So ends my reign as one of the last holdouts of my generation. I remember when this book first became a sensation and some of my middle-school classmates were reading it. Oh, how I scoffed. Children’s literature, at our age? Hadn’t we moved on? I was reading Orwell, Vonnegut, Salinger, etc. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to read a book about a kid younger than I was, magical powers or not.
I clung to that position of unearned snobbery even as the books became bigger and bigger, even as my sister and even my dad read them obsessively, and most of my friends did the same. I didn’t go to midnight launch parties at Barnes & Noble, I didn’t take the test to figure out my Hogwarts school, and I didn’t see so much as a frame of any of the eight blockbuster movie adaptations.
So why now? I don’t have a compelling reason. I’ve joked in the past that if I read them one day it would only be because Jeopardy has so many Harry Potter clues, and seems to expect a rather absurd degree of familiarity with the texts. (You really see clues about tertiary characters in Dickens’s oeuvre, but they do it all the time with the Potterverse.) That isn’t really true, though. I guess the closest thing to the truth is that my curiosity finally overcame my stubbornness.
I don’t really have a lot to say about the actual book. I really enjoyed it. It’s a brisk read but does a great job establishing the world of the story. Rowling is very good at adding in quirky little details that make Hogwarts seem like a real place with a real history. There are a great number of memorable characters, even if some are stock types. I was charmed by the developing friendship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I was equally charmed by the friendship between Harry and Hagrid, and the encouraging nature of Professor Dumbledore.
The actual plot of the Sorcerer’s Stone somewhat takes a backseat to the world-building, but that’s forgivable. Rowling still manages to deftly surprise the reader with a last-minute revelation, delivering a knockout left hook after hinting at the right jab all along.
Reading this book made it very easy to understand why so many people got so heavily invested in these stories. I’m a little late for the midnight book launches, but I am eagerly waiting for Chamber of Secrets to become available from my local library.