Half Blood Prince - No spoilers ahead

It began at 1:15 pm a pleasant Sunday afternoon innocently enough. 12 HOURS, a sandwich, a pizza slice, a sumptuous dinner followed by a mango lassi later I can finally claim to be a small drop of the all consuming Harry Potter wave that seems to have swept the muggle world and possibly also the parallel wizarding universe. It is an interesting notion that all wizards of the world would be waiting out for this book which they would be regarding as another edition of the adventures of the wizard they would have now come to treat as God. So the book instead of being as just another book would be something of the lines of a Bible / Ramayana part 6. Anyways before I digress too much (I know some might argue that I have already) I must get back to discussing my opinion of the book. Well first things first I must inform all of you that HARRY POTTER DIES. Do not repulse back in horror and shock for I have not given away a spoiler here (J K Rowling would probably sue my a** to hell if I did that I guess) its just that the Harry that we’ve come to know from the past books is kinda missing and we see new facets in his personality as well as his trusted and loyal circle of friends Ron and Hermione (the new age fellowship as some would like to believe). In the part of the series they all grow out from their overprotected shells and face the big bad worlds themselves. They all go through experiencing their own share of happiness, anger, and hatred dealing with most of it themselves. They discover their loves experience their heartbreaks thus lending a much higher emotional quotient to this book. Thus while there is a lesser amount of action the book scores and moves successfully forwards through the undercurrents running through its various sub plots (almost like how Kill Bill 2 compared to part 1). The book thus makes for interesting reading and would probably end up second best to only Goblets of fire. Moving on to the negatives I felt that the book was needlessly loquacious (mebbe all that talk of the Potter books encouraging reading habits amongst children has gone to JKR’s head) and there are chapters that can be removed in entirety without making any difference to the book. The title of the book was also not well justified and seemed like a gimmick because I seriously felt it would somehow be the main plot of the storyline. Also the ending of the book looks like a shameless publicity stunt for the next book in the series (that doesn’t stop me for waiting for it nonetheless).
All in all the 12 hours were well invested so people with that kinda time on your hands I say go grab your copy now (or request your room mate for it as I did  ).