Hi everyone,

the time has come for us to start discussing the sixth and penultimate book of the biggest literary hype in recent history (with the possible exception of Dan Brown, who we will now happily continue to pretend does not exist). Personally I am quite excited about it, as The Half-Blood Prince ranks among my favourite books in the series (also, this and book seven are the only ones I own in English, and as praiseworthy as the Dutch translation often is, it is still more fun to read the books in English, and it obviously allows me to participate more in discussions of language). In any case, all will agree that a lot of seminal events happen in this book, and there should be ample food for discussion.

Our discussions so far have sometimes suffered from small participation numbers, but the last one was at least much better in that regard than earlier installments. So I think we'll start with the pace we had in that discussion, i.e. three chapters on each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I will refrain from working out a full schedule, though, so as to give us the option of pausing, slowing down or accelerating whenever that should prove desirable. We have noticed before that Rowling often seems to write in groups of three chapters and that our schedule often works out amazingly well, but if at some point a different division works better, there's no reason not to go along with that.

This thread won't be Announced because we always have so many threads that need Announcing and it gets cluttered, but as noted previously, you can change your message board settings so you see the threads with recent replies first. Or you can just do what I usually do and use "My Threads" to keep track of this thread (those with a premium account can also mark the thread as a "Favourite Thread" ).

Rules are the same as always:

• Please keep spoilers out of posts title if at all possible, and warn if a post contains spoilers for later books (i.e. book seven).
• Try to post in the right place so the thread remains easy to handle even when there are hundreds of posts. Do feel free to start a sub-thread of your own when the topic you want to discuss doesn't really fit into any of the provided sub-threads, though.
• Suggestions are welcome in the suggestions sub-thread.

And for your convenience, here are the links to the previous discussions:

Book One: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Book Two: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Book Three: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Book Four: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Book Five: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix