When we last heard from our hostess, she was eagerly awaiting her copy of Harry Potter 7. To catch everyone up, here’s what happened.

Friday night, I re-read book 6. I had to. I had already watched “Princess Mononoke” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and was wide awake with anticipation. I was up until 3 in the morning and then woke up at 8:30, checking UPS tracking every half-hour (no more frequently - that would’ve been a bit crazy). I puttered about until the mailman arrived. UPS had passed along my package to the USPS for local delivery, so it came with the mail at 11:30.

Boom. Package opened, book opened, I’m back in bed and reading.

I emerged from my cloud of fantastical loveliness four hours later. I am a very quick reader (yes, I retain what I read), but the Harry Potter books are exceptionally quick reads. By this I mean that they are deeply engaging and enthralling, do not require a bedside dictionary, and despite their high page counts, if you decreased the typeface, pared down the whitespace in general (margins, gutters, leading, etc.) you could probably get this one down to a 400 page trade paperback.

Anyway - four glorious hours. I enjoyed it tremendously and it is my favorite book in the series. There are a few solid reasons, but I shall not divulge them for another few weeks until I know that everyone who’s still reading has finished. I could pull the old font color trick so you have to highlight the text here to read it, but I don’t want to do that. I’ll just wait. Patience is, after all, a virtue.

I got misty-eyed a few times while reading, but I didn’t cry. My friend Krys left me a (not truly) scathing voicemail about this. I had promised to call her when I finished reading, so I did and left a voicemail saying that I’d finished it, loved it, got emotional, but didn’t cry and thought she’d love it, too. Her return voicemail: “How could you NOT cry when [plot points omitted]?!?!?”

This doesn’t mean that there weren’t sufficient reasons to cry; I’m just a hard nut to crack when it comes to those things. That is, unless I’m suffering from a depressive episode, in which case I will cry when I hear the Natalie Cole song from the eHarmony commercials, when I can’t decide what to wear to work or if I want Manhattan clam chowder for dinner and the only canned soup in the pantry is split pea. Pathetic.

So, read the book once. Watched half of season 1 of “Arrested Development.” Read the book again and then went to sleep. Sunday, I spent time with my friends Theresa and Kofi; we went out for Thai food, talked about Harry and the Potters (the band - they move in some similar musical circles to my friends) and then talked about Harry Potter.

And then work, work, work.

Tonight’s train ride home was a good reminder of why I do enjoy taking the train; there are often some interesting little slices of life one can view. On NJ Transit trains, passengers are allowed to drink alcoholic beverages. The man sitting across the train aisle from me was kicking back after a long day, in his suit, with his nice dress shoes, drinking a beer and just chillin’. The woman next to him was reading Harry Potter 7. The man kept looking over the woman’s shoulder and checking out the book. Finally, he excused himself and asked her if she was managing to get through it without hearing spoilers and finding out how it ends.

You could see her tense up, jaw strained, her book suddenly closed and a weak smile on her face. She said, “No, I’ve been doing fine. I’ve just been making sure I don’t read the papers or go online!” The man replied that he was thinking more about the train - that he was sure someone on the train would have been talking about it, would’ve been reading the paper, or would have said something to her. Again, she looked somewhat frightened and replied that no, she hadn’t overheard anything or anyone and that she was almost done (she was - only had about 50 or 60 pages left.)

The man continued on for a bit and it became clear after about 30 seconds that he wasn’t going to give anything away, so the woman opened her book back up and answered his follow-up questions (”Are you liking it?” “If you were her, would you write more?”) pleasantly and politely.

That last question about writing more got me thinking… that’s a weird one to ask randomly on a train. Really. And he was totally interested in hearing what she had to say. Hrmmmm.

And I remembered that I’d been listening to NPR last weekend and they had interviewed J.K. Rowling’s publisher/editor, Arthur Levine. They mentioned that he lives in Montclair and visits a local independent bookshop in Montclair. Our train was nearing Montclair - and, actually, nearing the very stop for the bookstore mentioned in the NPR piece. The man got up, gathered his bag, wished the woman good luck in finishing the book unspoilt, and got out of the train at the Montclair stop.

Could it have been Arthur Levine? I think it could have. The man wore glasses, was balding and had his hair cut very close to his head otherwise, was on the youthful side of middle-age… so I got home and did a Google image search. I’m not 100% sure since I was watching his profile most of the time, and the pictures are all straight on, but it could have been him.

So… now it’s time to watch my newest Netflix arrival - “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.” It was an amazing book and I can’t wait to see how the movie translates. I was uncertain, but when I attended ALA last month, one of the librarians I spoke with said she was very impressed with the translation to film. She was also surprised that I’d read the book since she hadn’t met anyone else yet (in her profession???) who’d read it; but it’s a great book. Read it. It’s short, but so rich. Mildly disturbing, but worth your time.

Oh, and here’s a creepy video with people in strange animal costumes riding bicycles at night and clapping in unison.

Now I will go purchase some more Bat for Lashes songs from iTunes. I really like “Horse and I” and now I like this song, too.

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