Have to Admit It...

[liralen]

But I've been avoiding The Deathly Hallows.   Mostly because of how horrible The Order of the Phoenix was and while The Half-blood Prince was better I wasn't holding out much hope.  So I read Bujold's first The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and planned on just getting the second one in hardback as I enjoyed the first book a lot.  But then John bought the copy of The Deathly Hallows from our grocery store.  AND everyone here on LJ has been saying it was actually quite good and ties things up really well.

So I guess I'm going to have to read it.  :-)

Comments

[archangelbeth]

Hallows has some flaws, but as long as I don't hear what the author thought she was writing, I'll probably like it overall. *grin*

Sharing Knife, I like much better. O;>

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Cool. I do share a lot of your tastes in books, so this is a good thing to know. :-)

Thanks!!

I'll probably enjoy Hallows, it's been ten years of reading getting to it... we'll see.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to book 2 of The Sharing Knife although I'll probably wait for it in paperback.

I bought and read HP7, but then, I found it for £5 at our local supermarket, which swung the tide for me.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Woo! A Deal! :-)

I should probably just check 2 out from the library and buy it when it comes out in paperback...

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

I liked Deathly Hallows reasonably well, but the Bujold is much better.

I know, who could have guessed?

[liralen.livejournal.com]

*falls over giggling*

Me! Me! :-)

Ahem.

*hugs*

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

But you're a good guesser! And also silly!

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I am saddened, a bit, that you found books five and six to be horrible. I am more saddened that Penny wasn't able to read the last book (and that she regretted it, and mentioned that in the hospital.)

[liralen.livejournal.com]

For good reasons. I am sorry for your loss.

I think I found Order of the Phoenix to be horrible because half the book was about that horrible summer for Harry and about being stuck in the horrible house for Sirius. Most of it was filled with the severing of Harry's relationships with Dumbledore. There was so much irreplacable loss without real gain or wins in that book that it was really hard for me to like it.

It was also as if Rowling just wrote down everything connected to the characters she knew so well, too. It could have used a little editing.

I think it was a necessary step in the development of Harry and the whole work. But... I have always hated antiheroes and have little patience for teenage angst, perhaps because I had so little patience for my own.

I don't think it was nearly as badly written as other things out there. :-) I'm very glad that so many people find it an accessible way to get to fantasy. I'm also glad that so many people love the books simply because I'm always glad at anything that people WANT to read. So I'm gladdened, a bit, that you enjoyed them enough to want to defend them a bit.

*hugs*

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I agree that all her books wanted editing, but she turned into the 2000 pound gorilla rather quickly and (rather like Misty Lackey) was Too Big to Edit, and as a result, her work suffered.

I also would like to point out that you've frequently done much, much nastier things to the characters you write than what Harry went through - but perhaps the difference being, by the time you showed the suffering, it was diluted by either being fetishised or by being chosen, in some way, which gave the characters experiencing it an unreasonable calmness and poise.

The thing I found most real about the fourth through sixth books was the reality of Harry's being an adolescent, at best unprepared, and at worst, completely immature. Snape, in contrast, was shamefully immature in his handling of the same situations, and of course, the wizarding society at large shows a tendency to be childish and immature at best. Then again, I have only to look back at the last two national elections in the US to see the exact same degree of self-inflicted selfish blindness (all around).