Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

(Book Review--Harry Potter, Children's Literature, Fantasy)

Started: August 17, 2021

Finished: August 25, 2021

My History with this Book 

I was too old for Harry Potter when it first came out.  I was already in college when this book hit the shelves.  (Although my youngest sister was the perfect age for these books, and was the representative Potter fan in our family.)

Initially I wanted nothing to do with these books.  Early adulthood was the age where I scorned children's literature, and wanted to be seen as a serious reader of serious books.

But, as you know, the phenomenon of Harry Potter kept growing and growing until it was impossible not to become curious about the whole thing.  I had several adult friends who read the books and would tell me about them.  

For example, when I was living in the small Japanese town of Ajimu, Ryan, the only other foreigner in the town, was reading the Harry Potter books.

And then the movies started coming out.  I saw the first movie as a VHS rental while in Japan (and also listened to my friend Ryan compare the movie with the book.)

Eventually, despite my apprehensions about wasting time with children's literature, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to check it out.

I did the first book as an audio book.  In the English section of a Japanese bookstore, I found the audio book of The Philosopher's Stone and decided that this would be the perfect way to absorb Harry Potter.  I'd get to find out what all the fuss was behind these books, and I wouldn't have to waste any time physically reading the thing. (*1)

I had already seen the movie by this time, so everything was spoiled ahead of time.  And, as you know, Harry Potter famously started the trend of movies that were slavishly faithful to the books.  So there were very little surprises in the book.  Every plot point I already knew from the movie.  But some of the extra little details were nice.
This was sometime around 2005, before I had started my book review project, and so I never reviewed The Philosopher's Stone on this blog. 

In fact, the first 3 Harry Potter books I listened to (*2) before starting up this book review project, and so my Harry Potter book reviews start with book four.  

For years on this blog, I had a policy that I would only review new reads, and not books that I re-read (or re-listened to, as  the case may be).  And so I never reviewed Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, even though I kept it on regular rotation in my apartment during all the years I lived in Japan (*3).  So I listened to it periodically all through 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.  Once I left Japan in 2009, Harry Potter fell out of rotation. (*4)

Why I'm Re-Reading It and Reviewing it Now

If you've been following this blog lately, you know that recently my wife has been practicing her English by reading classic children's books, and I've been taking the opportunity to re-read these classic children's books once my wife is finished with them.  So far I've re-read (after my wife has finished them) Charlotte's Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.  My reasons for this are two-fold.  The first is to re-visit childhood classics that I haven't read in years, only barely remember, and am long overdue to re-read.  The second reason is to just challenge myself to keep up with my wife's reading.  (If she's doing all this reading as a non-native speaker, surely I should be able to keep pace, right?)

But in the case of The Philosopher's Stone, the first reason no longer applies.  For me, at least, this isn't a book that is lost in the mists of early childhood memories.  This is something I listened to, multiple times, during my 20s, and remember fairly well.

So the remaining rationale for re-reading this book was only the second reason--just to challenge myself to read more by keeping up with my wife's reading.  (Given how many unread classic books are sitting on my shelves, I did have some mixed feelings about re-reading a book that I didn't really need to re-read.  But at least it was a short and quick read.)

That, and because I never reviewed this book on my blog, so this was an opportunity to plug a hole in my book reviewing project.  (Starting with the Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which I re-read and then reviewed last year, I've changed the rules on m book reviewing project.  Books that I re-read now get full reviews as well.)

The Review

Right, so what is left to say about these Harry Potter books that hasn't already been said, huh?

There's a temptation to talk about these books in superlative or polemical terms.  When they first came out, these books were over-praised by their fans.  And, perhaps as a result of that over-praise, there then came a backlash against these books that over-criticized them.  When in fact these books are neither the best thing ever nor the worst thing ever.  They are kids books, that do a perfectly fine job of entertaining their target audience, and that's how they should be viewed.

It's also hard to cut out all the extra cultural baggage when reading a book like this--the legacy of the sequels, the movie franchise, and of course, J.K. Rowling's' own recent political controversies.  But I did my best.  I tried to read this book as if I was a 12 year-old child when it first came out in 1997.  

