My Last Attempt @ Blogging :)

ok...I admit...I don't know how to blog :)

This is my last attempt @ blogging and if it does not work, so be it.

One thing I have realized as a parent is how difficult it is to keep up with your child's schoolwork. So, I am going to begin uploading School Assignments that I put together for my daughter. Hopefully, it will help some of you parents out there.

Harry Poter and The Deathly Hallows ...Review.

Maybe i am just caught up in potter mania, but this seems to be as good a reason as any to put a review together...the challenge of course is to avoid too many details of the plot so that others can still read it...

What i do plan to do it to put the story out in precis over the next week and then also provide a chapter-by-chapter synopsis....when i get around to scanning the covers, will edit this post to include the scans.

This review contains spoilers...read at your own risk.
=====================================
Well, what do i say...this instalment from JK Rowling has been worth the wait...every second of it. In Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, JKR has surpassed all that she has been praised for so far...In a fitting end to the series, she describes the growing up of Harry and his friends...Hermione and Ron find a way to express their feelings and Harry learns to delve deeper into the world of magic...probably as deep as no live wizard has ever gone before....and JKR, at the end, does something which probably touches the heart more than all pairings and emotional scenes in all the books put together...she gives Harry a family to call his own.

Through the book, Harry is alternating between despair and hope...it resonates with incidents any normal person would go through...maybe that is what makes JKR's Harry so special...he is vulnerable like us...Rowling has tapped into that special bit which Stan Lee did with Spiderman ages ago.

The fights between Harry and Voldemort are excellently choreographed in the book. The last fight involving the wizarding world of Harry and friends with Voldemort and his death eaters both inside and outside Hogwarts is excellent...it retains an innocence which you would not get if you read about Ragnarok and is still as fierce.

There is a certain purity to characters in the book...Harry, Hermione, Ginny, Luna and even Voldemort...his bewilderment during the last fight is described in excellent fashion...

Snape being a good guy was almost expected...At the risk of sounding far-fetched, Snape seems someone who JKR wants us to believe in...So, while he is relegated to the sidelines for most of the book, he and Dumbledore finally turn out to be Harry's mentors ...even in death. I do believe that Snape's death should have been better played out...After building up his character for so long, his death was somehow ... an anti-climax.

In any case, Harry finally achieves iconic status...whether it is to advise Lupin of his duties as a father or whether it is his acceptance and understanding of Snape's actions during the heat of battle.

Of course, there are a few unanswered questions...most of them are about minor though...

I personally believe that killing Fred off was not relevant to the plot at such a late stage...It does bring in an extra moment of Molly being the avenging mother and finishing off Bellatrix, but Freds' death does seem a little stretched. JKR seems to re-emphasise parent-child bonding over and over again in the book...Lily talking to Harry,

a) What happens to Umbridge after You-know-Who is overthrown?
b) What happens to Lucius and the other death-eaters ?
c) What does Harry do after the war? Obviously, he cannot go to a regular office, working for someone in a minimalistic capacity....and he definitely is not joining Hogwarts as a teacher

I'm sure there are a few hundred questions like this that will pop up in a few days on multiple websites, but... All in all, the best read i have had in a long while and i hope to be able to read it a few more times atleast. This book is as close to perfection as any book can get...I am now waiting for part 3 of the inheritance series. :-)

Eragon ... Review

What do i say about the inheritance series that has not been said already?
Book 1 of the series is Eragon...It is an amazing novel.

The book starts off with a fact paced action sequence where a shade tries to steal a dragon egg from an elf. He doesn't get the egg,but captures one elf and kills 2 others...
Eragon - the hero of the series picks up the egg in the spine and it is a roller coaster ride for him from then on. He meets up with Brom - an ex-dragon rider who trains him in the art of being a rider. On his journey with Brom and Saphira (his dragon) to track down the killers of his adoptive father, he learns the story of how the riders fell and how the king Galbatorix usurped power. This strengthens his resolve to be on the ide of good...aka. Luke Skywalker.

Brom is ambushed and killed , Eragon makes a new friend in Murtagh and rescues the elf - Arya. He also finds the Varden - the rebels who oppose Galbatorix. The stage is set for a showdown with the shade and the urgals who attack the Varden's outpost. Eragon is greviously injured by the shade, but manages to kill the shade as well. When he despairs of his injury and life, there is a voice in his head which tells him to be sane.

Book 1 ends on this note.

The interesting part of the book is that it probably predicts the manner of ending of the series as well in the form of a dream that Eragon has.

