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Even though I hate commuting, it does give me time for one activity that I’m not usually able to do: reading. On the GO train, there’s not much else to do anyways. I just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this morning. There are some things that I like and some things that I dislike about all of the HP books to date (keeping in mind, of course, that they are primarially aimed at readers younger than me).

I’m enjoying the story across all the books immensely. The fourth book was a real turning point, which makes sense if there will be seven books in total. Three at the beginning, dealing mainly with character origins and building Harry’s character, one in the middle, the turning point, and three at the end, to sort out all the evil. There’s tons of good stuff that didn’t make it into the movies, and I have no freakin’ clue how they will ever make movies out of Prisoner of Azkaban or Goblef of Fire. They’re long.

What I don’t particularly enjoy about the books is how the story progresses within each book. Especially with Chamber of Secrets, when you finally get near the end of the book when all of the good stuff happens, you realize that you just read a whole lot of pages for nothing, because what the characters were thinking and doing was completely and utterly contrary to what was actually happening. I would expect them to get at least something right some of the time. Having a twist ending for every book does make for some great reading, but you have to go through a ton of stuff to get to it.

Rowling’s writing has improved a lot since the first book though, which is nice to see. Right after I finished Goblet of Fire, I started Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men.