In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling perfects the most important rule of story telling: be interesting. Her prose might not be great (although it is good), her plots and mysteries might be a little convoluted. But damn can she tell an interesting story, build a fun world, and put great characters in it.

From the first sentence, she lets you know what fun you're in for. There's just that magical touch to it only she seems to have. And she keeps it going through the whole book (and the six others in the series) without missing a beat.

The Sorcerer's Stone is packed with mystery. It starts early and picks up speed, burning through pages, right to the reveal, which is quite the surprise--no Scooby-Doo ending here.

But the thing that really makes this book stand out is the characters. Harry Potter ended up getting on my last nerve in the series, but in this book, he's crazy likable. The minor characters are what really make the series, though. They have more personality than the protagonist of most books.

This series might not be the best, but there's nothing like it. It's just magical. Plain and simple.

Lo que daría por leer este libro devuelta sin saber absolutamente nada del mundo de Harry Potter
Qué maravilla

After billions of years, I finally read this book and I came to the conclusion that I would have liked this more if I had read it at a younger age.

n  “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”n

This book was as enchanting as it was to 11 year old me when my sister put Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone in my hands and told me I simply have to read this series.

Harry Potter meant so much to me as a kid as it did to millions of others. It was a magical world I could fall into and experience Harry's amazing adventures with him. I read them over and over and it took me many years to finally come out of my Harry Potter bubble and realize that there are other books for me to read and love as well.

I haven't done a reread since I was 16 so it has been 7 years since I've read any of the HP books.

I'm sure you all know how this story goes but bare with me as this will officially be the first time I review this book.




Harry Potter lives with his horrible aunt, uncle and cousin (the Dursleys). Forced to sleep in the small room under the staircase, he is reminded everyday of his life that he is nothing more than an ordinary boy and an inconvenience. No matter what the Dursleys say, strange and inexplicable things always seem to happen to and around Harry.



And though his uncle and aunt try to stop events from unfolding, one day a giant stranger arrives at their door to finally tell Harry the truth about who he really is and to invite him to attend the prestigious, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.



But even in the magical world Harry is not ordinary. He is the boy who lived. The boy who the dark sorcerer, Lord Voldemort, failed to kill and who's impossible survival caused Voldemort to vanish.



Life at Hogwarts is great, Harry has finally found a place he belongs. But his wonderful life at Hogwarts is disrupted when Harry and friends, Ron and Hermione, stumble upon clues to strange happenings that they simply cannot ignore. Something important is being kept safe at Hogwarts, but our trio know that it won't be safe for long and take it upon themselves to investigate and stop it from falling into evil hands.




I was a bit surprised by how short the chapters are and how fast the plot moved. As a kid it seemed so much longer, but I should have expected that now that I am a faster reader.

The first HP novel is already a classic. I have read it in the original English and the (slightly disappointing IMHO) French translation because my kid, just a few months after starting reading, plunged head first into this book and only resurfaced after the last one. I never made it past the 3td book but admittedly really enjoyed this book. It is the most light-hearted and funny of the series despite the darkness of the One Who Cannot Be Named. The universe created by Rowling is one of the most complete and compelling ones ever for kids - that I will freely admit. I obviously would love to witness a quiddich match and go to a class dealing with mandrakes and eat in that fabulous dining hall. That being said, it seems to be quite a lonely life - the idealisation in a sense of pensions for kids of rich (or in this case) magical families is perhaps a tad disturbing when you want to be a more hands-on parent and these parents apparently have no issue with only seeing their kids on holidays and during the summer. I am not sure I could do that, but that is just me perhaps.

An extremely entertaining and memorable tale that my kids both adored in both book and movie form!

Just finished reading HP1 aloud to my son in English and found it to be very enjoyable. The plot does stick together, the characters are endearing (I love Ron's little side remarks about Hermione in the beginning), and the imagination Rowling deployed to create this magical universe is astounding. I cannot believe that this first book is already 20 years old! It has really aged well. I cannot really point to any weaknesses at all. It was entertaining and a pure joy to share with my son - his first time through in English! I believe I will set a 2017-2018 goal to finish all 7 books this time around! Finished #2 on audiobook so on to Azkaban now.

If you don’t know what a Muggle is by now, you’re either Rip van Winkle or enormously stubborn.

enormously stubborn...

yup, that shoe fits!

It is a bewildered girl who writes this. After all, her mind reasons, isn’t this THE children’s series? The best thing to have hit the bookstores since Narnia? There must be something tragically wrong with me. Surely my mind has twisted this into something other than what’s really there. Right?

Unfortunately, I don’t think so. You see, I’ve realised something. I might only have just finished book one (yeah, I’m just a little behind the times), but I’ve realised something. Harry Potter is a Mary Sue, Gary Stu, Marty Stu, whatever you want to call him. Let me say it again.

