Many of your posts have been very persuasive…
I’ll say you should read it in the way you read The Hobbit and then move on to the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, it starts out light, with and for children, but it moves and genuinely matures. At the end, it’s good fantasy by any quarrel. In my head, the later parts of the series are fully as developed as well known “good” fantasy, like Robin Hobb’s books, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and Aasimov’s works.
There are some flaws with the series, mostly in the internal consistency and worldbuilding aspects, that keep the books from being must-reads, but I still don’t know a person who has read them through and considered them to be a boring waste of time. Some people like them, most people love them.
I got bored about a third of the way through the first book and gave up. The writing was too simplistic and the characters were one-dimensional. If I have to finish that book and another like it before the writing matures, I don’t think I can be bothered.
But if the writing really is different in a significant way after the first few, I might read summaries of the early works and pick up the later ones. If so, where would you all recommend starting the series, and where might I find good summaries?
My impression is that the moviemakers were aiming at all the kids (and grownups) who’d already read the books. The goal seemed to be to get the characters and the core action on screen, for the enjoyment of the already-large Potter fanbase, and assume that the viewers could mentally fill in any plot holes.
AFAIAC, the main value added in the movies is Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Severus Snape. Other than that, the books are superior in pretty much every way.
Offstage somewhere, that’s all. Just like in Tolkien’s real life.
Aside from when he went home to Edith, J.R.R. Tolkien spent his days in an almost entirely male world - as a professor at an all-male college, which was the norm back then, in the army, while working for the Oxford English Dictionary, while going out drinking or on walking tours with his friends - the only women he would typically encounter would be the occasional secretary or barmaid.
Yet this was all happening in our physical world, where women were and are half the population. So whatever else may be said about it, the infrequency with which women appear in LotR is hardly a strike against its verisimilitude.
Yes, there is some marketing and hype. But as we’ve been discussing in this thread, particularly starting at post 18, the initial sales of Harry Potter Seven are orders of magnitude higher than anything else in the publishing world. Although the thread was initially about on how it was now easy it was to find a copy of the book after the first day, the discussion moved on to just how monstrously big the first printing was and first day sales were. The initial US printing was 12 million copies, which is 4% of the US population, and the first day sales were 8.3 million copies, approaching 3% of the population on one day, for a book.
There is some hype, but it is based on genuine interest in the series and the characters. This can only result from high-quality, accessible material/
I was going to recommend reading the first chapter of the first book, but you say you’ve done that. So I don’t know what to tell you. I would have thought that anyone who could get anything out of the books would get it right from the beginning. The later books may be darker and longer, but the appeal is the same.
Maybe it’s because you’re a fantasy buff. You guys often don’t like Potter. I don’t like fantasy at all, but I like Harry Potter for the same reason I like Terry Pratchett, and the same reason I loved Roald Dahl and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a kid. It’s not comprised of torrid mythology, and there isn’t dull world building (like, say, an entire chapter on the preperation of supper, or a dissertation on the entire history of Elven kings or whatever). The kids are ordinary people, who do ordinary things, only weird stuff happens to them. And even so, the story remains about the ordinary people who do ordinary things, not the weird stuff. I don’t need to know all about the backstory of the giants in The B.F.G. beyond the amusing descriptions Dahl gives, and it’s the same with Harry Potter - the wonder and the whimsy are important, not the laborious world building.
If you’re read the first book and you don’t like it, there’s little I can say except that maybe this just isn’t a series for you.
Wikipedia has some pretty good summaries.