Does Ron sublet from Dumbledore?

OK, wow. I just read that, ita and...it's both convincing, and truly makes me believe that some people have wayyyyyy too much time on their hands.

Her next book, though, is one I'm looking forward to, because she has a personal stake in it. Her grandmother was a worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in NY, and left a week before the fire that killed 150-plus women workers (and changed the face of American unions).

This sounds fascinating. I wonder if she was afflicted with survivor guilt.

I finished Jennifer Government on books on tape. It was okay. The characters were charicatures, one was annoyingly stupid (Hack Nike), the plot either needed to be tighter or more over the top a la Christopher Moore, the pieces come together at the end just the way you can see they were going, but I was entertained. I like the bar code tatoo.

Soderberg/Clooney's Section 8 has optioned it? Huh.

it's both convincing, and truly makes me believe that some people have wayyyyyy too much time on their hands

I agree on both counts... but verrrry interesting.

But Harry's mom is like Hermione -- from a non-wizarding family, but with strong magical talent.

Waitaminute, I thought that it never has been specifically spelled out that Lily's family was non-wizarding. Petunia goes on about how pleased the parents were when Lily got her letter from Hogwarts, but that's it.

(Yes, I'm still clinging to the notion that Petunia is a Squib. Also, that Lily and Snape were involved, and that her eventually rejection of him caused him to join the Death Eaters. What? Stop looking at me like that ...)

You're right -- I'd forgotten that. Then it totally could be Dudley that is referred to.

All Rowling's titles have that retro gee-whiz boy's-adventure air. I have to admit "Half-Blood Prince" isn't as cool as "Philosopher's Stone" or "Chamber of Secrets" or ... well, most of the others, really, but it doesn't provoke the same "You've *got* to be kidding me" reaction as "The Phantom Menace" or "Attack of the Clones," so I'm okay.

In other news, Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, a collection of stories about the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake which killed 4,000 people, is just marvelous. The stories are about people only tangentially affected by the quake, often just people from neighboring regions who only watched TV coverage, and how they go through their daily, quiet, often solitary or drifting lives, pushed just slightly out of course by this tremendous event over in the corner. The stories are really hard to describe--not slow but very careful, lucid, all these details and moments building up to something extraordinary at the end. Quiet moments of connection or disconnection, hope or despair, discovery, humor or joy or sorrow.

I too always thought Petunia is a Squib, and that her jealousy/frustration over being non-magical is what led to her rejection of the wizarding world and marrying someone who's so wholly against it.

And, refresh my memory...what's a veela?

I thought that Petunia and her family, except for her sister, were muggles. And that there was an, "Ooooh, a magical daughter -- cool!" factor in her family that made her hate her sister and other magic users. Admittedly, most of this is probably just assumptions on my part. But she seems to have a level of fear for things magical that I don't think she'd have had if she'd grown up in a magic-oriented household.

I'm with Calli, but I think Petunia's fear of magic is more a fear of all things that aren't exactly the way the neighbors do things. The Dursleys seem militantly average.