There are some problems that develop later in the sequels with tone, continuity, and repetitive plot devices.  But I tried to forget what I knew about the sequels, and just read this book on its own.

The first 6 chapters (pages 1-120) are absolutely brilliant.

Harry Potter is living with the abusive Dursley family.  (Oh, spoilers by the way.  But you know the story as well as I do, so let's start talking about plot points.)  The Dursley's are ridiculous caricatures right out of a Roald Dahl novel, and indeed, this whole beginning section has a very much Roald Dahl type feel.  (Think the aunts in James in the Giant Peach, or Trunchbull in Matilda, or the orphanage in The BFG).   It's pure silliness.  The reader neither expects nor is given realistic characters.  It is just buffoonish bullies whose cruelty and stupidity is exaggerated solely so that the reader can derive satisfaction when they eventually get their comeuppance.

But it is (dare I say it?) Dahl done better than Dahl.  J.K. Rowling is able to make these scenes really really funny--the frustration of the Dursley's, who get so annoyed by anything magical, and the way that they always try so hard to avoid magic disrupting their lives, and then the way that magic inevitably always does disrupt their lives, and then the way they get so angry that they can't speak properly--it had me laughing as I read it.  (Even though it was a re-read for me.)  If you ask me, J.K. Rowling doesn't get enough credit for these sections.

In later books, the increasing seriousness of the series is going to create a tonal inconsistency with the cartoonishness of these early sections.  But like I said, I'm not reviewing the whole series here. I'm going to try to stick to just this one book.  And in this first book, the tonal shift is still there, but it's not as dramatic as it will get in later books.

Once Hagrid arrives to pick up Harry, we lose the buffoonish Dursley's, but fortunately we don't lose the silly whimsical tone as Hagrid takes Harry to places like Diagon Alley and Gringrotts bank.  There's an interesting combination of epic fantasy worldbuilding with silliness.  We are being introduced to the world of wizards and witches, and learning the rules of the world and its institutions, but everything is also being played for comic effect.  Logic, in this world, is clearly taking a backseat to spectacle and jokes.  

(It's strange how many things in the wizarding world seem to be deliberately designed to make the wizards as miserable as possible--Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, for example.  But then, that's the whole joke, isn't it?)

Where the book started to lose me was at chapter 7, where the silliness started to take a back seat to the plot.  And then from here on out it was all about which house at Hogwarts was winning the trophy, Quidditch tournaments, feuding with Malfoy, and of course the MacGuffin of the philosopher's stone.   I found it a bit tiresome, but then, I found it tiresome partially because I already knew where it was going.  (And also because I knew that all these plot points would be repeated ad nauseum in subsequent books.)

I will admit to being hooked on the mystery when I first saw the movie in 2001 (*5).  And I will also admit to being surprised when the movie revealed Snape wasn't the bad guy all along.  (A good old-fashioned twist ending--well, it certainly got me on my first viewing.)  And had I read the book first instead of seeing the movie first, I imagine that I would have been more interested in those climatic chapters.

The big appeal of these books was trying to marry this very funny and silly story about strange wizards and cartoonish Dursleys with an epic high fantasy story about a battle between good and evil.  You can see where this combination would draw kids in--you get all the fun of a comedic story, but you also get all the excitement of the good wizards versus the evil wizards.  It does create a bit of tonal inconsistency, but sometimes a changing tone can make the book more interesting--it keeps the reader guessing as to what to expect next.

(The tone will be more of a problem in the sequels, but like I said, we're not reviewing the sequels here.)

One last note on the characters:

Now that the movies are so iconic, it is impossible to imagine these characters without thinking of the actors who portray them in the movies.  Admit it--when you picture in your head Snape or Hagrid or Malfoy, you're picturing the actor from the movie.

It's interesting to go back and read the book and realize how much the movie characters match the book.  Now admittedly I'm biased, because I saw the movie first, so I was already pre-disposed to imagine Hagrid as Robbie Coltrane and Snape as Alan Rickman, etc.  But still, I think most people would agree that the portrayal of the characters in the book and in the movies sync up very well.  The movie producers deserve a lot of credit for the excellent casting but that they did, but J.K. Rowling deserves credit for creating such colorful characters in the first place.  The characters are just as vibrant in J.K. Rowling's book as they are in the movie.

