Found Not Lost

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened in theaters a week ago; and while we were not insane enough to go to the midnight opening, we did go see it a few days later to give the crowd a chance to die down. It was still pretty crowded when we went on the following Thursday night but at least it wasn’t insanely crowded and we managed to get good seats front row center.

I have three daughters who grew up with Harry Potter. We read the first book aloud because my youngest daughter could not read yet and they have been hooked ever since then. We’ve read all the books and are re-reading them again. We’ve seen all the movies and just can’t get enough of them. This latest installment though, kind of left us flat. Which is unusual for us because we are such Harry Potter fans that we pretty much eat up anything Harry Potter that is doled out.

Right off the bat, during the introductory scenes of the movie, where the dementors demolish a bridge in London, they started to lose me. I was frantically trying to remember if this was in the book and my old mind just overlooked it. By this time my girls were like, “What the heck is going on? Where is this movie going?”. My 11 year old was furiously tugging on my arm going “That was not in the book!”. LOL! I guess we must all be purists. We don’t want too many additions nor omissions from the original plot.

Another deviation from the book that also had me and the girls going ‘HUH?’ was the attack on the Weasley farm house. You’d think the Norwich and Peterborough building society had invaded the wizarding world. In the movie, the Weasley’s house burns down during an attack from the fire eaters. As the whole family stood in a circle watching the burrow on fire, my only thought besides from ‘WTH???’ is, ‘I wonder if wizards carry home insurance? LOL! They were really losing my interest at this point.

The saving grace for this movie for me (and also my girls) is how the relationships between Harry & Ginny and Ron & Hermione were developed more in this movie. Forget it that they totally forgot to put focus on the title of the movie, ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ which was only mentioned once (I think) in the movie and if you didn’t read the book you still come away wondering what the significance of the half-blood prince was.

Overall, I felt really unsatisfied with The Half-Blood Prince. I kept waiting for the action to pick up which it never did. This is the first time this has ever happened with me and a Harry Potter movie. So now I want to see it again because I desperately want to like it. It has gotten good reviews elsewhere so I’m thinking maybe I had the wrong expectations going into the movie. I know I’ll be getting the DVD to complete our collection when it comes out. I just don’t know if I can wait that long to see the movie again because it really bothers me that I didn’t like it.

Are you a Harry Potter fan? Remember the invisibility cloak that has aided Harry many a times? Soon it wont be a mere stuff of fiction anymore. Scientists have discovered a way to make an invisibility cloak using nano technology. According to the article:

It works by bending light around itself like the flow of water around a stone, which would make both the electromagnetic cloak and the object inside hidden.
…These tiny needles decrease the refraction or distortion of the light to almost zero, rendering it invisible.

Is it not amazing what science and technology can come up with? Of course they didn’t come up with this technology just so we can play invisible pranks on each other; this technology, they think, may enable them to create microscopes than can see DNA or enable them to make even faster computer microchips. And you thought your computer was fast now… just you wait!

I hated to see the Harry Potter series end after seven years of annual anticipation. Many of us fans wondered how J.K. Rowlings would follow up Harry. Surely she can’t just abandon the wizarding world altogether and go on to something else? Well, she did go on to something else, but the wizarding world’s influence followed. Her new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is due for release on December 4, 2008 and is now available to be pre-ordered from Amazon.com. The tales are five fairy tails which come with commentary byProfessor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

If you remember, this book is the one that captured so much attention last year when seven books, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowlings herself were unveiled. One of the books, the moonstone edition, was bought by Amazon at auction for a whopping $3.98 million!

Click here to read more details about The Tales of Beedle the Bard and look at more photos of the original handwritten book.

My ten year old daughter is now reading the first thick Harry Potter book, number 4, Goblet of Fire. We now have the whole 7 book series and although she is more up to date with the movies than the books, I’m really glad to see her wanting to read through the story rather than just depending on the movie version.

If you haven’t read any of the books yet, I highly recommend them. And aren’t you lucky that you haven’t read them yet. You don’t have to wait for the the next book to come out! These books were so good that the wait was excruciating! (just like the spell) Luckily, after the first couple of books they started alternating the book release with the movie releases. The made the wait just a little bearable.

The girls are back from vacation and I finally get my chance to read the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series!! I started reading on the plane during the flight back from Los Angeles and only stopped during the awfully turbulent landing in Atlanta.

Had another opportunity to read more pages when our flight from Atlanta to North Carolina got held up for over an hour. All in all, travel time from door to door took twelve hours. I could have been more irate, but at least I had Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows to keep me occupied. I’m still in the middle of it, so I’ll have to let you know later how I liked it. The girls can’t wait to discuss with me what happened in this final chapter. I have sworn them to not even think of letting any spoilers out before I finish the book.

This past Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to tackle the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was such a relaxing way to relax and spend the weekend. Harry has grown to be a typical, surly teenager and undegoes some of the more mundane angsts of growing up aside from battling Voltemort and learning new spells. He goes on his first date, after finally mustering the courage to ask Cho out. But the girl is also a teenage twit, so things don’t go too well for them. Now I am assuming since I am two years late reading this book, that everyone else has read it, and won’t mind then if I reveal some of the more important plots here. For one, Harry’s godfather dies in this volume. He gets killed by Voltemort while he is trying to save Harry from getting himself killed, all because Harry decides in this volume to be headstrong and not listen to instructions. Wha’d I tell ya, typical teenager! But dumb of Dumbledore not to tell Harry the truth in the first place. It was a lot of fun reading about Fred and George’s, the Weasley Twins, antics though. That evil inquisitor lady deserved what she got.

Well, it was a thick book, but every page was highly entertaining. I love being able to go through an 800 page book in a couple of days. This only happens to me when something is really interesting, and keeps me turning pages. Most often though, I have to force myself to keep going to see if anything interesting is going to happen. Jade and I have a running joke that I judge books by their cover. If they have a well designed jacket, I may just buy it and start reading it. This is how I end up having pretty books, but hard to get through. Oh well, at least once in a while I run into a Harry Potter or Ann Rice book. Now those keep me turning pages! Sometimes sappy romance novels do the trick too