Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling (1997)

I was very late to the Harry Potter series and might never had read it at all had I not stumbled upon this article in November last year. The idea in the article that struck me was that there is now a generation of kids who have grown up with a character who has grown up along with them, and that this is a fairly unique situation. Having not had much interest in the books up until that point I was now intrigued so I went out and bought a copy of the first book, Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, and proceeded to read the whole series over the next five or six months. From the moment I closed the last book I have been looking for an excuse to start it from the beginning again.

With regards to the series, the thing that strikes me most, beyond the sales figures or how many kids it turned back on to reading, is just what a phenomenal body of work it is. It is a complete story told over seven volumes where right the way through the plot, up until the final chapters, you are consistently being introduced to factors whose consequences run back through the entire length of the story, constantly changing your view of the characters and situations that they have faced. To be able to put together such a large plot, over so many volumes and be able to drop in twists right till the last moment and have it all make sense really is a massive achievement. On finishing the series for the first time I was left with the overwhelming sense of what a great challenge it must be to construct such a massive project.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone itself is a great kids book: nasty foster family, escape to a fantastical world, new friends, new enemies, great adventures. It is also it is full full of some pretty heavy shit: young kid grows up in an unloving family after the supposedly accidental death of his parents only to discover at age eleven that they were in fact murdered. He is whisked off into a new world that for the first time in his life provides a sense of both love and belonging but also forces him to confront demons far beyond those of a nasty uncle. The skill of the book is that is it able to mix up the fun adventure stuff with the far more mature ideas of loneliness, alienation, elitism, poverty, acceptance and the challenge of trying to figure out your place in a world that you do not understand and that only allows you to uncover small pieces of the puzzle at random.

The bonus of reading the book for the second time is that the characters, which are really good to start with, take on even deeper and well constructed personalities in terms of how their pasts and futures unravel over the length of the series. Simply being able to put the hatred that Harry and Snape immediately feel for each other into the context of the whole story - Harry's misjudging of the potions teacher which is in no way helped by the latter's massive internal conflicts with regards to his student and his past -  makes for really great reading.