Everyone else is posting about Harry Potter Book 6, so I guess it's time for me to weigh in as well. I finished the book a few weeks ago, and by this point hopefully everyone who's planning on reading it has done so. At least once.

Rachel poses the suggestion that Dumbledore is not really dead and that it was all a setup so that Snape can prove to Voldemort that he's really evil. This would be kind of cheesy, but I can see it happening. It was the first thing I thought of when I read it, and JK Rowling has been elusive when asked about it in interviews, but it almost seems too obvious. The whole point of killing off Dumbledore is so that Harry has to kill Voldemort on his own without incredible luck or help from Dumbledore, Hermione, Sirius, his dead mother, etc. etc. Despite being the "hero", Harry hasn't actually done much of anything heroic in the last 6 books, and it would be delightfully ironic if Rachel is right about him being upstaged by Neville in book 7.

The other interesting piece of news to come out of this book is that the long, slow, heavily-foreshadowed pairing of Hermione and Ron has finally come to pass. The fact that it has been foreshadowed since book 1 and beaten into our heads with a two by four since book 3 apparently did not faze the many many online forum denizens who were stubbornly insistent that Hermione would end up with Harry, and who are now wailing in puzzling agony that it hasn't happened. In one article (which I might cite if I can find it later), one 20-something female fan said something to the tune of "I will never be able to have a meaningful relationship again after finding out that Hermione doesn't end up with Harry". Wow.

Nevertheless, I thought this latest installment was pretty solid, much better than the meandering book 5 but not as good as book 4. I'm sure some gigantic merchandising blitzes are already being planned in order to wring the last few billions of dollars out of the final chapter. Oh, why didn't I think of this...