Lynn Sislo has just posted the third installment in her Beginner’s Guide to Classical Music. Good stuff!

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling

As all the world knows, June 21st was Harry Potter day throughout the
English-speaking world. I’ve not yet managed to get a copy of the latest
tome, but in preparation I re-read
Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire, which I’d only read once
before, when it in turn was brand new.

I liked it better this time. I’m in a lazier mood, maybe, but recently
I’ve been tending to read books at their own pace, slowly, rather than
rushing through them as fast as I can. Read slowly, I found it more
entertaining, especially the scenes toward the end. It’s a good yarn.

The character development is a little lacking, except for the major
players. Harry spends a good bit of the book, we are told, fascinated by
Cho Chang, who plays on the Ravensclaw quidditch team. We aren’t told
much about why he finds Cho attractive, just that he does. (Of course,
looking back on my years as teenage boy, perhaps that’s realistic.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next one…when I can find a copy.

I’ve got an extremely busy week just ahead, so posting might be sporadic. Or it might not; we’ll see. Everything should be back to normal by the end of the month.

I’ve just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Through Darkest Zymurgia!

If you’ve come in late, it’s a ripping yarn of adventure, exploration, and potable beverages. Try it, you’ll like it!

I love James Lilek’s daily page, The Bleat; it makes me laugh out loud more often than anything else I see on the ‘net. It’s all because of passages like this one:

One of the how-to books my wife bought suggested a boombox in the maternity room, with quiet music that helped you “center.” Something with flutes or aeolian harps or zithers played with feather dusters. I brought some Beethoven. Bring that kid out to the strains of the fifth! I also brought some nebulous new-age stuff I’d purchased in the 80s. It all sounded like music suitable for glacier races. It wasn’t any help at all – it just trickled out from the speakers, like the faraway sighs of a lovely zeppelin slowly deflating. At sunset. Near a lake. With swans.

I picked up my daughter at the library after work tonight. She is
spending one day a week there during the summer months helping out
with shelving books, story hour and the young adult book group the
librarian is trying to garner interest in. I got chatting with the
librarian, a very nice woman with virtually no knowledge of the kids
market in books or even what young folks like to read. Of course,
being the type that will recommend books to anyone who even remotely
looks interested, I left her with a list of decent fiction that kids
ages 10-14 might enjoy reading. No more “MaryKate and Ashley go to
Hawaii” for this crowd!

One of the books I recommended is Fox’s “One-Eyed Cat.” It’s a
Newberry Honor book, one of the few lit awards that actually seems to
award good writing and not good publishing. The story is fairly
simple. A young boy has a father who’s a preacher and a mother crippled with
rheumatoid arthritis. His dashing Uncle comes to visit for his
birthday and brings him a hunting rifle which his father promptly
confiscates and banishes to the attic. Curiosity takes over and the
boy sneaks up to the attic at night, gets the gun and goes out to do a
little target practice. He’s startled by a noise, reacts and shoots
something. Later, he sees a cat with its eye shot out wandering the
neighborhood and realizes he was the one that shot it.

That is a very bald precis of the plot. The father is well portrayed
as a heartbroken man with a sick wife struggling to care for her and
his son. The mother is realistically depicted without being
melodramatic about her pain or illness. And the young boy finds a
friend in an old man down the road who takes in the cat and nurses it
back to health. When I read the back cover, I worried that here was
yet another anti-hunting novel along the lines of Bambi–something
not well thought of in my family of avid hunters–but really it
turns into more a tale of responsibility and consequences, guilt and
repentance than anything else. And it reads really well. Definitely a
must read for my daughter.

I’ve not been a fan of the Emperor Napoleon since I began reading Patrick O’Brian and found out what he’d put Europe through. Arecent biography agrees, according to the always interesting Cronaca; be sure to click on through for Victor Davis Hanson’s review.