24 July 2008

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is the sixth Harry Potter book. The first three I remember were very good. I read them quite a number of years ago. I especially liked the third book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban because I thought the time travel was very ingenious. The fourth book Goblet of Fire was okay, but kind of long, and the fifth book Order of the Phoenix was extremely long and quite forgettable.

It has taken me about two years to read Half Blood Prince mainly because I tend to read books long after the hype is down and because for the last two years I have spent much time stressing over university. Now that university is over and I have a six-month holiday before I start working full time next year, I have time to finally read all those books I've been wanting to read. Half Blood Prince is one of them.

I'd like to start off by saying that Half Blood Prince is very dull at the beginning. In fact, one of the reasons why I found it difficult to read this book was because of this dullness. The books throws up hundreds of names and places. I feel like I'm reading Lord of the Rings again. To survive this onslaught of jargon I have to have Internet connection nearby so I can do quick research on various characters and spells I have forgotten.

The fact that many of the characters are older now means that many of them are starting to date others. While many people will like this, I do not like it at all because Harry Potter now seems like a gossip magazine.

At the end, a major character dies. I won't say who it is but I think that Rowling's decision to kill off a character is sensationalist. Obviously death is something that provokes a lot of emotion in people, but when it's overused by artists it starts to lose its effect.

After finishing Half Blood Prince I am now going to start reading Deathly Hollows now, which is the last book. I am also reading a number of other books at the same time, so I will talk about them later.

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