HARRY POTTER IS A SUE.

No wonder it was boring and bothering me so much. I can hear you future readers (at present I have exactly none) demanding to know why, just why, I think he is a Sue, and how dare I? Those of you who haven’t fainted, that is.

*puts on mafia boss accent* You wanna know why? Let me count the ways. If you could just keep track on your fingers–oh, it looks like you’ll need your toes as well–that would be really helpful.

Right. Here we go.

1. He’s hated by all the nasty (some of them ridiculously evil) people.

2. And liked by all the good ones.

3. He has a cool scar, black hair, and green eyes. Like, yeah. He looks cool. This is the reason I stay away from the black hair/green eyes combo in my own writing: it’s really something that gets doled out by most authors to their specialest favouritest characters. And boy, is Harry Potter special or what?

4. He’s famous. Not only that, but everyone bows to him in the street. I think we just discovered Buddha’s successor.

5. He’s rich. Insanely rich. What are the odds?

6. He got into the best school for magic around. Without even applying.

7. He’s a Gryffindor, the most fantabulous house in the school.

8. He’s fantastic at broomsticking even though he’s never had any practice whatsoever.

9. Immediately, instead of getting punished for breaking the rules, he gets put on the Quidditch team even though it’s unheard of for someone so young to be there. And this is after the teacher sees one single display of catching a Remembrall. Ever heard of beginners’ luck? Adrenaline-fuelled ability, perhaps? Heightened senses? With all this, she still decides that Harry should be in the Quidditch team.

10. Continuing the theme of complete and utter Sueness: FREE BROOMSTICK! Not only that, it’s the latest in broomstick technology.

11. He got given his broomstick by a teacher. I will leave you to guess the phrase that applies here. Starts with ‘t’ and ends with ‘eacher’s pet’. Wow. You got it. Tell me, have you applied for Mensa yet?

12. He then impresses everybody on the Quidditch team with his special specialness to such an extent that he’s likened to the greatest Quidditch player in a hundred years (who was also definitely older than Harry when he played Quidditch).

13. Invisible cloak. He’s got all this, and then to add to it, he gets an invisible cloak.

14. He’s smart.

15. He’s brave.

16. He’s good at magic. These last three combined are a Sueness Overload in themselves.

17. And yet, even with all these qualities, he’s so generous and brave, is purported to have such good judgement, etc., that you feel as if the urge to like him is being shoved down your throat, stirred until properly combined, and left to set for three hours.

18. This is the part that made me almost throw up: Hermione, for no good reason, throws her arms around Harry and tells him how great he is, and that she’s basically not worth half of what he is. Just stuff some more Sueness down our throats, why don’t you, J?

19. Harry just escaped major Sue-ity again because Neville Longbottom’s final points are the ones that win Gryffindor the House Cup/Trophy/thing. Still, Ron and Hermione win a generic fifty points each. Harry, of course, has to get sixty. Minor Sue-ness.

20. Yeah, he loses Gryffindor a massive 150 points, but he gets it all back, doesn’t he? Being treated like an outcast doesn’t really seem to have made an impression on him at all.

21. Instead of being punished for heading into the third-floor corridor, he is rewarded. Now, make no mistake, I do see that there are times when we should break the rules for the right reasons. But surely, to maintain order, shouldn’t the ‘perpetrators’ be punished on the surface of things? Surely Harry should be given grunt work or detention or something, right? Wrong.

22. The way he was saved from the evil Lord Voldemort is by nothing other than Pure Love. *cue sparkles*

23. Dumbledore turns out to have given Harry the cloak. Surely, having been a teacher for many years, he would recognise what mischief kids get up to, and would really NOT want a boy whose friends include the brother of Fred and George Weasley to have access to an invisible cloak. Or, if it comes to that, any kid at all. T-E-A-C-H-E-R-S-P-E-T.

I wouldn’t care if HP only displayed a couple of these characteristics, but he’s got the whole lot! The thing that really drives me up the wall is that surely this should be the ultimate guide for what not to do when writing a book, and yet… and yet… it’s a bestseller. It’s not sour grapes that keep me writing this post. It’s sheer confuzzled amazement.

The writing style is boring and forgettable. No description to speak of, no real thoughts. There are some allusions to historical figures and terms, and so on, but they aren’t presented in an interesting way. And couldn’t we have at least met Nicholas Flamel?

The morals in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone are negligible at best. It’s just me, me, me propaganda in disguise—one lying, sneaking, and even ‘immobilising’ episode after another. And that’s from the so-called ‘good’ characters.

Cliché after cliché abounds in this book. It’s there in Dumbledore’s white beard. It’s there in Harry’s surprisingly quick Quidditch triumph. It’s there in Professor Quirrel’s turban. And most of all, it’s there in Draco Malfoy, a character so flat he could’ve been made out of paper and then run over with a steamroller and his original shape would have been slightly rounder.

