-plot in which people act like idiots, yes, but that's not as bad). We're also spared the ham-handed attempts at social satire that marred the previous couple of books-- the new Obligatory Bumbling Professor is another Type who comes in for ridicule, but it's not as irritating as with the tabloid reporter and the horrible educational bureaucrat. There's also some actual movement on the overall series plot, which is good.
Unfortunately, this is all really too little, too late. While this is a much better book than the previous one, it seems like the previous book squandered the last stock of goodwill for the series. For most of the book, this one failed to really hold my attention-- it wasn't a chore to read, or anything, but it wasn't difficult to set it aside to do other things, either. And it was awfully easy to find things to dislike about it on the way through-- things that were intended to be cute and charming (and may have worked that way in the first couple of books) generally came off as irritating.
On a slightly higher level, I thought there were some serious structural problems regarding Chapter 2 and the ending (which I viewed differently than Kate did), and I'm not really thrilled about some of the things the ending sets up for the second book. Detailed thoughts on those problems, and why I'm hoping most fans of the books are wrong about the ending, will follow in the comments.
Posted at 8:01 PM | link |