PublishersMarketplace reports:

“Matthew Stewart’s THE GOD OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS: The Heterodox Origins of the American Revolution, which shows how the founders’ most cherished aim was neither to secure independence nor to establish a government without a king, but to eliminate from the earth forever the specter of theocratic tyranny, and that this heterodoxy was the driving force of the Revolution, to Alane Mason at Norton”

This sounds right, important, and timely.

HBP Chapter 26 Re-read

The Cave

What a day for a day trip …

Riddle climbed down the shoreside cliffs by magic … not specified what spell … but we know he had early mastery of telekinesis

Dd suddenly begins swimming with the agility of a much younger man – magic?

Tolkien’s “Say ‘friend’ and enter becomes “pay blood and enter.” Advantage JRR.

Dd says “your blood is more valuable than mine.” Why exactly? Here again Dd sticks with his overall strategic appreciation that Harry Potter is the single most valuable asset available to The Good Guys™. Why? The implication seems to be that he is the best chance of defeating Voldemort. The flip side of that is rather grim, namely that without Harry, The Good Guys, even with Dd, don’t really have a chance of defeating Voldemort.

“We couldn’t just try a Summoning Charm?” Harry, once more with the mastery of “Accio.”

Dd can detect the traces of magic, even decades-old magic left by a supremely skilled wizard. Here he seems to be operating with several orders of magnitude more skill than Harry can even conceive of.

Dd doubts that Harry’s magical capacity will even register on Voldemort’s detection spell b/c the old Voldemort is underestimating the powers of the young. This even though Riddle himself was a famous child prodigy! Suggests hat Riddle’s skill has increased hugely since he left Hogwarts – where he was already proficient enough to make a Horcrux diary.

The effect of the potion that Dd drinks is terrifying … “It’s all my fault… please make it stop.” I felt like I was going to throw up first time I read this. JKR prefigures Dd’s vulnerability.

Harry is hard enough to do what Dd asks and force him to drink the potion. He is perhaps even harder than Dd.

We see the pay-off of the Inferi setups earlier in the book. Harry doesn’t have much presence of mind, but once roused Dd is more than equal to the task.

This ring of fire scene is the cover of the English book. As many of us thought when the US and UK covers were released, the English cover still looks better, and it is a better reflection of the book than the US cover. The scene on the back of the US cover, with Ginny and harry looking up together at the Dark Mark in the sky, either a) does not exist in the book or b) comes after the most exciting part of the action.

Dd: “in the end the protection was well-designed. One alone could not have done it…” In other words, given the advantages of a preset situation, V’s skill was sufficient to defeat Dd.

THE DA VINCI CODE in 100 words
By Dan Brown

BEZU Fache stormed through the glass pyramid entrance to the Paris Louvre that had been designed by Chinese-born architect I M Pei.

None of these details had anything to do with the dead curator lying on his parquet floor - or the code leading to an invisible message that would lead to an another puzzle inside a magic box that would prove Jesus and Mary Magdalene had sex - but it helped pad things out a bit.

Robert Langdon groaned and waited for Sophie to notice his uncanny resemblance to Harrison Ford.

It was going to be a long, convoluted night.”

Plus seven other classic novels. Hilarious.

HBP Chapter 25 Re-read

Enjoyed the reference to Ron’s “Pygmy Puff” and the image of Harry silently reliving a particularly happy image he had spent down at the lake with Ginny at lunchtime.

Again to Slughorn’s credit that he approved of Ginny. I hope Slughorn gets to do something really useful in book seven. I’d like to see this potentially very likeable character given enough “ammo” to become a friend of Harry and fan favorite.

Eileen Prince is Captain of the Hogwarts Gobstones team – am I right that Gobstones has never been explained?

Liked that Harry knew that the Prince was not a girl – “I can just tell.” This reinforces the theme of “shadow friendship” that Rowling has cleverly developed.

Trelawney trying to hide sherry in the Room of Requirement is surprised that some students know of it … but it’s not really much of a secret, is it? They might as well give a tour on orientation day.

The big reveal occurs here as Trelawney mentions that she was “rudely interrupted by Severus Snape” the day of her interview with Dumbledore.

Note first that Harry could have obtained this info at any time by buttering up T and asking her about her first job interview at Hogwarts … but JKR has prudently given him an antipathy to her (not unlike an antimony …)

Who exactly was the voice that is speaking through Trelawney? It’s hinted that T has inherited a smidgeon of genuine gift from her famous ancestor, but that’s begging the question … if in the Potterverse there are occasional genuine prophecies, where do they get their 411? There are no gods, demi- or other, just a whole lot of magic floating around … is it possible that the magic connects with itself somehow and finds a human outlet? What’s its agenda? Why offer this particular prophecy?

