Harry Potter Book 6: done gone finished!

Got the book at 12:50 today and started reading at 1pm finished it at 6:30 pm, with breaks for lunch and tea. The below is my impressions, there shouldn't be enough detail there though for it to provided any major spoilers.

It's a reasonable read, not up to the standard of the earlier ones though, at least in my opinion. It starts off interesting enough but fairly quickly loses some of the interest, with a couple of things not being followed up properly, at least as far as I'm concerned. Two new characters are introduced out of the blue at the beginning, one makes little appearance after that, just enough to make sure you don't like the chap, while the other shows up through out the book and is interesting enough if under used.
What is done quite well though is the confusion developed over Snape, he plays an increasingly important role with a couple of very interesting scenes which simply increase the confusion. Is he good or bad? I can't tell at all though his actions in certain sections certainly lean towards the later.
As in the previous book she kills off another of the more important and interesting characters a habit that I'm beginning to find annoying. The story ends pretty much on that note.

Thankfully the teenage angst of the previous book doesn't seem as common in this one, instead she has a couple of fairly obvious and completely unsupprising romances develop with a bit of angst thrown in, which if you don't spot coming at least a book ago, then I don't know what to say.

A little more is learnt about Voldemort but he doesn't appear directly at all in the book.

Oddly enough one of my biggest complaints about it would be that it glosses over much of the detail present in the earlier books even though it's just as large as the previous two.
The biggest question it leaves me with though is why is Snape considered so trust worthy by Dumbledore?

Any way I hope the next Wheel of time book is better than this book turn out to be.

Happy

Don't you just love it when you check up the due date for a piece of work and find it's due a week later than you thought!

Though that still does leave me with my MSc proposal to finish and other various bits of work.


On another note been reading alot of old Sci-fi recently, a mix of stuff from the 1930's to the 1980's. Kind of cool some of the stuff they dreamed up for the books.

For example one of the book series set in the next couple of hundred years but written in the 1930's through 1950's.
Plays around with the idea's of:
Black holes though they're not called that, probably because that name hadn't been invented.
Matter to energy conversion.
Negative Matter ak Antimatter
Inertia less space ships.
Telepathy

Some of especially interesting things are:
Electronic Computers in the Books are Mechanical or Analogue.
Computer often refers to it's original meaning, Humans or groups of humans trained in Mathematics.


Kind of cool so if you want to read some good old school Scifi try "E E 'doc' Smith's" lensman series.