Pottermania
Title: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Author: J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Book, July 2005
Hardcover: 672 pages
ISBN: 0439784549
Joining the ranks of school children everywhere, I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend reading the latest Harry Potter installment. Although the narrative pace was certainly slower than in the previous books, I found this to be a welcome change after the convoluted storyline of the Order of the Phoenix. This book was clearly setting the scene for the next and final book, and although some have said this gave the book a contrived air, I quite enjoyed all the flashbacks that provided us with more information on the mysterious Lord Voldermort.
Throughout the course of this book, Harry and Co. seemed to be resolutely entering adulthood, leaving behind the trappings of childhood. This process came to a head at the end of the climatic last chapter, when Harry decides on the path he must follow and Hermione and Ron pledge to join him. One aspect of their growing up that was handled less gracefully, was their romantic lives. Constant references to snogging made it seems as though there were people making out in every nook and cranny of Hogwarts, which is somehow at odds with the Hogwarts that J.K. Rowling had described previously. The romantic scenes also suffered from the awkwardness brought about by trying to discusses issues of sexuality in a G-rated setting. That said, there were other scenes that were decidedly less G-rated. In particular, certain fight scenes. As I read them I wondered what an accurate depiction of those scenes would do for the ratings of the Half-Blood Prince movie.
All in all, this was an entertaining read. But I expect the last book to be even better.
If anyone needs a refresher of where the story stands until this point, here are synopses of the first five books.
you’ve done an awesome job with your k2 conversion. Can i ask you a few questions if you dont mind? How did you style your reviews? It looks like Structured Bloggin? I cant seem to style my structured bloggin plugin. Im not sure how to do it. Yours looks great! Please help me if you can.
Also, how did you get those lines between the entries where it says snack sized?
And as for harry potter. I haven’t read his books, but this next movie coming out looks amazing! thanks again for any help you can give me. You have a great looking blog! somthing I would like my blog to look like!!!!
Hi Trench, thanks for your kind comments
Re: styling for reviews, I tried using structured blogging, but my hosting provider doesn’t allow fopen() and so it didn’t work properly. So I just do it the old fashioned way. I created star images for all the possible ratings and uploaded them to my server. For each review I download the cover image from Amazon, upload it through the wordpress admin and have it create a thumbnail, link to the thumbnail, type in all the metadata info, and then link to whatever star rating I want to give it. Not very high tech, but it works well enough.
For the lines between del.icio.us links, the plugin creates some divs that provide hooks for styling, so I just added this to my k2scheme stylesheet:
.delPost {
padding-bottom: 4px;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-left: 12px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #EEE;
}
Hope this helps and thanks again.
Thanks alot for the help. Wow, you do your reviews manually. Thats alot of work, but it really looks good. Im going to add you to my Dailys! keep it up.