Chayyei Sarah writes
"Saturday night I picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and read the whole thing between the hours of 10 pm and 10 am the next morning. It was a killer staying awake on Sunday, but it was worth it. This was definitely a very good Harry Potter book, much much better constructed and edited than Book 5. And that's all I'll say for now, so as not to include spoilers on my blog."
Some clues which suggest Sarah's version of HBP was not the exact same as mine:
1 - My version wasn't well edited, or well constructed. It was flabby and thin.
2 - My version was not "a very good Harry Potter book." My version was a very bad Harry Potter book. A very good Harry Potter book has interesting subplots, shows us new and facinating corners of the magical world, (think the Dept of Mysteries in OP) and puts old familiar charactars in new situatons (Lupin, Moody and Malfoy, are past exmples) This book had none of that. (We don't even see or hear about Moody. He appears to have vanished from the Potter universe)
Worst of all it was boring. The hint of promise in chapter 2 is never developed and them it's nap time until the very end, which, as I remarked elswhere, was a scene that, for all its drama, was equal parts New Hope, Batman, and every Kung Fu movie ever made. In fact, my ratings of the books in the series, from best to worst as of today, are as follows:
Prisoner of Azkaban
Order of the Pheonix
Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire (tie)
Sorcerer's Stone
Half Blood Prince
4- Though we do get some back story in HBP, none of it is especially interesting. First, it's all about Voldermort, and none of it is earth-shattering in its originality. Why does Volfy spend his days plotting evil? Why, in books these days, does anyone - artist, serial killer, superhero - do anything? An unhappy childhood, of course. And unlike James Potter, who was revealed in OP to be complicated and nuanced hero, Voldy is all evil all the time, and surrounded by cardboard henchmen.
5 - I finished my version in just about 8 hours. If it took Sarah 12 hours to get through hers something's definately amiss. I want to read her version. Mine was a big let-down.
