Book: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Page: 52
Which is: Chaos and confusion at Privet Drive, Dementors have attacked Harry and Dudley, Harry might be expelled for using a Patronus, he’s waiting to hear more.
Lead: 609
Time Spent: 39.25 hours
Pages Remaining: 1672 (59% complete)
Estimated Completion: Sun 15th July
Favourite Character: Harry
Random Quote: If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
Cool Moment: The duel with Voldemort
Phew! Some big numbers there.
Where to? Well I watched half an episode of Life on Mars while I made lunch and finished off the rest with a break later. That’s an hour. I watched a 20minute interview with Rowling on Youtube – part of which I watch twice so call it half an hour. I know it took a long time to get going yesterday – getting up, bathroom, dressed, first coffee etc – about an hour. I wrote my blog – half an hour. I cooked and ate my tea – a microwaveable thing so half an hour? That’s 3 1/2 hours. The other 2 1/2 was “breaks” none of which were meant to be more than 10-15 minutes but I suspect some were longer.
So today I got up again at 12 and I’ll probably be starting reading in 10 minutes (1:30). I’ve got to go to the shop before 4pm which will probably take 1 1/2 hours… and I need at least 6 hours reading to be on track about 8 if I want to have a few early nights. If I can finish today before midnight that would be excellent. We’ll see.
Ok, Harry Potter. You want to hear about him? Well Goblet of Fire is my favourite Harry Potter movie and as I think I said, prior to this I’d read less than half the book itself. So it’s tempting to talk about all the differences. However, if I follow through with my idea of watching the movies I’ll do review/compare then – keeping up the blog every day tradition.
I enjoyed Goblet of Fire but it does suffer the same problem as Prisoner of Azkaban in that it overloads on exposition towards the end. Voldemort treats Harry to a long drawn-out explanation of how he returned, Crouch/Fake Moody does the same then just for good measure Dumbledore uses truth potion on him to get even more. Even as the book is in its closing pages we’ve got Hermione explaining how she stopped Rita Skeeter. I think Rowling is excellent at setting up all these threads but bad at tying them up. Really the scenes with Voldemort should be the climactic of the book followed by a short denouement and then end. In reality we have an overlong exposition scene in the middle of the climax and three longish chapters afterward.
This book also suffered more than the previous ones of me knowing how it ended. Which is mainly due to knowing the main plot points from the movie but not having read the book itself. Lent itself to a “get on with it” feeling at times.
But having said that I did really enjoy the book and I would have wanted to know what had happened in the various threads of the story. The end of the book is a real turning point in the overall 7-book arc and that’s fun. I liked some of the relationship stuff, some of the stuff about Harry and Ron falling out and about how Ron feels about money – all felt very true.