The strongest possible fic rec

No matter whether you are or not actual Harry Potter fans, if you care for good writing at all, and miss reading "Inverarity"'s two Harryverse novels, Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle and Hogwarts Houses Divided, you will be kicking yourselves, and you will deserve it. Inverarity creates enormously attractive characters, each brilliantly individual and motivated, and then places them in compelling situations; her cliffhangers are the best I have seen since I first read Dick Francis, and right now, in the unfinished Hogwarts Houses Divided, she has come up with the mother of them all. (Alexandra Quick is completed, but it is only the first of a series.) The writing is delightful, clear, descriptive without being diffuse, and has excellent dialogue; the pacing is superb; and there is that intangible extra, the sense of drive, the storytelling energy, which makes a reader keep reading no matter what. This is not just for Harry Potter fans: it is a first-rate sequel of stories by an amazingly accomplished writer who really should be getting paid for her work.

I have already said something like this, but I do not find the subject boring

This is not to put down the oppressed Tibetans. But all the people who now notice that there is oppression, ethnic swamping, cultural suppression and destruction in Tibet - did they only notice it now? And why is Tibet special, when the rest of China is ruled with the same methods? Does tyranny only become unacceptable when it touches an ancient (and frankly backward - Tibet before 1959 was no haven of freedom or enlightenment) culture that has a faddish hold on certain areas of Hollywood? Did the regime that gave you the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tien-an-men Square massacre, and infinite other acts of inhumanity and cold-blooded criminality, only begin to be despicable a month or two ago? I find the West's attitude to China quite incomprehensible.