Maybe I do resent the success of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Panned and covet her readership, but am just too self-unaware to know it. But that doesn't really explain why I enjoyed some parts of the book and not others. Rowling wasn't any richer when writing the pages where characters are forever exhorting one another with banalities like "Come on" and "Let's go" than she was on Page 96, when somebody says, "[P]eople find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right," which I quite liked.

...

The only real relativism I'm defenseless against came from one of my favorite relatives: my 10-year-old niece, Carly. She e-mailed to say that my review "wasn't very nice." Actually, she called it a "pile of rubble," which, for my money, represents a more surprising and memorable use of language than anything in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:56 AM  |