Voldemort vs. Vader

Lately, the back story seems to have taken center stage: first the Star Wars prequels, and now the latest Harry Potter book. Rowling does a pretty good job in the latest book filling out the details of Voldemort's past. This is effective, I think, in making him more real, and importantly, a more imposingly scary figure. Before this book, Voldemort was simply a caricature of evil that popped up at the end of each of the Potter books to be promptly vanquished by a geeky teenager. The back story makes his not-to-be-named wickedness more tangible.

Before the latest "Potter," and before the Star Wars prequels, Vader would clearly have won in any head to head with Voldemort. Vader is appropriately nasty and puts the hurt to a number of fairly potent folks: he "kills" Obi-Wan, he renders Han Solo helpless, and he beats up on Luke fairly handily. The prequels, though, pretty much ruined Vader for me. As far as I can tell, here's how Anakin's transformation went down:

"Boy, Mace Windu's obfuscatory politicking sure is confusing. And what's with his weird purple lightsaber, anyway? He's just not as cool as that Palpatine, who has a wicked cool gravelly voice with that vaguely sinister precise diction. Oh, and my wife may or may not be in danger. Better go slaughter a bunch of helpless kids and become the most wicked tyrant the galaxy has ever known."

Right, so instead of swimming and all that other triathlon stuff, the greater portion of this last Sunday was spent gobbling up "The Half-blood Prince." I bought the book at Kepler's late Saturday night (my copy was about the 1000th sold in less than 24 hours at this local, non-chain bookstore) and had it pretty much finished by Sunday night. I think it may be the best so far, maybe even surpassing "Azkaban." I'm looking forward to the last book.