Here be spoilers...ye whiny bitches.

Warning! Harry Potter spoilers below!!!

Good. So I just (and I mean just, like two minutes ago) finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and as the world is waiting for my opinion of it, here you go. I'm certain there's nothing in here that hasn't been said, but that's what blogs are for, right?

Anyway, J.K. Rowling remains almost uniquely easy to read; I've never read a series of books that were such page-turners, and just about everyone else I talk to feels the same way. My Dad and his wife took the book up to Door County for a week, she read it first, he second, and they said it took two days each. It took me only a little longer; I read it in slightly more fits and starts, ie on an El or a CTA bus, among other places. But seriously, I'd look down at the page numbers and twenty seven pages would be gone in two minutes. That's entirely a tribute to Rowling's writing style, which couldn't be easier to digest, and I mean that in the good, ecumenical way.

That said, she's clearly making some points, and as much imperial command as she must have, it's intersting to wonder if the corporate overlords at Warner Bros. aren't whispering in her ears about anything. There's a little bit of Spider-Man at the end, what with the "I can't love you, I have Thins to Do," there's a little of this and that all over the place. (The geekier five per cent among you will quibble that all this stuff is stolen from Tolkien anyway; I don't give a shit. Shut the hell up. You've had your movies, now go the hell away.)

She's also getting more overtly political: Scrimgeour is clearly a stand-in for the Bush-Blair "Coalition of the Willing," (or, as Jon Stewart once called it, "England and Spain") asking Harry to put a brave face on the tragedy of the times by smiling and "reassuring" everyone (although Dolores Umbridge, and her dolorous umbrage, who will go down in history as one of the great literary villains, I believe, was a better straw man than is put up here); the book begins with a clear swipe at the tabloid nature of the right-wing and its attendant ass-licking media. I don't think this means Voldemort has a corollary in the real world, but her targets seem pretty clear.

The thing that makes me think the most about these books is who they're being written for now. Clearly, when she started, they were for kids, but I firmly believe that Goblet of Fire was twice as long as the first three because it had become clear that adults were picking the books up as well, and adults of every stripe. (Look around for the tale of the woman who made herself a costume to win the "First book out of the box" contest at her local bookstore; they gave the prize to a baby in a cape, and this woman's web entry read like a National Lampoon story from the late 70s. "I could have put out her little eye with my wand, I wanted to," shit like that. Jesus, I waited a month, why couldn't you?) I'm about as far from the sword/sorcery/wizards/spells thing as it gets, and I love them. See my first paragraph as to why. She's peppered this one with "slut" and, seriously, what Harry does to Malfoy ain't kid stuff at all. (I skeeve my brother reading this to my two pre-teen nieces, stumbling on to some of this charnel, but he's a college professor, and he'll probably vet it before he even lets it in the house.) But of course kids are reading them still, and her giving Harry the rationale to realize that just because you're in the arms of an adult doesn't mean you're safe or even loved is a good thing for kids to get from these books.

Also, I think Rowling is now more aware of the global audience; these books used to be almost completely, utterly, totally British. Gryffindor is a Welsh-sounding name, Hagrid is obviously a Yorkshire giant with his "yeh's" and " want ter's" and "summat's," McGonagall is Scottish, with her tartan hanky, Seamus Finnegan, Neville Longbottom, etc. But the success of the books and, more, the movies, seems to have homogenized them just that little bit; this one doesn't seem quite as proud to be British as the first few. Michael Gebert once pointed out that Olivier's Henry V, filmed in the British Isles (mainly Ireland)almost in secret during the War, as a rallying cry for his king and countrymen, was one of the few films of that era to be completely, utterly, and proudly British. That's one of the things that I, as a lifelong Anglophile, always liked about J.K. Rowling's books. Would that it were a little truer with Half-Blood Prince.