July 2006 »

Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
Rating:
Buy Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Amazon.com

The sixth book in the much ballyhooed Harry Potter series is one of Rowling’s weakest efforts to date. Part of the problem is that with only one book left in the series, Rowling must cram in all the exposition and backstory that got cut out of previous books so that the series finale makes sense and is free to plow straight through to the finish.

While Order of the Phoenix had darker and better developed characters, Half-Blood Prince brings back the caricatures from the first four books of the series. At times I felt that the only indication that these characters had grown at all over their last five years at Hogwarts was the excess of romantic entanglements. Perhaps some readers enjoy the many couplings, triangles, and endless snogging, but I find them a bit tiresome. The major supporting characters from books past, including most of the extremely large cast of book five, are largely relegated to the background. I don’t think this helps the book any, as the flatness of the main characters becomes much more obvious when they’re the only ones to focus on.

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I heart risottos. So it was just a matter of time before I tried to make one.

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I’m guess I’m with Andrew Sullivan on this point:

I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see how it can be seen as anything other than human life

in that a blastocyst has human DNA and, left to its own devices, will develop into a human rather than a dog, cat, or fish, but said blastocyst doesn’t really meet the requirements of personhood in the more philosophical sense. It doesn’t talk, see, hear, or think, it lacks consciousness and self-awareness, and frankly it looks a lot more like blastocysts of other species than an actual person. Biologically it’s living and human, but it’s not really a living human just yet.

But I don’t see Bush’s veto as an upholding of moral principle. I see it as more evidence that he likes to cherrypick his principles.

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