Added to which, the plot is so unoriginal. Can anyone say ‘Cinderella’? Orphaned child mysteriously left with a mean, boring family who doesn’t want him and treats him terribly. Discovers that he really belongs to a world beyond his wildest dreams. And that he’s very, very rich. Almost immediately, he’s at home there. Sure, he has his enemies, but who doesn’t? And they get dealt with anyway. Added to which, it turns out that his parents are super-cool.

If that’s original, then I’m Neville Longbottom’s true love. Turns out everybody who keeps calling this original is Neville's honeybunchkins.

I had to struggle to finish this book. Really struggle. I had it out from the library for nine weeks because I kept putting it down for ten days or so, then realizing I should probably finish it to see if it got better. I’d pick it up and realise that I’d forgotten what had happened before, meaning I had to go back to the beginning and start all over again. This, as you may well imagine, drove me nuts.

Eventually, with the help of SparkNotes, I managed to figure it out and I’ve just taken book 2 out of the library. I’m wondering if it gets any better. After all, J.K. Rowling’s run out of Cinderella storyline. Considering how much people love this series (to me at this point in time, they are inexplicably popular), I’m not going to end with a pessimistic “I don’t think so”. I might go with something more like this:

It’s got to, right? Right???

--------

*Disclaimer: As I am not at this point in time a Harry Potter fan, I’ve probably gotten a couple of things wrong, although I’ve checked and double-checked to the best of my ability. (If you see any errors, please comment and let me know.) However, even if a few things are a bit off, there are still about twenty points on this list. Surely that’s enough to merit consideration anyway.

4/5 ⊹₊⟡⋆

I really loved this - if I had read this as a kid I would have made my entire room Slytherin themed (yes I took the quiz I was NOT happy about it). It's such an easy world to get sucked into. The characters have more personality than I would have thought - I mean some names and themes are definitely problematic. Even though this is YA - I still had a really good time. It was really fast paced, lots to love and I will be reading the next one! My first read of 2025 - starting off on a high note

Do you know how hard it is to rate these books while trying to make sure nostalgia the dominating factor??

Man, I'm so glad Harry Potter was a huge part of my childhood growing up.
Stephen Fry was bloody brilliant.

Current project: re-reading HP.

My history: I was a young adult when this first book came out, and the print book never really grabbed me when I gave it a try. I found that I very much enjoyed the American audiobooks with Jim Dale narrating, however, so I read the first few books this way. But this came to an end when I misplaced the fourth book and no longer had a long commute--I never did reach the end of that wretchedly long quidditch game, so I gave up.

But here it is, 2015 and I'm trying again! This time I'm doing the wonderful Stephen Fry narration on audio. It's interesting to come into these books after all this history, both in the sense of the cultural impact of these stories as well as the knowledge of how much children's lit, as art and as industry, has changed for the better because of them.

Re-read reaction: 3.5 stars

With this first book (and I suspect with the next few), I still feel the way I did before. I admire the incredibly imaginative ideas so much, but the writing isn't quite as rich or the character development isn't quite as deep/emotional as I'd like just yet. It's a pretty straightforward story, albeit one embellished with fantastic details.

But I LOVE HERMIONE GRANGER, always have, and I've heard the later books are much darker. And it's still a lovely experience to have the books read to me like a bedtime story.

My favorite parts of this book:

The mirror of Erised, owl post (pleeease may I have an owl), and the thing hidden under the turban. And:

n  It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.n

Well done, Neville. You deserved the same number of house points as the other children, in my book.

5/5 stars




https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...

Well, what a beautiful return to lovely childhood memories that was. If I felt any human emotions ever, I could almost get worked up about it.





Replace “ones” with “books” and I feel much the same as...is this Sirius? It really has been a decade since I’ve read the books and I’ve never seen the movies.





Okay but really important question: How do people like Snape?! I remember what is supposed to “redeem” him, but he is really one of the most awful characters I’ve read. “Always”? Bleh. I wish Fluffy killed him. Every time he shows up I have a temper tantrum. (See below for visual aid.)





I have to be honest, I was halfway convinced I wouldn’t like this book much at all. I tend to have opinions that are irritatingly against the YA grain, and then I can’t join in the fun. (Okay, yes, I’m mainly talking about Throne of Glass.) Instead, I read the whole thing in one sitting. And it’s the week before finals, too. Ain’t that logical? (Harry is me trying to study; Hermione is my mind reminding me there’s HP to read.)





My only complaint about this is a very English major one: none of the poems/songs have meter! They sound all lopsided. (How nitpicky is that?! The truth is I loved this book, but I still love to complain.)





Now I’m about to die because I don’t own a copy of the second book AND I WANT TO READ THE NEXT ONE. I don’t know what to do!





Bottom line: Who am I kidding? You’ve all read this. And you all know it to be an absolute…