Wahey! Book VIII, in a nutshell. (But you forgot the House Elves.)

I was all kinds of happy to talk HP with Buffistas, but have realized that this is a conversation I can't dive into without some serious catching up, as anything I can think of to say has doubtless been thought of by someone brighter than me, written about, and already been debated and put to death.

Off to read! Will hopefully be back with coherent thoughts.

Wahey! Book VIII, in a nutshell. (But you forgot the House Elves.)

Do they revolt? I know they are kind of revolting...

From the Leaky Cauldron interview:

MA: Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?

JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has.

Possibly taking it too much at face value to say that if she refers to Snape as "culpable" then he is in fact guilty. Of something.

I am also embarrassed to admit that I never clued in to the four houses representing the four elements (or even that Slytherin's common room was under the lake). Although I have been wondering if anybody's done a Harry Potter tarot deck.

JKR also said that she's sure some careful re-reader has already identified one of the remaining phylacteries Horcruxi.

Tying those two concepts together, the one that RAB got to before Harry and DD would be a "water" Horcrux. The diary...shrug... So can we think of earth, air, and fire Horcruxi? Or am I over-engineering?

Possibly taking it too much at face value to say that if she refers to Snape as "culpable" then he is in fact guilty. Of something.

Or she could have been talking about his Death Eater work during Voldemort's first uprising.

With HP talk slowing down (well, a little), is there any consensus on how we're going to pick the next book?

Signed,

Looking for yet another way to avoid the work I should be doing

Nilly, that was fascinating to read. I especially loved the parallel drawn between Voldemort's solitude and Harry's strong friendships. As a certain blond vampire once said, "A Slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn't in the brochure."

I forget who mentioned this upthread, but I now really want one of the major showdowns in Book 7 to be Harry defending the Dursleys from attack by Voldemort or the Death Eaters. It would make sense to have one of the final conflicts be over Muggles, given the sharp good guys/bad guys split over how Muggles and halfblood wizards should be treated. (As a side note: am I being weirdly oversensitive in feeling that "halfblood" is a kind of derogatory term itself? Is there a more positive term in the Potterverse for a witch or wizard of mixed ancestry?)

Or she could have been talking about his Death Eater work during Voldemort's first uprising.

True.

With HP talk slowing down (well, a little), is there any consensus on how we're going to pick the next book?

I was interested in the possibility of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

....but, that doesn't really help with "how we're going to pick the next book" unless "how" means "Raq assigns the reading."

Nilly! That was very interesting to read.

Meanwhile, in Australia they've discovered a way to use HP to teach Mendelian Genetics!.

I was rereading Goblet of Fire last night, and I started wondering if maybe the Sorting Hat couldn't be a Horcrux. I just hadn't realized that it had been Gryffindor's before he enchanted it. Over the years, the hat has probably been guarded less strictly than Gryffindor's sword.