Discuss: Why are the "Harry Potter" novels the most popular ever?

Cafe Society
41

[QUOTE=Struan]
I’ve yet to read them, but one thing I’ve noticed in my frequent trips to charity shops in search of books is that every popular writer is very easy to find - your Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele etc crowd - but although they are there, there are comparatively few Harry Potters. That suggests to me that they are loved and re-read.
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I’m willing to bet my household is not the only household that will ultimately have more than one copy of each. My kids are fans of this series, my husband likes it, I like it. When my children finally leave the nest, I will send them on their way with their own copies of well-loved books and series to start their own bookshelves. For this reason, I will buy them when they can be found at thrift stores, even though I already have them.
For this last release I bought two copies brand new.

42

The characters are human, the mysteries are intriguing, the quality is fairly consistent - Harry Potter does something fantasy doesn’t do. It’s mundane. A lot of Fantasy is stuck in Arthurian cliches - saving princesses, stopping evil knights/wizards, middle-aged scenery & weapons, as well as Tolkienesque ones - great quests, airy dialogue, big adventures, grand creatures. You see the world through Potter’s human eyes, like you were the boy who didn’t know he was a wizard. A lot of stuff would bore the hell out of a pureblood wizard, raised in the atmosphere - wizard’s banks, bars, wizard food, and primarily, wizard school.

Potter is a kid going to school, usually solving some mystery. If there were say, 10 chapters, the middle 8 are pretty boring. Little high-level action. Talking back to teachers, getting caught out of bed looking for clues, girl trouble… the mystery turns into scenery. Every once in a while, you get a clue for the mystery that’ll remind you of the first few chapters and encourage you to press on.

IMO Potter’s more mystery than fantasy. Always the whispers, the clues, the theories, the slip of secrets, the red herrings, and the grand reveal.

Oh and the mythology is doled out in small, easy to swallow chunks. I hate for hell fantasy writers who expect you to enjoy 2,000 years history about Hazzobal the Grand-hander in the land of Smazzersat. Harry Potter is about an inquisitive kid who just happens to live in this magic extension of our world.

43

[QUOTE=I’m Ron Burgundy?]
The characters are human, the mysteries are intriguing, the quality is fairly consistent - Harry Potter does something fantasy doesn’t do. It’s mundane. A lot of Fantasy is stuck in Arthurian cliches - saving princesses, stopping evil knights/wizards, middle-aged scenery & weapons, as well as Tolkienesque ones - great quests, airy dialogue, big adventures, grand creatures. You see the world through Potter’s human eyes, like you were the boy who didn’t know he was a wizard. A lot of stuff would bore the hell out of a pureblood wizard, raised in the atmosphere - wizard’s banks, bars, wizard food, and primarily, wizard school.

Potter is a kid going to school, usually solving some mystery. If there were say, 10 chapters, the middle 8 are pretty boring. Little high-level action. Talking back to teachers, getting caught out of bed looking for clues, girl trouble.. the mystery turns into scenery. Every once in a while, you get a clue for the mystery that’ll remind you of the first few chapters and encourage you to press on.

IMO Potter’s more mystery than fantasy. Always the whispers, the clues, the theories, the slip of secrets, the red herrings, and the grand reveal.

Oh and the mythology is doled out in small, easy to swallow chunks. I hate for hell fantasy writers who expect you to enjoy 2,000 years history about Hazzobal the Grand-hander in the land of Smazzersat. Harry Potter is about an inquisitive kid who just happens to live in this magic extension of our world.
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It sounds like you haven’t read much good fantasy. What you describe isn’t very representative of the fantasy field, especially the hugely popular urban/contemporary fantasy.

44

It’s so popular because the first book was good and it really hooked you into reading the rest. I liken it to being hooked on a good soap opera - not exactly the paragon of programming excellence, but entertaining as hell when you’ve gotten yourself hooked.

45

It’s more than just wish-fulfillment.

It’s just real enough to be plausible to a kid and just unreal enough to be easy to daydream about. Most kids at some point in their lives, around about the time they realize that washing the dishes isn’t a fun new pastime, think their parents are Horribly Unfair. That’s why the Dursleys are such ogres.

Most kids have had a teacher they swore was out to get them, especially if it was in one of their weaker subjects. Enter Snape and his random detentions.

Every kid wants a big huge friend to defend them. Hello, Hagrid.

Everything in the first book fit right into my childhood fantasies. School is so boring! I don’t want to learn about the life cycle of the frog. It would be so much more awesome to turn someone INTO a frog or to fly; oh, yes, to fly would be wonderful, on a broom or a carpet or what have you. And you can pet unicorns and live in a castle and there’s a scaaaaaaaary forest and even getting from your bedroom to your classroom is an adventure!

