Harry Potter Fans: Why Do You Read Them?
 

I have to read at least one of the HP books for a class I'm taking in the fall. I'm not an HP fan, and after reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I'm still not a fan. So I thought I'd ask the fans of the series: why do you read the books? What do you like best about them? What should an uninitiated (and skeptical) HP reader be on the lookout for?

I'm a huge fan of Harry Potter. I started reading mostly because they were written by and English author (and anything English I'm a big fan of - except Marmite:eek: ).
I read them for pure entertainment. I enjor reading, but it's hard for me to find a good book that I can't put down. I've read some excellent books, but none that have been able to capture my attention like Harry Potter.
I think those who are fan of Harry can atest(sp?) to the fact the J.K Rowling can really capture emotions. I can be angry, frustrated, sad, and happy, with all of her characters. For me, a well written book is one where I can empathize, sympathize, and/or relate to the characters, and I certainly can.
I'm probably not doing a very good job of explaining my like for Harry Potter, but for me it's kind of hard to describe. I just find the books exciting.
I guess they're not for everyone. Not everyone has the same likes and dislikes.
I'm just glad that you took the time to read 2 of them, so you can honestly say you're not a fan. I always say, don't knock it till ya try it. And you have.
I doubt I answered all your questions. I don't know if there is anything you should really be on the look out for. I'm sure there will be many more answers to come.

I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan! I only started reading them about 2 years ago while working at Borders and wondering why so many people were buying these kids books. Needless to say I was hooked. What I like about them are the writing quality as well as character development. The description of the places and what is going on makes me feel like they really do exsist - but that's a good thing for any fantasy literature, right? :) I feel like I'm a part of the story and the character development really allows you to get to know the characters.

Those are a few of the reasons why I like the books so much.

Edited to add: Ditto to what Lady Pi Phi said :)


Sarah

Re: Harry Potter Fans: Why Do You Read Them?
 

I really enjoyed Books 2-3. I found Book 4 to be a bit of a labour and Book 5 is okay so far. I found with Book 2 and 3, they were quite suspenseful. Also, I went to a Private School so I can relate to the idea of Hogwarts as a Boarding School, having Inter-House competitions, uniforms and stuff like that.

I do like how there are some mature themes that are addressed in the books, such as racism (Magic Folk, Muggles and "mudbloods"), good vs. evil, jealousy (Harry is wealthy but has no family, Ron has family but is not wealthy), etc.

I guess it's a matter of either you like it or you don't. You read two of them so you definitely made the effort and thus, I commend you for that.
FWIW: Everyone was raving about "Ya Ya" the book and I found it nearly impossible to get through. Same with "Memoirs of a Geisha" which took me 3 false starts before I go through it.

Great replies so far, keep 'em coming!

I haven't completely given up on the series. Like CutiePie mentioned, I was a bit astonished (but pleased) that an author dared to address issues of racism/classism in a book that's ostensibly for children. I recently read a critical piece that did a "queer" reading of the books, and that's what made me decide to keep reading until I finish the series.

I guess what got to me was that it seems that the first two books were about 65% exposition, 35% actual plot. I did like the second book a bit better than the first, and I'm 14th in line for book 3 at my local library. I should have it sometime before the new year. :rolleyes: ;)

i agree with what everyone else has said so far and i want to add that for me it's partly the simplicity of the books...good vs evil where good wins out. i have/had a very high reading level, i wasreading college level books when i was 10 and because of that i'm just starting to read the types of books i hsould have read in 5th grade now that i'm in college. it's nice to curl up with a book like harry potter after reading all about political theories and economics all day, let me tell you!

Have you read any of the Lemony Snicket books? Another great series to try.

I was wondering what the hubbub was about. For the hell of it, I bought the first book....

and could not put it down! :D

I am reading the second one now and have bought all of the others...except the 3rd one

Gotta get that one

~again, quick note - they were origionally written for adults...

and they are at a level where kids get them... and they read into it one way... and adults get them and they can see bigger issues being talked about...

fun for the whole family ;)

although anyone who says they prefer the movies needs locked in a cupboard under the stairs...

I started reading them when the 1st movie came out. Because I knew I had to read the books first. I was hooked. I got friends hooked. :)

I was drawn to a lot of the themes & how they're viewed through this somewhat sheltered kid's eyes. Also, I love the wizarding world that JKR has created-fascinating. The characters do seem to be easy to love (or hate, in cases such as Prof. Umbridge :mad: )

I'm a really avid reader. I generally don't like girly books (a la Oprah' Book Club) so it's hard for me to find really good stuff. In fact, after awhile of HP, I found that I had a hard time going on to other books 'cause they weren't as interesting!

Also, for a long time the 3rd book was my least favorite. It wasn't until about the 4th or 5th read through that I really got into it like I did the others. Book 4 has been my favorite since I first read it. Although I've only read book 5 once, so I may change my mind.

I would wait until you read the third book to really make a decision. Many adult fans (myself included) didn't really get into the series until Prizoner of Azkaban. In my opinion, the first two are ok children's books. The third is where I felt the plot got a lot better. I really liked all the new characters introduced, and that is the book where I really began to care about all the characters, almost as if they are real people!

i would agree about reading the 3rd book. that is probably the best one so far.

i only started reading the series recently. i haven't been able to not read at least 2 chapters a day and finished up the first couple books in a week or so. the first two were okay and kept my attention but the 3rd book was really what drew me in. and i am the type of person that doesn't read for pleasure. it takes a lot for a book to keep my attention. i don't like books that are too complicated and get you all confused in the philosophy of the world when the book can just be about 50 pages shorter and get to the real point. maybe this is why i enjoy reading harry potter. the plot is simple... somewhat predictable (although sometimes i was fooled) and the characters don't appear to be made out of cardboard.

saw the first movie and was a lil disappointed about how much was left out. but i will watch the second and can't wait for the third.

oh... i got hooked cuz my cousin and roommate both read the series and gave me crap for not joining the masses. :rolleyes: i am not regretting it tho. it's well worth my summer.

