I finished at 2:30 am. Too sleepy to get weepy over D then but woke up rather shocked. I can't talk to anyone else about it because my son, in-laws and such are still reading. I liked this much more than #5. That one seemed to have 200 pages of padding. This one got right to it. Harry is so grown up now and the themes are so adult. You guys are sharp re RAB - I missed Regulus Black.
So I am hoping that Harry isn't as whiny as in the last book? That is what annoyed me the most.
I missed it, too. It was a "Duh!" moment once it was pointed out to me. I also thought this book was more adult.
I also thought this book was much better than the last one. It seems that every author has a "fill" book that doesn't go smoothly from one point to another without excess padding, and IMO, OOTP was JKR's "fill" book.
I guessed early on who the Half-Blood Prince was, and am now more conflicted about Snape than ever. I thought the textbook was older than Harry's parents' generation, of which Snape was one. And someone who knew the spells and devised the charms that Snape did would have had much greater power to assist V than what Snape did. Think of how Snape threatened Quirrell in the first book, when Harry could have been done away with at no suspicion to himself. And I still think that D was/is smarter than to trust Snape on the basis of Harry's reasoning. . .
Just some random thoughts.