There’s just enough danger that a kid could happily put themselves in Harry’s place. Or Ron’s, or Hermione’s. Every good thing he has, every kid would want; every bad thing that happens they can relate to. Somehow, in this place, at this time, these adventures resonated with the imaginations of children. Something about their content and their structure struck a chord in many imaginations because it was, basically, what they would make-believe already. And it was great fodder for playground play, too. Even being one of the bad guys would be cool…

46

[QUOTE=wonderlust]
It sounds like you haven’t read much good fantasy. What you describe isn’t very representative of the fantasy field, especially the hugely popular urban/contemporary fantasy.
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You may be right, but I think he’s got a fair criticism of so-called high fantasy. Lots of the stuff that I have that even can be cleanly defined as fantasy (Morressy’s sword and sorcery stuff from the 80s that actually has very little sword and even less sorcery for most of the books or his Kedrigern books, for instance) are definitely not Tolkien but are also not Tolkien’s after-runs which are often bashed on this forum.

Then, of course, there’s the stuff that’s harder to classify. Is Card’s Wyrms fantasy or science fiction? How about The Dark Tower or Silverberg’s At Winter’s End?

Anyway, I obviously agree with you, even if I have let my subscription to F&SF lapse.

Oh, Wendell Wagner, could you please use the VB tags? This ain’t Usenet and the underscores makes your posts harder to read.

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[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
None of the explanations offered so far have come anywhere close to explaining the sales of the Harry Potter books. The various literary elements in the books that people have cited all appear in other books. Indeed, various combinations of these elements appear in other books, and those books aren’t as popular. It’s not the genre of the Harry Potter books either. There’s nothing new about English-language children’s fantasy series. They have been coming out regularly since at least the time of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. There’s nothing new about English public school stories. They were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There’s nothing new about stories of schools for wizards.

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But I do think the Harry Potter series is unique in that it has all of the elements cited together in one series. It’s the combination that JK Rowling hit upon that led to its popularity.

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I think it’s a combination of two things. One is that it’s a good solid series that manages to be perfectly accessible and the other is that in the years that the first few came out, mega bookstores and book clubs were very fashionable. Oprah’s book club was huge at that time and people suddenly thought it was very cool to have lattes and discuss books. For parents, Harry Potter was something they could share with their kids and their friends and the impression I had at the time was that people thought it was great to be reading kids books again.

If Harry Potter had come out in the 70s or 80s I think it still would have done really well but a lot more kids would have gotten it from the library and not as many adults would have read it or talked about it with each other.

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[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
If you wanted to explain the huge popularity of certain novels, it would have to be something that accounted for The Lord of the Rings (150 million copies), The Da Vinci Code (60 million copies), the Harry Potter books (60 million copies each), In His Steps (over 30 million copies), The Valley of the Dolls (over 30 million copies, To Kill a Mockingbird (almost 30 million copies), and Gone with the Wind (almost 30 million copies). For any single one of those books, it’s possible to come up with dozens of unique characteristics that define those books. The problem is to show why those characteristics caused the popularity.

Someone will probably say that each of the novels happened to catch the mood of the time. I don’t see that, and anyway it can be argued that, on the contrary, each of these popular novels actually was one of the causes of the mood of the time. I don’t see that anyone in this thread has produced anything but a circular explanation of the popularity of the Harry Potter books.
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Causes of the mood of the time? Sorry, but I simply can’t buy that. That’s especially true since many of these books sold over a very long period or several periods of time. Tolkien most especially. Was LotR the cause of the moods of college kids in the 60s? Not at all. The times created the mood. (And how about the zillions of sales after the movies were made?) Was To Kill a Mockingbird the cause of the mood of the civil rights era? No, it was the other way round. Pretty much the same for all of them, except for the ones which are hard to pair with any mood of their times.

And that leaves Harry Potter. That book falls into the hard to pair category for me. It caused the mood of our time? Ridiculous.

I said earlier that the common thread is that there is no common thread. They are random examples of the need for a common shared mass experience that recurs with utter regularity in modern times. There are many, many more than you list. This Wiki page has a dozen more fiction examples from 1850 on. Just about every decade from the 1920s on has one, and their numbers and the numbers sold tend to increase as you get closer to the present, as would be expected.

And that’s without listing Stephen King, Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy, John Gresham, Nora Roberts, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum or a zillion other megaselling authors, nor the list also on that page of bestselling series, a couple of which have collectively sold more than Harry or Tolkien, albeit from far larger total numbers of books.

There’s nothing that explains them and not others similar to them because of their special qualities. It can be explained by the notion that people like to be in the center of crowds in many senses, and will gravitate to the most popular and make them exponentially even more popular. But you can say that without any notion of the times and their relation to it. Else most of these would have stopped selling years ago. And they haven’t.

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[QUOTE=wonderlust]
It sounds like you haven’t read much good fantasy. What you describe isn’t very representative of the fantasy field, especially the hugely popular urban/contemporary fantasy.
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You’re damn right I haven’t. The more modern/urban stuff usually pertains to vampires or werewolves and is usually campy as all get out.

51

I meant the stuff I’ve read. I’d be happy if you pointed me in the direction of something less ridiculous.

