Why Harry Potter?

Full disclosure: I've read all the Harry Potter books. I've even read them all multiple times. I've seen the movies. I love Harry Potter.


Why do I love Harry Potter? Because, as someone who can never, ever have too much of a good book, I had waited my whole life for these books. As a kid, my definition of good books involved fanciful stories, elemental battles between good and evil, and a little bit of magic. And I was especially interested in fat books, in series containing multiple volumes. After all, the only thing better than a good book was a good book that lasted a long time. At ten or eleven, I could kill a two hundred page book in a day and a half; for me, the longer the book, the better.

I was a Harry Potter hater for a while, when both my mom and middle-school aged younger brother were reading them. "Soft-core fantasy," I called them, scoffing the entire way back to my well-battered copies of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. It was Thanksgiving break when the first Harry Potter movie was released, and I grudgingly accompanied my family (even my dad, by then a H.P. devotee) to the theater, steeling myself for the kids' movie I was about to see.

What happened, of course, was that I came out of the theater a Potter lover. I read the first four books over that Thanksgiving break and feel compelled to this day to break out the Harry Potter (books and movies) around the holidays.

Having read all the books, then, why read them again and write about them? For this reason: now that we have all seven books available to us, I think it's useful to go back and read the entire series to evaluate the quality and examine the scope of J.K. Rowling' s vision. Plus, I've never done it before.

So there.