Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling (ISBN 0545010225)
Rating: 9/10 majority of the book, 4/10 ending - average 7/10

This weekend welcomed one of the most widely anticipated books in recent memory. Hard to miss it, with everyone and their mother walking around reading it, sunning themselves and reading it, drinking coffee and reading it, etc. Major what? moment when I told a co-worker I was up until 1am reading last night and she asked me what I was reading. What ELSE would I be reading until 1am? I guess this weekend was a little Potter-centric, and I have to remember that not everyone got the fever :) Honestly, I kind of wish I'd stopped at 12am and not continued, because then I could just not have read those last couple chapters.

I think it's great that one of the biggest cultural events of the summer has been the release of a book. A book that millions of people read over the span of a weekend. Our short attention span nation actually sat down and read a 750 page book, expended the energy to carry the damn heavy thing on the subway with them, and in a big city, actually brought strangers together to chat about it as they were walking here and there. Massive cheer on friday night when we all got on the bus holding our books, cheering from those already on the bus who had it.

Now on to the spoilers. IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE BOOK (and plan to), you may want to stop reading now and go finish the book first, as I'll be talking about who died, who survived, and all that jazz.




Ok, all good? Those of you still with me either have read it or don't care to....



WTF was JK Rowling THINKING???!!! Did she drink Spielberg water or something? Ok, I'm calm [breathe in, breathe out].

To start from the beginning. Most of the book was what I would expect from a Harry Potter book - very engaging, a fast read, building to a big climax at the end. Mad-Eye Moody dies straight off the bat. I can deal with that, it's not like he's a big character anyway, not a lot of emotional investment there.

Harry, Hermione and Ron wander around for a while, but honestly, I think that's fairly realistic, I mean, if they knew what to do off the bat it just wouldn't seem real (I can't believe I just said that about a magical fantasy book...but I guess I'm talking psychologically real here). But that's all part of the build-up to the end. Things start moving about 2/3 of the way through when they start finding horcruxes and the sword.

Then you get to face-off #1 between Harry and Voldemort, when Harry is going to his death. At this point, I'm really liking this story, and it just feels right to me that Harry is going to sacrifice himself to kill Voldemort. Not that I want Harry to die, but it just seems to fit (the reasoning given in the book, that Harry is the 7th horcrux and as long as he lives, so does Voldemort). And going into it, I told everyone (and their mother) that I'd much prefer it if Harry died than Ron or Hermione. Plus, I was also convinced after the last book that Snape really was a good guy working with Dumbledore. So after I found out he, in fact, was a good guy, and it looks like Harry's actually going to die, I'm feeling good about the book, like JK Rowling is actually going to make it an interesting ending rather than a cotton-candy one.

No. What was I thinking? Ok, so I realize that this book is a young adult book, and is targeted towards a younger audience than me. However, it's not like she doesn't have a history of killing off main characters (ahem, Sirius, Dumbledore). Let's review who was killed off in the book:

Mad-Eye Moody - ok, yes, he was a good guy, he had a part in an earlier book. But do I really care that much? Not really.
Crabbe - yay
Lupin and Tonks - yes this is sad. But the problem with their deaths is that they didn't mean anything in the book. I mean, Rowling told us that it affected Harry, but she didn't show us. It felt like "look, Lupin and Tonks are dead, how sad, running out into the woods to continue the fight." It's not like I wanted him to fall to pieces over them. But if they were going to die, it just felt like it should have some kind of emotional impact and it didn't really - I felt like the whole thing with Lupin and his son was kind of shoved down my throat from the beginning, just to set me up for him being killed off at the end. I didn't feel like it created a real sense of emotional intimacy with the character. When Sirius and Dumbledore died, there was that sense of loss and sadness as I was reading it (not that I was just being told it was sad), and that sensation was just absent here. Maybe they're just not big enough characters.
Fred - see Lupin and Tonks above
Snape - he kind of had to die, big part of the plot. No issue here.
Dobby - I take serious issue with the fact that we see the most emotional impact on Harry being the death of Dobby. Yes, Dobby saved him from the Malfoys. Dobby was a good friend, and I don't mind that Harry was so saddened by his death. But the fact is that this is the ONLY death in this whole book that I really felt was adequately shown to affect Harry.

Maybe the book was just built up too much. Everyone kept saying the 7th book was going to be a bloodbath, that lots of characters were going to die. And as much as I like most of the characters and have built up a connection to them over the years with these books, I feel cheated. Cheated, I tell you! I was expecting some kind of emotional impact, emotional scenes, and rather than the drama I was expecting, I just got rip-roaring action instead (and lest you think I'm one of those tear-jerker chick-flick women who never watches action, I must tell you that 3/4 of my dvd shelf is action movies).

Have you seen A.I.? That movie exemplifies exactly how I felt about this book. For this movie, Spielberg and Kubrick collaborated, but they couldn't agree on an ending, so the movie wasn't made for several years. Then Kubrick died. Which left Spielberg to make his own ending. There was a point, about ten minutes from the end (SPOILER), when Hayley Joe Osment's character is at the bottom of the ocean. I'm not sure if this was Kubrick's ending, but I sure wanted it to end there. But no. Spielberg had his tentacles in it, so they had to find Hayley several hundred years later, when society accepted AIs and he could be a little boy like he always wanted. Happy ending? Yes. Contrived? Hell yes.

Now let me vent a little about the flow of the book. The book takes about 600 pages to build to its climax, and once it gets going, with the battle at Hogwarts, explosions everywhere, it seems there's nowhere to go but up. Harry goes out into the woods to face down Voldemort. Harry dies (sort of). Then there's a random, completely unnecessary chapter with Dumbledore in the train station of Harry's mind. It completely destroys the flow, is completely cheesy, and implodes the climax in upon itself. I didn't feel a need for this chapter. At all. Because when Harry goes back to his body, the climax has just had the air taken out of it (yes, this could also be partly because I've realized that Harry is not, in fact, going to die). So the last chapter with Neville killing the snake and Voldemort killing himself (this was kind of cool, that Voldemort was his own downfall) just didn't have the same impetus that the story did before the extraneous chapter.

And the last chapter. Talk about cotton candy. Spielberg. Cheesy. Campy. Come on! I mean, seriously, 19 years in the future? Harry, Ginny, Ron and Hermione sending their kids to Hogwarts? Ok, so I know they're turning this book into a movie, and that it's aimed primarily at a teen and pre-teen audience, that they want to have a happy ending, and tell people what happened to the characters after the battle ended. But seriously. This is like the French-dubbed version of Last of the Mohicans, when at the end, instead of their quiet grieving, they start saying stupid things like "Where are we going to go now?" "We're going to go to Kan-tuck-ee and summer with my father." Ugh.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book until I got to those last four chapters. I should have stopped reading at midnight, instead of continuing on until 1am. But it's still worth the read, especially if you like the Spielberg endings and don't go on crazy rants like I do when I come across an ending like this (especially when I was expecting something different).

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there's a happy ending. Voldemort had to die, of course, and Harry had to come out victorious. I just feel like it was a bit TOO happy of an ending.

What was your reaction to the whole thing?

Company and Jennifer Government

Company by Max Barry (ISBN 1400079373)
Rating: 7/10

This is the latest book by writer Max Barry, satirizing corporate America. He seems to have taken the Six Sigma model, applied it to a company (rather than technological system), and run away to an extreme with it.

The book is about Stephen Jones, a new employee at a corporate company. He is immediately promoted past people who have been working at the company for years. The thing is, none of his co-workers in Sales seem to know exactly what the company does. His department sells services to other departments within the company, other departments support yet other departments. A self-sufficient ecosystem of a business. But he starts to question what the company actually does, where they get their money, how they pay their employees, etc. As the company institutes harsher and harsher policies aimed at turning their employees into cogs in the machine, headcounts rather than happy, productive workers, Stephen gets recruited on the six-figure salary management team. As he undermines from within, Stephen has to navigate office politics and find a way to expose the company's secret underbelly. This includes a plot twist that I won't spoil, but it worth reading to find out about!

This book is well written and, while escapist, not without food for thought. Are we happier carrying on with our lives as they are, or would we want to know the whole truth about what goes on in our companies and our lives? The Matrix covered this question quite well. I honestly don't know how I would answer this question - would I want to wake up to reality if it meant I had to live in a sun-less world with slop for food, no creature comforts, and a need to fight it out with the machines? Or would I want to live a lie, even if it was real in my head (and if it were real in my head, isn't it, in fact, real?).

Jennifer Government by Max Barry (ISBN 1400030927)
Rating: 8/10

I enjoyed this book even more than Company. In this dystopian alternate reality, American corporations literally run the world. Workers take the last name of the company they work for (Jennifer works as a police officer, therefore Jennifer Government. The antagonists are John Nike and John Nike). Nike hatches an evil plan to release a new lines of shoes, while simultaneously hiring an someone to assassinate kids purchasing the new shoes as a stealth marketing technique (to add a certain amount of danger to the purchase, the idea that you shouldn't go buy something makes the desire to do so even stronger, doesn't it?). And no, this is not a spoiler (you'll learn this in the first few pages of the book).

Even before publication, this book was optioned by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. It's set to release in 2008. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Garner were the top choices for the lead, but IMDB doesn't have full details yet.

Definitely escapist, not perfectly written, but nevertheless this book reached out and grabbed me in the first couple pages. I couldn't put it down until the very end.

Wicked

Wicked by Gregory Maguire (ISBN 0060745908)

Rating: 5/10

I will never be able to watch The Wizard of Oz the same way again. It was the first movie I ever watched as a child, captivated from start to finish. And now the wicked witch of the west just doesn't have the evil cachet that she used to have. She is, in fact, a rather heart-wrenching character.

I thought the storyline of this book was quite well done. The author spent time to really think through his interpretation so that it would dovetail perfectly with the original movie, making it that much more "believable." The fact that he also explores the psychology of the wicked witch and the sociological dynamics of their cultures just makes it all the more fascinating. And less like science fiction - the characters act in very familiar ways, similar even to our own society, just with the added fantastical element. The themes threading through the book are those of discrimination, tyranny, protest, and loss.