52

[QUOTE=dangermom]
While I’m all for discussion of issues, and I’m not against a fun scare, I sometimes think we use it as an excuse to cover up the fact that we have failed to protect a small child from something inappropriate.
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Read any Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen lately? There’s protection and then there’s coddling. Not having children I might not the best arbiter on the subject and I don’t think I’d casually hand book 6 to an eight-year-old, but I don’t think he’d be scarred for life, either.

53

I haven’t seen mention of one reason I stuck with the story (as an adult) - when my nephew and niece started reading them, and convinced my brother to read them, and my brother recommended them to me (I started reading right after Prisoner of Azkaban was published), one of the reasons I stuck with them was because I liked the stories, but also because I knew that this was a series with a pre-determined lifespan. People knew from day 1 that this was going to be a story told over seven years with seven books, no more. So I know that I can follow the story with the expectation of a final conclusion. As opposed to many other series (e.g. Oz) where the author just kept writing novels, adding onto the previous story or completely changing the setting of the newest addition to the saga.

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Exapno Mapcase writes:

> There’s nothing that explains them and not others similar to them because of
> their special qualities. It can be explained by the notion that people like to be in
> the center of crowds in many senses, and will gravitate to the most popular and
> make them exponentially even more popular. But you can say that without any
> notion of the times and their relation to it. Else most of these would have
> stopped selling years ago. And they haven’t.

First, thanks for the link to that list of best-selling books, which is a lot longer than anything else I’ve seen before.

Second, here’s what I wrote:

> Someone will probably say that each of the novels happened to catch the mood
> of the time. I don’t see that, and anyway it can be argued that, on the contrary,
> each of these popular novels actually was one of the causes of the mood of the
> time. I don’t see that anyone in this thread has produced anything but a circular
> explanation of the popularity of the Harry Potter books.

I was not arguing that the novels caught the mood of the time. I was not arguing that the novels caused the mood of the time. I was countering a possible argument that someone could make that the reason that each of those best-selling novels achieved such popularity because the books happened to catch the mood of the time. I was saying that I didn’t see that the books particularly caught the mood of the time. I was saying that this was no better an argument than the opposite one, which was that the books caused the mood of the time. (For me, the phrase “it can be argued” means “someone out there probably has an argument to this effect.”) I’m saying that I haven’t heard a coherent set of reasons that each of these best-selling novels became popular, other than luck, which isn’t much of a reason.

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[QUOTE=DesertDog]
Read any Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen lately? There’s protection and then there’s coddling. Not having children I might not the best arbiter on the subject and I don’t think I’d casually hand book 6 to an eight-year-old, but I don’t think he’d be scarred for life, either.
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Odd as it may seem to you, I collect folk and fairy tales and am all for my children reading the older versions and skipping the Disney movies for as long as possible. Not some of the originals, such as Sleeping Beauty–a lot of those stories were really meant for adults in the first place–but at least as much as we can manage. In our house, the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella’s sisters lose their toes, though we use Wanda Gag’s wonderful versions for our smaller folks until they’re around 5.

You’ll note that in that paragraph I said I was speaking generally about society, not specifically about HP. I agree that the later books probably won’t scar a kid, but I’d still prefer to wait until my kids are 10 or so, since I just don’t think that they are appropriate for a younger kid. I draw a line between archetypal folktales and modern scary books. Yes, I am weird. :stuck_out_tongue:

56

I hesitate to post in this thread–having read only the first Harry Potter book and being dragged to the movies by my wife–but in observing my wife’s reaction to the series, I’m tempted to draw several general conclusions:
[ul]
[li]In general, I think the perceived quality of the first book and a healthy dose of media hype for the later releases have kept the series alive. While the later books have some highlights, I wonder if the need to see it thru to the end and discover Harry and the other character’s destiny are the inertia that drives the popularity of the later books.[/li][li]The school setting and the “bounded” independence of the students–they are unsupervised for long periods of time, but always seem to remain within some “safe zone”–I think attracts children to the series. IMO children like the idea of independence, but are also fascinated by rules, and (right or wrong) sense that a mastery of specific rules is what gives one true independence. [/li]As a tiny example, Rowling notes how the children are judged on their ability to transform mice into snufboxes (“points are taken away for whiskers”). The ability to perform magic, perhaps, is the ultimate metaphor for independence, but the school itself shows that this independence bounded by rules, a truth reinforced by cute details like the one above.
The visual metaphors–even I have to admit–are fairly creative; this, I think, is the one thing Potter fans return to most often when discussing their love for the books. My wife just last night referred to something as “like an every-flavor bean” and I’ve hear a colleague refer to an email he received as “a howler”. The mirror of Erised in particular is a useful storytelling device, as it was used both to illustrate character traits and as part of the plot device; its the kind of thing–like the “Medusa’s head”–that can be used to build a myth upon. IMO Rowling’s ability to come up with such interesting visual metaphors are what powers the popular draw of the series.[/ul]

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[QUOTE=alreadymichigan]
OMG UMBRIDGE VS THE TRUNCHBULL!
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I say Trunchbull by a nose… :wink: