yay for reading all day!

[dancingyel]

i had pre-ordered the last harry potter book on amazon, so yesterday, i spent the morning waiting impatiently for it to arrive, and the afternoon reading. it was lovely! a relatively easy read (around 750 pages, 4-5 hours, but i do want to re-read it), quite engaging, and fun. it was far from perfect, but i quite enjoyed it nonetheless.



things i loved: dudley doesn't think harry is a waste of space. little snape! neville kills nagini! wizard wedding. stupid missing ear jokes! percy coming back into the fold. dumbeldore being not so perfect. sword of gryffindor coming to the rescue once again. hagrid not dying. kreacher! luna being a comfort to olivander. the fact that harry both dies and doesn't! mrs. weasley killing bellatrix!

things i didn't like as much: no mention of the dursleys, or hermione's parents at the end. epilogue, while cute, felt rather forced. no mention of who killed tonks and remus, and how. ginny being jealous of cho was dumb. the holocaust overtones, both with grimewald and voldemort's blood status thing, also felt forced, especially with the whole duel thing taking place in 1945. it's like, ok, i get it JK!

overall, i have to say i really enjoyed it. i'm not so picky as hardcore fans, and while i really wanted to get it on the first day to avoid reading spoilers by accident, i wasn't expecting an epic masterpiece. still, it made me happy to get the conclusion to the series, and i was grinning by the end. now some of my friends need to actually read it so i can have people to blather to!

Comments

[owens888.livejournal.com]

"the holocaust overtones, both with grimewald and voldemort's blood status thing, also felt forced, especially with the whole duel thing taking place in 1945." I thought that Grindelvald was supposed to be a major driver behind the Muggle WWII, so the date makes sense through that context...

[leora.livejournal.com]

Also, it didn't feel that forced, because she's been doing pretty strong Holocaust/race issues overtones since book 4. And that wasn't the only one. The whole mark of the deathly hallows has a very similar story as the swastika. I remember reading Just So stories as a kid and being shocked to read a reference to the "good symbol" in the picture, which was the swastika in the other direction. I'd figured she'd been building up the whole pattern of tyranny and stupid racism sort of issues from the start to parallel real world examples.