I can't believe I forgot to mention the final Harry Potter volume in my roundup last entry. Suffice to say, it was fantastic--I agree with everything Elizabeth Hand says about it here and and she says it all well enough that I'll (to put this in Clarionese) just say "ditto Liz on Potter"* and pretty much leave it at that.











*'cept anti-ditto her on the Tolkein homage with the horocrux-necklace (I read it and thought, "oh, cool, Tolkein homage") and semi-anti-ditto her on the reactions to the previous books. I thought the first two were just OK--I really started to get into the series with #3--but I clearly enjoyed those early volumes more than she did. In particular, I've never understood the sentence-by-sentence level objections to the earlier books. That isn't because I necessarily think that those criticisms are untrue or unfair, but because I've never been able to read those books slowly enough to notice the sentence-level flaws. That said, like Hand, I ocassionally did stop to notice anomolously above-par passages in the final volume.