I was, however, disappointed by the execution of this storyline. It took me a very long time to finish this book. I really had no drive to pick it up and read it, unless I just didn't have anything else to do at the moment. I can't quite pinpoint the reason, but Gregory Maguire's books are very difficult to really escape into. I also read his Snow White (using the Italian Borgia family), and felt the same way about that book. I'm not hopping up and down to read his next one, and have in fact had Son of a Witch (ISBN 0060747226) on my shelf for months and not been tempted to pick it up.

The Lost Daughters of China

The Lost Daughters of China by Karin Evans (ISBN 1585421170)

Rating: 7/10

The first layer of this book is an autobiographical tale of a couple adopting a daughter from China, the bureaucratic rigamarole that ensues, and their emotional journey they go through in bringing their daughter home.

On a sociological level, the story gets much interesting. Because of China's one child policy, the number of abortions and abandonments of daughters has spiked. Stats go so far as to say that there is up to a 20% gender gap in this new generation. China's culture has valued male children (to carry on the family name, inherit property, so on), and if a family can only have one child, they will sometimes abandon or abort girls so that they can have a boy child without flouting the law. The burgeoning orphanages are packed with little girls, and generally the only orphaned boys to speak of are those with health issues whose parents are unable to care for them.
Now, families are often given an allowance to have two children (if the first one was a girl), but then if they have a second girl this puts them in this same dilemma.

So there's a whole segment of Chinese girl growing up in orphanages or jumping the big puddle to come to the States. The Chinese adopted community here is growing by leaps and bounds because it is relatively inexpensive and there is no concern that the birth parents will come back and sue for custody. The downside is that these girls are entirely cut off from their heritage, their ancestry, their roots.

The author brings up a good (and frightening) point also. What happens when all of these children get to marriage age, when there are 20% fewer women than men? When there are so many young men with no outlet for their lust? On the one hand, perhaps it will make women more valuable and mothers will consider keeping more of their daughters. On the other hand, wars have been fought over women before, and with not enough to go around, tempers could run high. Would these young men unable to start a family throw themselves into their work, advancing the Chinese economy and industry? Would they join the military (and how would that affect their relations with other countries, if their military keeps growing to such an extent)?

Only time will tell, but the prospects for the future do definitely give pause.

Excellent book, fairly quick read. It discussed politics, sociology, and history, as well as the emotional aspect of family and adoption. Worth the read.

The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist, by Rudolph Chelminski (ISBN 1592402046)

I'd rate this book a 6.85/10 (is there a reason for the decimal? Does there need to be?).

This is a very clear, captivating biography of Bernard Loiseau, one of the star-crossed super-chefs of French cuisine. Steeped in Michelin history and resplendent with a cast of high-powered chefs in the culinary environment of Les Trentes Glorieuses, this book begins with his modest childhood and culminates in his suicide in 2003.

One of the disturbing factors of this book is his untreated bipolar disorder. Always on the up, uber-friendly, smile til you drop, Bernard also faced occasional black lows where he was practically inconsolable. Medication made him feel like his edge was gone. He didn't feel he could go to a doctor because of the stigma he felt was attached. He suffered enormous self-esteem issues, but overcompensated for this by exalting himself in the eyes of others, boasting constantly that his food was the best.

Added to that was the stress of the Michelin stars - always striving for that elusive third star, and then once achieved, the constant gnawing worry that it would be taken away. I've read elsewhere as well how stressful this becomes, how easy it is to go out of business once stars are rescinded (an automatic drop of about 40-60% of clientele per star), and the overdrive that constantly fuels the chefs.

It's fascinating to me that in an industry that's about pure luxury (at the 3-star level you can easily drop a few hundred dollars, if not more, for dinner), the chefs who create these masterpieces drive themselves towards perfection such that they are not able to enjoy living life in the same way. Bernard seems to be more driven than most, not missing even one food service, despite traveling the country to promote his restaurant. He put so much stress on the image presented that he didn't leave himself time to just stop and enjoy life - vacation, spending time with family, all that took a second spot to the restaurant. Though, much the same can be said of many driven business men who barely see their families - in this case it's that much more tragic for while he's seeking happiness in his success, he won't let himself be happy that he's achieved the level he has.

And all that fame he was seeking does actually turn out to be fleeting - in the 80s, snap bracelets and leg warmers were all the rage (and after that plaid shirts and the grunge look), and at that time, I'll bet you that the producers of those products thought they hit the money spot, the champagne uncorked and the money rolling in from all side. But as with anything, whether it be cooking to clothing to music, what's new becomes old-fashioned and yesterday's trend-setters become tomorrow's history.

I enjoyed reading this book. I learned a great deal about the culinary industry in France, about the Michelin and Gault-Millau guides, and the ephemeral fame to be had. It was a bit of a slow read, not one of those books that I'd be thinking about reading all day and can't wait to get my hands on. But then, it's not supposed to be.