Some fantasy books have a cast of characters that are difficult to distinguish from each other, but J.K. Rowling definitely does not have this problem.  J.K. Rowling knows how to write distinctive, memorable characters.

The flip-side, though, is in exchange for being memorable, her characters sometimes become caricatures.  Over the course of the 7 books, many of these characters never grow or develop at all.  Malfoy's development over the series is a perfect example of a static character.  But here I am criticizing the whole series again!  I told myself I would only limit myself to this one book.  And for this one book, they work great.

Footnotes (docs, pub)

(*1) If memory serves, I got it from a bookstore in Nagoya city when I was living in Gifu.  And I think I paid a pretty penny for it back then.  It was back in the days when people actually bought audiobooks on physical media, and it was a set of around 10 CDs.

Although the actual production cost of a single CD is only pennies, there was a popular illusion back in those days that a single CD had to cost at least $15 each, because that's how much you paid for a CD when you bought a new music album.  So audiobooks were often priced accordingly--the price was often about $15 per CD, as if you were buying multiple music albums instead of just one audiobook.  

(I haven't actually paid money for an audiobook in years now.  Does anyone know how much they currently cost?  Has the cost of physical media gone down any?)

Part of the reason I parted with the money to buy the audiobook was because in my view it was more than just entertainment.  After several years of living in the Japanese countryside, and speaking either Japanese or a very simplified form of English, I noticed that my productive vocabulary was becoming very simple.  When I got together with other foreigners, and tried to speak English, I often had the feeling of not being able to find the words I wanted.  It was a phenomenon that the other foreigners observed as well.  We were able to communicate our meaning well enough, but we often had the feeling that there were more sophisticated words then the ones we were using, but the words didn't come to us readily.

Having had some - literary - ambitions, I was worried about losing my language ability in English, so I started playing audiobooks in my apartment or in my car to keep up my literary vocabulary.  

I was also at this stage in my life big into audiobooks.  I viewed audiobooks as a very simple way to increase the number of books I was able to read.  

I've since then become disenchanted with audiobooks, because I've come to realize that there are some books I didn't fully absorb when listening to by audio.  Particularly books with complicated plots or subtle prose.  But Harry Potter was not one of those books.  In this particular case, I feel like I absorbed Harry Potter just as well by audiobook as if I had physically read the whole thing.

(*2) I actually only paid full retail price for the first Harry Potter book.  For books 2 through 6, a friend of mine who was big into pirating everything off of torrent sites on the Internet downloaded the audiobooks, and burned them all onto a CD-ROM for me.  (This was back in 2005, so book 7 still hadn't come out yet.)
Back in those days, I didn't even have a computer at home, and I couldn't play the CD-ROM on my normal CD player.  So on weekends when I spent a couple hours at Internet Cafes, I would just bring the CD-ROM with me, put on the headphones, and play it on the computers at the Internet Cafe.  At the end of every Internet Cafe session, I would write down what chapter I was on on the CD-ROM jacket, and then pick up from there the next time I came in.  And in this way I worked my way through Harry Potter books 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.  Book 7 I actually bought in hardcover and read when it came out.  

(*3) During my time in Japan, I viewed listening to English audiobooks as a way to keep up my literary skills as much as entertainment.  See footnote (*1).  So the audiobooks that I had in my apartment were played again and again and again in the hopes that I would absorb all their literary language.

(*4) During the period when I was toying with the idea of going back to school for a history degree, my audiobook listening time switched to a lot of history related books and radio shows.  That, plus as time went on, audio material became so freely available online and to download that there really seemed little point carrying around physical copies of audio books.  If memory serves, I left my physical CDs in my old room at my parents' house one year in between moves to different countries.  And on a recent trip back to the U.S., at my mother's urging, I gave away or threw away everything in my old room that I wasn't going to use again.  I think that's when I parted company with my audiobook copy of The Philosopher's Stone.

(*5) According to Wikipedia, the movie came out in 2001.  Although since I first saw it as a VHS rental, it may have been 2002 when I first saw it.  Who can remember?

Weekly Reading Vlogs: 

August 22: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (p.0-210)

August 29: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (p.210-332) 

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling: Book Review