Spoilers. (Duh.)

( book-destroying spoilers )

Proposition: the reason that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is less interesting than the first book is that the story is mostly about someone other than Harry.

Discuss.

(Alternatively, what the heck was Bloomsbury UK thinking with the kids-version cover art for the seventh book? (See also: US version.))

ETA: I've booklogged this book & ( Read more... )

My car went in the shop for two days this week (replace all the tires, repair a mis-aligned headlight), and I rented a car from the dealership. On the phone, they told me that they'd give me a Corolla, which was fine since my car is a 2003 Prius, in other words small, and a big car would be awkward.

Instead of a Corolla, they gave me . . . a Scion ( Read more... )

This is appallingly spoilery; be warned.

( minor thought on a major spoiler )

There is much to tell about the last couple weeks, and I was going to tell it tonight, but I decided instead to treat my tired self to a novel. After some deliberation, I went back to reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

I'm not done yet. I made myself stop reading most of the way through. But I would just like to say that it is much more ( Read more... )

Catching up . . . . On Tuesday the 1st of June, we went out for ( Read more... )

Hey HP fans: "What I did on my Summer Holiday", by trickofthedark, "an alternate universe OOC ficlet in which Harry Potter grows a brain."

(Also, New York's income tax forms? Suck hard vacuum through a straw.)

Non-HP-fandom people, ignore this.

FictionAlley has started posting listings of new fics to LiveJournal, and so I read a few while killing time.

It's probably wrong that my main reaction was, "whee, fodder for mctabby's Summary Executions!"

(I think this one pushed me over the edge:

Desperate to prepare Harry for what lies ahead, Dumbledore attempts ( Read more... )

(Non-HP-fandom people should ignore this post.)

Ahem. lizbee's terrific gen short story "The Language that God Speaks"? (Summary: Pratchett reassured us that all libraries are one, and Gaiman told us about one particularly unique library. Hermione discovers a twenty-year-old experimental potion which allows her to access the Dreaming.)

Why did I not ( Read more... )

I read Order of the Phoenix yesterday in one big gulp, from about 11:30 (went out to get it in the morning) to about 2:30. The rest of the day I spent socializing (we have a houseguest) and intermittently trying to digest.

What follows is my impressions after a night's sleep, but not ( Read more... )