HSU IT Department

Over the weekend I reread Half-Blood Prince ('cause, you know, the movie) and then, because I couldn't stop THERE, Deathly Hallows. I had re-read HBP right before DH came out two years ago but hadn't picked up either of them since (except to do a little fact-checking for the Nurse on occasion LOL!). Both were FAR better than I'd remembered; DH in particular was much better, I think because having read it before I was now able to pick up on all the little clues and hints, so everything made much more sense than the first time through. Cried over Dobby and Snape again, of course, especially Snape -- such a sad, lonely man, so twisted and tormented, and yet so courageous, so clever. One tiny moment whose power was lost on me the first time through but which struck me with full impact this time: as Snape is dying (that's not a spoiler, right? Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't know that?), his last words are a whisper to Harry, "Look...at...me." And I suddenly understood why: because Harry has his mother's eyes, and Severus wanted to see Lily's eyes one last time. (See?? I get all choked up just writing about it, even now!) For an allegedly kids' book, Rowling packs an awful lot of adult emotion into the last one.

I'd forgotten in how many different ways Voldemort is thwarted by his inability to comprehend love. Not just Harry's mother's love for him, which started the whole thing, but Narcissa's love for her son, Snape's love for Lily, Harry's love for Dumbledore...it's woven all through the books, in ways both obvious and subtle. Nicely done.

It was also an odd sensation reading these two having read a lot of HP fan-fic in the interim. At one point I recall thinking, "Oh yeah, I remember the backstory to that" before realizing "No wait, Rowling didn't WRITE that particular backstory" LOL! Fortunately that was the extent of it -- an occasional hiccup, as it were -- and none of the NC-17 fanfic I've read distracted me from my enjoyment of the actual tale.

Still puzzling over how anyone deduced Dumbledore being gay out of the whole thing though. If Rowling hadn't said it I never would have thought it.

Continuing my temporary regression to childhood, I reread all five Chronicles of Prydain over the last couple of days. When I was a kid I wanted to be either Gwydion (main hero) or Achren (evil enchantress); she's at her best in the third one but comes to a bad end, as Evil Enchantresses all too often do. (There's something suspicious about that, since in real life villains often flourish like the green bay tree...) But my favorite has always been the fourth one, where Taran tries to figure out who he is. He's such an adolescent goof in the first one but by the end he's definitely the most interesting, and probably the most complex, character in the whole cast. There are some great life lessons buried in these books (OK, reading them now, I have to say they're not exactly buried, it's more like they whack you over the head -- but they're still good, and at age 7 or 8 or whenever kids usually read these, how subtle can you really be??). Best thing is that the characters grow up as you read them, like the Harry Potter books, and I always go all sniffly at the end of the last one when Orddu, Orwen and Orgoch visit Taran and he has to choose whether to stay or go. *snif*

Shame the movie version of the second one stunk. Never mess with perfection, the seams always show.

Having wallowed sufficiently in the Days of my Youth (oh, except for this one, which I FINALLY again know the title of thanks to AbeBooks' BookSleuth forum and will devour as soon as my copy arrives, hurrah!!), I've started on The Librarian Spies, which promises to be professionally interesting, since I might want to be one someday. Hey, if Julia Child can be a spy, why not a humble librarian??