Well, I have to do this. Just check the name of this blog, for heaven's sake!

I did speed-read Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince through most of Saturday night. It was worth every minute of it. Thought of a good many things to write about on the blog while I was reading it, though it all eludes me now.

When you read a book like that, not letting go of it for even a minute, not even for loo breaks, the inevitable happens. You finish it too soon. When I had just started reading it, there was this terrible decision I had to reach. Should I take it slow and easy, read it chapter by chapter, savouring the feeling of actually reading a new Harry Potter book – one which holds surprises and unexpected twists and turns, one that I didn't know like Jack and Jill went up the hill, or should I just whoosh through it like I always do? This whole tortuous decision-making process lasted all of two seconds while I continued gobbling it up like I always knew I would.

When I had finished it less than 24 hours later, I felt classically bereft and lonely. (Ok, anybody who thinks this is sinking into bathos obviously doesn’t understand a thing about Harry Potter and can leave right now). And what irked me most on Sunday morning was the fact that nobody I knew had read the book – so I couldn’t discuss it in excruciating detail like I was dying to. People just kept calling me to ask who had died – although not really expecting me to play spoiler -- but which I did with much relish.

And then I realised that there wasn’t much to discuss about the book, actually. I mean, there aren’t too many surprises left anymore. I can sort of guess what will happen now. I’m sure it will happen as startlingly and uniquely as everything happens in HP, but what I mean is, most of the really big questions have been answered.

Really, I could be quite cynical about it at one level, and still thoroughly enjoy it in another. I mean, there were some things I could sense coming from a mile away, rather, from the second chapter onwards, but it was still a kick to find out that it was so. I knew there couldn’t be such old-fashioned, unworldly, un-sexed up 16-year-olds in all of England, that Harry and Ron seemed more out of Tom Brown than a school in modern-day England, but somehow I was just glad they were such gentlemen and not vandalising perverts. When a book can suck you into its world like that, I think it’s quite, well, magical.

It’s rather like reading a satisfying Agatha Christie – if you stop to think about it after you’ve finished reading, there are a million highly improbable things you can point towards. But most of the time, you just close the book with a satisfied sigh and don’t want to think about the million improbable things.

There are some books you can’t classify as good or bad, and you don’t even want to decide their merits or lack thereof – you just love them for being there. Well, I’m a bit like that about Harry Potter.