The book is somewhere in between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Comparisons with either series don't make sense as the book itself is for those readers who want to make a smooth transition from Rowling to Tolkein. To think that the author wrote it when he was in his teens boggles the mind.

Some scenes from the book - for example the scene where Angela the witch and solenbaum the werecat are introduced, the rescue of Arya, Eragon's first sparring fight with Arya - all stick to memory. This is a book which can be read multiple times and every part of the book is an awesome read. That is more than can be said about book 2 - which is a great read as well, but parts of which tend to get a little boring.

The Sea Of Monsters ... Review

so, i finally get around to reviewing my third book after atlas shrugged and the lightning thief...what a difference in literary tastes :-)

this is an excellent book along the lines of the first one...



So, now percy is looking forward to settle in his camp and funnily enough (for him), there have been no major incidents through the year...so, he looks forward to his last match with an opposing team and then it is off to Camp Half-Blood...the day is marred by a nightmare and a shadow following him, but is nothing compared to the monsters that show up for the match...percy meets up with annabeth and finds that a cyclops has been his only friend at school for the last year....the cyclops turns out to be his brother (poseidon is a very virile ruler in this book keeping in tradition with mythology :-) ).

They reach the camp and find that the tree (which was thalia...until zeus turned his daughter into a tree just before she died) has been poisoned and so there is a danger of the camp being over-run by monsters...unless someone finds the golden fleece...so, though it is clarisse - daughter of aries who is selected for the quest, percy, his cyclops brother and annabeth set out on a quest to find the fleece, save their satyr friend grover and to ensure that clarisse - who had the original quest does not feel upset about losing out to percy...

on the way, they meet with adventures which would make both ulysses and hercules proud....and of course, the stage is set for the third book when they discover that their entire adventure was just another plot by Kronos to gain power.

The book is an excellent read and brings out growing up-pains in a very light-hearted way...i guess my favourite parts are quite easily the ones where percy first feels a sense of shame about his brother and then pride at his achievements...and then the part about the gray sisters which is remarkably remniscient of the time that perseus found out medusa's hideout by stealing their singe eye...i for one am looking forward to the third instalment...The Titan's Curse when it releases next May.

A Long Wait

hi,

time to begin keeping commitments...before i start off this blog, would recommend that you take a look at

http://thecomicproject.blogspot.com

if you like the comics there, then you can pick up the downloaded comics at

http://thecomiclinks.blogspot.com/2006/08/comic-download-links.html

to read the comics, you should be able to download CDisplay

enjoy...

Well, now on to business....


Percy Jackson and the Olympians...Very interesting name for a very interesting series (i should try and scan the cover page of every book that i review...hmm..good thought).

This series promises to be an excellent one and is great for a bit of light reading. I usually judge books by the number of times that i read it and the frequency of reading percy jackson series in the last few weeks have been fairly reasonable (which is saying quite a lot). More info on the books can be found at:

http://rickriordan.com/children.htm

The Lightning Thief:



Very briefly, Percy Jackson thinks he has a bunch of disabilities and is fairly bad at school work (he gets thrown out of every school he attends) until he discovers strange things happening around him. He finds that his best friend is a satyr, his best teacher is a centaur and he is forced to destroy a minotaur...all in a matter of a couple of days. Not bad for a start to his vacation.
Then he finds that he is bunched with a few kids who are all "half-bloods"...offspring between gods and human beings. Soon, he meets up with the Oracle (like ancient times) and finds that he has to go down to the underworld, meet up with Hades and recover Zeus thunderbolt in the next 10 days, else, the world as we know it could end up in chaos. He discovers that things are not really what they seem and that it was Kronos - Zeus Father ...the chief titan who was responsible...In the process of figuring out this plot, perseus makes a couple of friends and encounters ancient evils that hercules and other heroes have encountered.

So, what is special about this book....I guess the writing stle is one of those things that makes this book a little different. The hero has no love lost for the gods, and yet, he learns to respect, love and fear them. The writing style is a little irreverent and while it is not in the same league (of irreverence) as the Bartimaeus Trilogy, it is enough for good enjoyment. the teaser on the back cover is a perfect example of this style....



I have read this book atleast 4-5 times and there are still no parts in the book that i skip over when i read it (usually, when i read a book multiple times, i skip over some boring parts). That makes this book good.

Bottom Line : This book is an excellent read. The writing style is excellent and for people who have read greek mythology earlier, the book resonates with ancient figures oft heard of, but not enough :-)

I will try to scan the cover here...

Next Time : The Sea of Monsters...Till then, bye...