harry potter paperback box set books 1 7 paperback

Which describes a lot of preteens, and especially a lot of preteens with a dawning sense of their own queerness. In other words, the books offered a navigable system for belonging-alluring, perhaps especially, for a person who didn’t entirely feel like she belonged in the real world. It speaks to the same drive that makes adults take Myers-Briggs tests, an endless fascination with the parameters of one’s own selfhood-and that fascination is rewarded with the fantastical idea of belonging to an imagined tribe of people (or wizards) who also hew to those same parameters. First you divide the muggles from the wizards, then you divide the wizards into houses. Also addictive were the books’ two systems for ordering people. It’s easy to see how appealing this could be for young readers-especially for YA readers, people who might be starting to feel that the world doesn’t make sense at all.

The reader is left with a sensation of an ordained universe, a place where things make sense if you just pay attention. So I read Book One at the same time that I was reading, say, Book Five, and could see how Rowling had seeded elements of the later books’ plots right from the beginning. I read more slowly, and even more slowly still I read each book out loud to the youngest child in our family. (Hard to imagine a more delightful sight than the bland corporate halls of the Oregon Convention Center filled with shrieking eleven-year-olds swooping around in cloaks.) My kid barreled through each book as it was released, then read and reread until it became a part of her. I accompanied my child to midnight drops of new HP titles. Children who came of age in the aughts and the teens (and even now) had their imaginations, their dreams, their very sense of themselves invaded by Harry Potter. That’s an easy way of saying something more poetic, more difficult, stranger. In the first two decades of this century, the Harry Potter books took over children’s imaginations.

Harry potter paperback box set books 1 7 paperback