I read the first book because my sister made me, and was hooked. I just think it's so cool how she can put together this whole entire flawless universe . . . she does a ton of planning things out and it shows. Of course, that's what fantasy's about, but I think Rowling does it in a way that's better thought out than the average fantasy author. Plus, I can't get into fantasy that's too far "out there," and the Harry Potter books have one foot planted firmly in reality with the other in the wizarding world, which keeps it from going overboard.

I read them because I like them. :p

No, seriously, I can't explain it...I'm just hooked. Hermione is my favorite because she reminds me so much of myself when I was about 11 or 12, minus the frizzy hair.

I started reading them because everyone was making such a fuss about them. I had to see what all of it was about. Low and behold, I was hooked from the first book. Book 4 is my favorite and I can't wait to see the rest of the movies. Somehow, I managed to get my boyfriend hooked on them, even though he refuses to admit it ;)

To answer the question...I like the books because they are simple enough for a child to read and understand, but they are deep enough for an adult to enjoy. I find myself wishing I could go to Hogwarts and go to Potions class. When I have kids, I definately plan on reading the books to them.

Yes, I have! They're pretty good, too. I have read the first 7.
His "real name" is Daniel Handler, and I read 'Basic Eight' by him (which I thought was a stinker....took me forever to get through)

-- I've always liked the fantasy/magical reality genre (provided it's well-written).

-- JKR is a fantastic writer. Her words are well-chosen, and she rarely wastes a word. She draws on older forms of literature -- the English boarding house novel and the fantasy/magical reality tale -- in a way that demonstrates her complete familiarity with what has gone before, but that uses existing elements with utter originality to create a compelling story of good vs. evil.

-- JKR has an almost Dickensian gift for naming characters. For example, Draco (Latin for "dragon," which in medieval understanding is considered a big snake, perfect for Slytherin) Malfoy (Old French for "bad faith"). Or Argus Filch, the caretaker who keeps an eye on everything at Hogwarts and who is named for the 100-eyed giant of Greek mythology. Remus Lupin's name should have given away his secret early on -- I could have kicked myself for not catching it.

-- The book is full of characters that one cares about and that are fun to hate.

-- They are smart books, with many levels. As some have already noted, JKR deals with some serious issues without preaching.

-- If you know some Latin (or a few other languages), it's fun to decipher the meanings of various spells and incantations. (If you don't know Latin or these other languages -- she even uses Aramaic -- check out the Lexicon at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/.) If you know medieval literature, you can pick out all sorts of symbolic elements.

-- How can one not like a book with Ernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans?

-- They are great fun to read out loud, which my 5-year-old demands on a regular basis. (He is convinced that when he turns 11, he'll get a letter telling him he has been admitted to Hogwarts, despite being Muggle-born. He already says he wants to be Harry Potter for Halloween -- I'm trying to convince him to be a little unusual and be Harry wearing Quidditch robes instead of school robes.)

That is cute! And I think Harry in Quidditch robes is far cooler than just Harry anyways. :)

So I Read Book Three...
 

Based on the comments here, I bought Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Saturday. And while I couldn't put the book down (read it in one day), I can't honestly say that I'm enthralled with the series so far. I keep waiting for that magical *something* to jump out and pull me in, and it just hasn't.

You guys were right: I liked Azkaban much better than the first two. It was a bit darker, and seeing the kids acting out like surly teenagers was fun to watch. I think that my bias against fantasy is affecting my ability to enjoy the books; the last fantasy series I read and enjoyed were part of Robert Aspirin's "MYTH" series.

I'm not sure if I'll stick with it since the waiting list for the most recent books is so long at the library, and I don't want to line J.K. Rowling's pockets any more than they already have been. ;)

"Harry Potter and the Childish Adult"
 

Saw this on a listserv for children's literature. Offered as information -- I don't particularly agree with this viewpoint.

Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
by A.S. Byatt

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and — a much harder question — why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.

The easy question first. Freud described what he called the "family romance," in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real "real" family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.

The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the drowsy years between 7 and adolescence. In "Order of the Phoenix," Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the book becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his late (and "real") father was not a perfect magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits.

In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers.

Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing "secondary worlds." Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from "Star Wars" to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing.

The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.

They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death. These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey latency fantasies?

Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

I didn't want anything to do with Harry Potter when the books first blew up. I thought it was one of those trends like Pokemon or Power Rangers and wanted nothing of it.

Then a cousin of my mom's asked me if I'd read the books. She told me that she had bought the first one for her son and daughter, and had to read it first to be sure it was okay for bedtime. She quickly became hooked, which seemed like a pretty good endorsement to me.

I bought the first book and really enjoyed. Got the second book, thought it was great. The third book, though, is my favorite. I love how Rowling pulls the reader in and makes you care about these people she's created, without seeming to do a thing. The writing is simple, touching, and genuinely funny at times, which is a great change of pace from the smarmy and sometimes self-congratulating smart literature you find many people reading.

I guess what I really like about HP is that it's direct without being too simple, and deep without being preachy. A fun read that also lets you learn about human nature.

Besides, the word "muggle" is so cute. :D

Re: "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult"
 

I agree with much of this article, including the "roots" of Harry Potter. But as for the sections I quoted above and others like them, I have to wonder: Has this writer actually read the books? Way off base, I think.

There is a reponse to the above article on salon.com:

http://salon.com/books/feature/2003/...ing/index.html