Various Topics

1. I started my own "library of favorites" for contemporary literary classics, and thus I have started to pursue new copies of all my favorites so I can keep them forever, but my mom thinks this is a silly practice and that I should, I dunno, hunt down battered old paperbacks at garage sales and read them once and then donate them to charity or something. ROSA Okay, so that might be an exaggeration of sorts, but that's her state of mind. My point of view is that in this ever changing, tragic world of ours, I really take solace in reliability and stability.

2. I've been rereading the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. Excellent fantasy series, and if you haven't read it you have to do so or you're a... how to put this nicely... SATANIC PIG-HATING COMMUNIST!

3. I treated myself to a shiny new hardcover copy of the original Chamber of Secrets for my library. No more of this silly Anti-Illustrationist movement.

4. I got seventy dollars and several euros richer yesterday; it's pretty happy.

5. Due to said new funding, more Harry Potter hardcover purchases may be on the way.

6. The movie adaptation (if you could call it an adaptation) of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is absolutely terrible. You have this overly and overtly opinionated and unheathily adverbial blogger's advice not to go see it, and his word that unless by chance of stupidity and ignorance, you haven't actually read any of the books, all parts of the movie will disappoint except - I almost regret saying this - the brilliant, spot-on portrayals of Luna Lovegood and Dolores Umbridge. ROSA I would almost see it again just to see Luna say her lines again, which, by the way, are almost all intact from the canon... Seriously, weird in exactly the way I imagined her to be in the book. Oh, and in the chance of said stupidity and ignorance, SIRIUS BLACK IS MURDERED BY BELLATRIX LESTRANGE AT THE END.

7. ROSA is a new good friend of mine, a novel sort of punctuation mark if you will, a running joke, but the kind that isn't funny. The first person to email me telling me what the mark does will win a great big sundae on me.

Decline in Harry Potter Books

I think I have found out why the fifth and sixth books of Harry Potter are my least favorite ones. The reason is not that the books have gotten darker and the tone more serious. It's not even that Mary Grandpre's illustrations have become less cartoony. It's because all the character roles in which the readers got so set over the first four books get changed and turned upside down. For example, in The Order of the Phoenix Ginny stops being all crazy about Harry and starts dating, and in The Half-Blood Prince, Harry is "hungry" for Ginny (creepy). Harry becomes a very angry young man, the government are complete morons, and Sirius gets himself killed. Neville becomes less dorky and Ron gets on the Quidditch team.... It all adds up to a seriously confusing Harry Potter world the likes of which we didn't see in the first four parts. And that is why my order of favoritism is 241356. w00t.