Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince - JK Rowling
Got through this on in a weekend. The 6th part of the Harry Potter saga doesn't disappoint, and like the targeted age group for this book, Harry is a teenager facing typical teenage issues, with evil wizard posses thrown in to the mix. And like many of us in the west, the wizarding community is being bombarded with flyers telling them to be alert, and report any strange magical events to the Ministry.
Like all of the Potter books, they are an easy, entertaining read, and the Author, to my memory, seems to have captured the sorts of issues that kids face and twisted them into a magical setting in a most interesting way. The ending was unexpected, and the uncertainty regarding the goodness or evilness of a key character was laid to rest once and for all....

Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
I really enjoyed this book. It's funny, sad, beautiful, honest and innovatively written. It's written with several interweaving narration styles, which in itself isn't original, but the premise behind these interconnected characters is that the book is written as if the (Jewish American) Author is researching a novel on a Ukrainian Jewish village from which his grandfather had survived in WW2, although you never get a direct narration from the Author. The Author engages a local tour guide to help him find the locations and hunt for a woman in a photograph who was credited with saving his Grandfather's life. The tour guide's Grandfather also comes along for the journey, and it brings his war time memories flooding back. What the reader is presented with is the writing that resulted from the trip:
- sections of the story written in narrative style from the tour guide (a young Ukrainian man, with adequate english, but dangerously armed with a thesaurus, sustituting inappropriate words from time to time!).
- folktale-style stories from the Narrator, going back to the late 18th Century. Beautifully depicts a village with its own peculiarities and customs, living in relative harmony (bar the odd Pogrom inflicted by the Russians) up until the Germans invade in 1942, focusing on the Author's supposed ancestors.
- Colloquial style letters from the tour guide to the Author, critiquing the Authors made-up folktales along the way, as chapters are sent East across the Atlantic.

Dramas unravel regarding the Authors family history up until and just after the war; the woman in the picture; the tourguide's (non-jewish) family's parallel experiences during the war; and finally the legacy that the war left in both the Author's and the Tourguide's families in the 2 following generations.

Well worth a read.