I finish reading Harry Potter
Well, this afternoon, I became, at the age of forty-one – almost forty-two – the latest person to have read all of the Harry Potter series, excluding Fantastic Beasts, Beedle the Bard, Quidditch through the Ages, The Cursed Child, and whatever other appendices, spinoffs, and fanfictions there may be. That is, I read nos. 1–7, Sorcerer’s Stone through Deathly Hallows.
The series took hold of me as I read, and by the end I knew it was a profound thing.
My advice to serious readers disinclined to invest in Harry Potter, who’d dismiss it out of hand:
Just slog through book 1. It isn’t a great book. But it’s short, and it does some necessary scene-setting. If it seems lightweight, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The series is clever that way. At first, the characters concern themselves mostly with ephemera, with froth. This changes. Gradually, inevitably, things get weightier, starker, huger, until whatever trivia came before drops out of view.
Meanwhile, enjoy the satire. There’s a lot of it, and it gets cleverer and more pungent. Enjoy the gentle mockery of ordinary human foolishness. Enjoy it in good conscience. Ultimately, the series is on the side of these sinners, it’s about saving sinners, it doesn’t shirk from paying redemptive costs.
That’s a good rule of thumb for finding profundity in popular art (not that all art must be profound). If a work is to have depth, it’ll soon acknowledge discord: perhaps, evil. If so, as a popular work, it might handle its topic lightly. It might satirize. Ride this wave first. It might take you farther than you expected, to more sobering shores, especially if the piece is long: a book exceeding, oh, five hundred pages; a movie exceeding, oh, two hours; a daily comic strip or radio show or blog lasting, oh, two decades. Lo and behold, the thing might not just offer criticisms; it might offer a positive vision, a hopeful possibility worth considering. It might not only diagnose sin, not only prescribe a personalized cure, but gesture toward or detail a renovated world in which temptation and envy and fear need not have purchase, need not sting at all.
The series took hold of me as I read, and by the end I knew it was a profound thing.
My advice to serious readers disinclined to invest in Harry Potter, who’d dismiss it out of hand:
Just slog through book 1. It isn’t a great book. But it’s short, and it does some necessary scene-setting. If it seems lightweight, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The series is clever that way. At first, the characters concern themselves mostly with ephemera, with froth. This changes. Gradually, inevitably, things get weightier, starker, huger, until whatever trivia came before drops out of view.
Meanwhile, enjoy the satire. There’s a lot of it, and it gets cleverer and more pungent. Enjoy the gentle mockery of ordinary human foolishness. Enjoy it in good conscience. Ultimately, the series is on the side of these sinners, it’s about saving sinners, it doesn’t shirk from paying redemptive costs.
That’s a good rule of thumb for finding profundity in popular art (not that all art must be profound). If a work is to have depth, it’ll soon acknowledge discord: perhaps, evil. If so, as a popular work, it might handle its topic lightly. It might satirize. Ride this wave first. It might take you farther than you expected, to more sobering shores, especially if the piece is long: a book exceeding, oh, five hundred pages; a movie exceeding, oh, two hours; a daily comic strip or radio show or blog lasting, oh, two decades. Lo and behold, the thing might not just offer criticisms; it might offer a positive vision, a hopeful possibility worth considering. It might not only diagnose sin, not only prescribe a personalized cure, but gesture toward or detail a renovated world in which temptation and envy and fear need not have purchase, need not sting at all.