For One More Day

I feel really soppy now.

I've heard this guy before. Mitch Albom has been praised from more than one quarter among the various ppl I've mixed with. Finding this book in my house when I popped home this summer, I decided to see what the fuss was about. Pretty dangerous, considering this is how I got interested in Harry Potter.

It was well worth it.

The premise is simple. A man on the verge of committing suicide after a wreck of a life, wakes up to see his mother. The only problem: his mother's been dead 20 years, marking the downward spiral of his life.

What would you say to someone if you could have them back all over again?

On hindsight, I suppose a lot of what was written could be called corny and a rehash of some movie or other. But the fact of the matter is, I liked what I read. Simple sentences, nothing complicated. Not pretentious, no cringe-worthy moments, you never get the sense Albom's trying too hard to get his point across. Plus a twist at the end.

A short book that left me feeling good at the end. Not good as in feel-good, but good knowing that authors like this still existed and books like this were still being written.

And I want to read his other books.

HarryPotter (the end of...)

The last Harry Potter in the series. This one had me all excited way before it appeared, to the extent of preordering it (!) and going up all the way to town to collect it the night it was released.

An overnight reading later, and I can say that I'm somewhat disappointed. Possibly being slightly harsh here. I mean, this is the fastest selling book of all time, plus bringing fame and fortune to 3 kids and a 40-something year old lady (hats off to Joanne).

Its different from the other books (and here's hoping you've read them) in that Harry Potter is now on the run. Yup, no Hogwarts, Quidditch, lessons or dodgy toilets to worry about. Instead, we are presented with a older Harry, a couple in the form of Ron and Hermione and a more- actively-evil Voldemort. Chase scenes, spell duels and flashbacks are the theme of this book.

Speaking of which, people DO die here. A lot. Which is somewhat fitting given the grim nature of the book. However many of the death scenes were somewhat perfunctory I felt. Plop, ooh he's dead. That kind of stuff. And a couple of people did die that I wasn't expecting, too.

If you're wondering whether reading the last book is enough, you'd be in trouble. References to the earlier books in the series abound, and the end-story is only going to make sense if you've read (and understood) book 6. Maybe its cos I'm slow, but I only really understood things after reading through the ending twice.

I expected a longer, more fleshed-out story to end the series. In the end, I got a different sort of tale. One that starts off with a bang, which dampens slightly in the middle, and picks up near the end. All the characters from previous books make an appearance, btw. And its good to see the what-happened-to-so-and-so chapter at the end.

Now all we have to do is to wait for the movies, which seem to be getting better and better.