Book Review: Harry Potter

Rating: 🪄

Harry Potter is a series by J. K. Rowling, but you already knew that.

J. K. Rowling is nowadays a deeply distasteful person with abhorrent and harmful views on trans people (if you have 3 and a half hours, check out Contrapoint’s first and second videos on this). No money was given to her in this Potter re-read process, and that’s all that I’ll say about her here.

I started listening to the Harry Potter series on audiobook (the Stephen Fry narration in the King’s English) as something to fall asleep to. I thought that since they’re fairly simple and I knew the general plot already, it would be boring/disengaging enough to quickly doze off with.

Before I knew it, I was listening during the day, too. I had stopped listening to podcasts - it was just Potter. Instead of falling asleep, I was staying up an extra 20mins to hear if Gryffindor beat Slytherin at Quidditch or not, and how.

I forget exactly where it was online, but I was reading a thread a couple months ago titled “What’s the Modern Equivalent of Harry Potter/Pottermania?”. And the overwhelming consensus is that there isn’t one now, and wasn’t even one many decades before Harry Potter either. The sequential releases of the Harry Potter books was a once in a 50-to-100-year cultural phenomena. There weren’t lines of people across the world sleeping in tents on the streets awaiting the next book release of Narnia, Percy Jackson, Stormlight Archives, Hunger Games, or Twilight. My friend was telling me about how his family shared one copy of one of the later Potter books and it was being read with a bookmark per person pretty much 24/7 until everyone had finished it, with my friend’s Dad blowing past the kid’s spots late at night and the kids catching up during the day. You probably have your own Potter-related memories of both the books and movies coming out; I don’t have to convince you of the significance.

On reread, does it live up to this hype? Honestly, yes. They’re just excellent books. They are nominally fantasy, but there are tons of elements from other genres, too, especially mystery, young adult/coming of age, horror, and comedy (the writing, especially in the first couple books, is quite funny).

I think of the books in three themes across both the books and movies:

1. Books 1 & 2 (Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets): “innocence & play”. Voldemort’s dark undertones are present, but rarely the focus, and it’s more about establishing the whimsical and mysterious nature of magic, escaping the Dursleys into a fantastical world of best friends and evil enemies, sport, learning, confusion and courageous adventure.
2. Books 3 & 4 (Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire): “growth”. Harry’s life is threatened by the Grim, but it ends up just being his gruff loveable Godfather. There’s a dangerous magical olympics where people in the past died, but no one is in real danger now. Until Cedric dies. The last part of Goblet of Fire kicks of the third section.
3. Books 5, 6 & 7 (Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hollows): “resistance & overcoming”. People that other characters and readers alike actually care about are dying. The stakes are Nazi-like totalitarianism and muggle enslavement. Greed & power hunger versus love.

There is a really slow burn of revealing what is actually going on - what does Voldemort truly want? We don’t really find out until the last book. And there’s plenty to criticize. Harry comes off as remarkably flat and passive as a character a lot of the time. The conventionally British avoidance of effectively communicating emotions is the cause of a number of avoidable minor to major catastrophes, not just in the child characters but Dumbledore and other adults too.

But the overarching tone of imagination, salience of characters overall, and the world building is on another level. There’s a formula to most of the books: Dursley’s, Hogwarts Express, Classes, Quidditch, Central Conflict, Dramatic Climax, Resolution. And it works SO well.

I think the central theme of Lynch’s Twin Peaks is probably Love is not enough, and in this way, Harry Potter is the opposite of Twin Peaks. The central premise of Harry Potter is that Love is enough. Harry’s mother’s sacrifice to protect him ends up being the most powerful form of magic presented in the Wizarding universe.

I wish there was more than seven, but it’s also probably good for me to get back to podcasts and other books on my list!