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1 out of 2 found this helpful: untitled
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)
A new semester at Hogwarts had started. Harry Potter would meet new teachers and learn new subjects. Also, he would win Quidditch games and have some small romantic moments.
Bad things were waiting for him too, though. Malfoy was so eager to do something glorious for the Dark Lord Voldemort. He was definitely up to something dark and evil. And, he was so close to Professor Snape, to whom Dumbledore trusted deeply.
Harry received Dumbledore's private lessons. Through the memories shown at the lessons, more and more secrets about Voldemort were revealed to the boy. But there was something still remained mysterious, what a Horcrux is. This seemed to be the darkest thing in the wizarding world and the most unknowable mystery of Lord Voldemort.
Potion-making was a new course this semester. This course was a bit too hard for Harry. But the lucky thing was that an old copy of the textbook of potion making helped Harry very much with scrambled words at the edges of every page. Harry was always wondering who the book's owner "Half-blood Prince" was.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth book of the series. J. K. Rowling still keeps up her successful way of story- telling in this book.
Every character was put in his very suitable place that cannot be changed and each one had his or her personalities. If you look close enough at them, you can still find out that everyone in the novel was growing and changing. But this growth or change is always in the most natural and reasonable way.
Dumbledore was always a symbol of rightness and powerfulness to all readers in the previous books. But we cannot deny that he was also getting older all the way down. In this book, Professor Dumbledore was weaker than ever before. He was also facing many more difficulties than ever. One of his hands was burnt black as if dead.
Nevertheless, Professor Dumbledore was still kind-hearted and tolerant as he was in the other stories. Some even might say he was too easy -believing, though.
Harry was one year older than in the last book "the Order of the Phoenix". He was now more mature not only because he was much taller, but also he was getting wiser and braver.
Being the Chosen One does not only mean being more famous. The other meaning was more responsibilities. Especially when the power of Voldemort was on the rise and more people were kidnapped or ki...... full review
2005-12-25 17:16 | comment
This is not the "Snow White" in your mind...
Review: Snow White
Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes, very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?
This is from on of Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Explanation”, a story in which somebody invented a new sort of machine which was believe to be able to help change government, understand and criticize Maoism, and peep girls in an apartment on the other side of the street.
Donald Barthelme was an American writer of short stories and novels. He also worked as a newspaper reporter and educator. He is truly an important figure in the history of postmodernism. The entire collection of Barthelme contains various explorations of describing the life and rebuilding the concepts of literature.
Many will think his works full of nonsense and weird expressions. But no one can deny that he and his works are highly philosophical beneath the seemingly alien writing style. Barthelme creates a world so unreal and so absurd in his works but the unreal and absurd image of world is just a reflection to the real world in which we live. The only difference between the two is that Donald Barthelme has fragmented the situations in the real world and rearranged these parts with his hands into a new form.
His style of writing is of much controversy. Some believe that he was meaningless and his novels and stories went too far away from the understanding ability of readings. But at the same time many regard him as profoundly disciplined. Barthelme’s writing and language style was even given a name – Barthelmismo.
It is true that for most readers, the first impression on “Barthelmismo” would be surprising, because the forms of his stories are rather unique or weird. He uses jargons, typos and obvious spelling mistakes in his oeuvre. He put fabricated or hard-to-understand illustrations in his stories. As in “At the Tolstoy Museum”, he put Tolstoy’s big photos together with Tolstoy's huge coats and other pictures. In “The Explanation”, he put big black squares as paragraph separators. He also employed other inventive ways of expressions. This make his novel does not look like “a novel”. As in “Glass Mountain”, Donald Barthelme put numbers in front every line of all the 100 sentences and made it more like a “lis...... full review
2005-12-23 19:34 | comment
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