Harry zooms to Dd and demands an explanation. Dd sticks to the position that Snape had no way of knowing that the parents in the prophecy were people Snape knew, and Dd reserves to himself once again just why he Is suyre he can trust Snape completely.

What could Snape possibly have told Dd that was more convincing than “I had a change of heart”? Ideas:

• “I’m Lily.”
• “I’m pregnant by James.”
• “I really, really don’t like Voldemort anymore.”
• Voldemort wants his favorite followers to make Horcruxes themselves and split their own souls into pieces. Actually, this is sort of plausible – Snape would not trust the idea of splitting apart his own highly protected soul.

Enjoyed the section where JKR has Dd close the typical “action hero” loopholes by saying “you must foillow even such orders as ‘run’, ‘hide,’ or ‘go back.’ Adds nicely to the characterization of Dd that he delivers this line with such self-awareness and irony.

The bit at the end where H gives Hermione and Ron the task of watching Malfoy and Snape made me think of “General Potter.” He’s quite good at telling people what to do in a crisis!

It’s typically admirable that Harry gives the Felix to R, H, and Ginny.

Publishers Marketplace reports:

“Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction master Greg Bear’s CITY AT THE END OF TIME, which transports readers to Earth’s final city at the terminus of time, where humanity fights a metaphysical disease that threatens to corrupt all of history, to Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, by Richard Curtis of Richard Curtis Associates (NA).”

This homage to Arthur C. Clarke sounds terrific. I am worried that homo sap will be doing well to last as long as we have been around — 30,000 years plus or minus 4,664, depending on whom you believe.

from The Official Website of Lee Goldberg:

MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE
Coming next January!

First in the all-new series of original mysteries starring Adrian Monk, the brilliant investigator who always knows when something’s out of place…

Monk’s house if being fumigated, and he has nowhere to go. Fortunately, his assistant, Natalie, and her daughter are kind enough to take him into their home. Unfortunately, their home is not quite up to Monk’s standards of cleanliness and order…

But while Monk attempts to arrange his surroundings just so, something else needs to be put straight. The death of a dog at the local firehouse—on the same night as a fatal house fire—leads Monk into a puzzling mystery. And much to his horror, Monk is going to have to dig through a lot of dirt to find the answer…”

I’ve been wondering if this might work. First signs are a little worrisome. Natalie, not Sharona? The book version of Sharona didn’t ask for a raise… why not keep her?

“Co-anchor of CBS News’ ‘The Early Show’ and Notre Dame graduate Hannah Storm’s NOTRE DAME INSPIRATIONS: The University’s Most Successful Alum Talk About Life, Spirituality, Football — and Everything Else Under the Dome, a collection of inspiring stories from numerous celebrities and other distinguished alumni about their legendary alma mater, to Trace Murphy at Doubleday, for publication in September 2006,”

This announcement submitted to Publishers Marketplace probably sounded a lot better before Michigan State beat Notre Dame in overtime, 44-41.

And it will sound a lot worse next fall when a healthy Mike Hart leads Michigan to a decisive victory at Notre Dame.

Paris Hilton’s YOUR HEIRESS DIARY: Confess It All To Me, an opportunity for fans to channel their own inner heiress as Paris shows them how to get the most fun and excitement out of every single day, again to Trish Todd at Touchstone Fireside”

Another Book I Won’t Be Reading.

oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Security and Usability, First Edition:

“Destined to be the classic reference in this emerging field, Security & Usability collects 34 groundbreaking essays from leading security and human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers on authentication, privacy and anonymity, secure systems, commercialization, and much more. It is expected to start an avalanche of discussion, new ideas, and further advances in this important field.”

The intersection of security and usability was always a critical issue when I was working on lexis.com. O’Reilly is prescient as usual in bringing out a book that hits on the nexus of these two often apparently countervailing imperatives.

SciFi Channel via HPANA: director Mike Newell explains the questions he & Ralph Fiennes were asking themselves during the filming of Goblet of Fire:

What does he want? Why does he want to come back? What sort of a person is he that he wants to come back? What sort of a person is it who wants to impose a reign of evil? Does somebody who wants to impose a reign of evil actually see that it’s evil? Or is it in fact for them a kind of good?”

I find this quote a little worrisome in terms of how the character of Voldemort will be played in the GOF movie. As far as I can recall, there’s no textual evidence whatsoever that Tom Riddle is concerned with anything other than his own good. The good of others is utterly extraneous to him, and in fact (as Newell would know if he had bothered to read Half-Blood Prince) Riddle is observed to be concerned with cruelty and domination from an early age.