The Heir of Slytherin

Upon entering the Chamber of Secrets, Harry finds Ginny unconscious and unwakeable. (Hmm...spell check doesn't like that...un-wake-up-able? Better, now it just doesn't like "un".) Then Tom Riddle shows up and tells him not to bother trying to wake her up. Harry's a bit weirded out by the glowing 66-year-old who looks like a teenager and says he's a memory, but not quite enough. (I'm thinking there's some sort of spell at the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets that make you monumentally stupid if you're not the Heir of Slytherin.) Harry and Tom have a nice little chat about how Tom's evil and un-name-able and stuff and then Tom bad mouths Dumbledore. Well, he's not getting away with that! "He's not as gone as you might think!" Harry says. (that'll show him!) Well, with that kind of support, what could Dumbledore do but send a bird and a hat to help. Tom, understandably, finds this pretty hilarious and calls on the Basilisk to finish Harry off, but it turns out Dumbledore might just know what he's doing after all. Fawkes blinds the Basilisk and the hats exports a sword onto Harry's head, allowing him to kill the Basilisk. Unfortunately, the stupidity spell is still in effect and Harry manages to stab himself with a poisonous fang in the the process. Riddle taunts him as he dies, but Fawkes cries on the wound and heals him (pretty sure he heals the stupidity spell here too). Harry uses the Basilisk fang to stab the diary and Riddle fades or dies or whatever you want to call it. Ginny wakes up, the two of them join Ron and Lockhart and Fawkes flies them back to the bathroom and leads them to McGonagall's office...

This is obviously an important chapter in the canon of Harry Potter. We find out that Tom Marvolo Riddle is Lord Voldemort (and that he writes word jumbles!). We find out Phoenixes sing. We find out Moaning Myrtle has a crush on Harry. We learn Lockhart's completely lost his memory. And we learn that books can die.

In all seriousness, obviously this is a pivotal chapter in the series. Though we don't yet know it, we've just seen the first horcrux destroyed and plot-wise, that's about as important as you get. This is of course Rowling's true brilliance as a story-teller. She gives us a reasonably exciting climax, brings a large number of questions from earlier in the book to an answer and generally delivers a satisfying conclusion to the story (with the denouement to come of course) all while quietly laying the ground work for the last two books and the entire climax of the series. How many of us truly thought the diary would ever come up again except in passing? I know I didn't. It's these hidden set-ups and clues that keep us reading these books over and over.

I feel like I just petered out there, but I can't get the rest of the thoughts in my head to form coherent phrases. Perhaps someone else will have something to say about this chapter!

The Vanishing Glass

I almost missed another day, getting far too caught up in Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future - Volume 1 to remember little Harry. (On a related note, I was inspired to create a new tag for my LibraryThing catalog: "geek porn" for which I have some very particular and yet nebulous criteria, so far only Wheaton's book and Russell T. Davies' The Writer's Tale qualify.) I've also got a couple Sam Smith Oatmeal Stouts in me now, which might make this post more interesting...or it might just make me sleepy after a long week.

So it's ten-years-later and Harry is living in the cupboard under the stairs, where he apparently rooms with a bunch of spiders. (I can't help but find it odd that uptight Petunia would allow any spiders in her house, even to torture Harry.) Oh, and it's Dudley's birthday. This is actually one of the (very few) scenes I prefer in the movie. "But last year - last year I had 37!", so much better than "That's two less than last year." particularly as the latter requires Dudley to do some rather quick math we he proves is all but impossible a paragraph later.

Harry's baby-sitter breaks her leg (does she really though? Is this addressed in Order of the Phoenix?) and Harry gets to go to the zoo with the family. Vernon tells Harry there better not be any funny business, which is a bit ridiculous, even for the Dursleys, but it turns out to be a pretty good way to tell us all the weird stuff that seems to happen around Harry, so we'll forgive it, and Harry proceeds to have a pretty good day (I have no idea what a Knickerbocker Glory is, (and I'm too lazy to look it up) but I'm pretty sure I want one). It's a good day until they go to the reptile house anyway, where Harry has a quick conversation with a snake before the glass on it's cage disappears and the snake escapes, thanking Harry on the way. Surely that snake thing won't come up again, right?

Harry is, of course, punished for the Great Snake Escape, even though there's no proof he had anything to do with it other than a traumatized boy mentioning that Harry was talking to the snake (no 10-year-old boy has ever done that before) but this gives Harry the opportunity to be retrospective and tell us about what he remembers of his parents' death (a lot of green light, sounds like a car crash to me alright) and that a bunch of weirdos do things like bow and wave and shake his hand (can't say I really blame Petunia for trying to avoid that, it's a bit creepy).

Changed the format a bit, thoughts?