A whole greater than the sum of its parts.

I doubt that there is much which can be said about the Harry Potter books which has not long since been said many times over.  Notwithstanding that likelihood, I must add my praises to the towering mountain of accolades.  Good work deserves praise, and true art merits appreciation.

I was a late-comer to the Harry Potter series.  Due partly to the fact that I have a pathological hatred of jumping on bandwagons, and partly to the fact that I judged the first book by its cover, I did not begin the series until the sixth book had been released.  It did not take long, however, for me to realize that I had stumbled onto something truly phenomenal.

The first Harry Potter book was published in a world where even adults had to be coerced into reading, and where children would only read if Pizza Hut, or some other company, offered them an incentive to do so.  If you had suggested then that children as young as eight or nine would pick up and read, of their own accord, a book which was more than three hundred pages long, and which had no pictures other than one whimsical illustration at the beginning of each chapter, people would have looked at you as though your head were spinning on your shoulders.  And yet, here we are, at the latter end of this incredible literary adventure, gazing out upon a world where young children stand in line in the small hours of the morning to purchase books which are thicker than some editions of Webster’s dictionary.

But it is not just the success of the Harry Potter books which is so remarkable.  It is the reason for that success.  Not since the Chronicles of Narnia has a series of so-called children’s books so awakened the imaginations of so many people.  On every continent, and in almost every country, children and adults alike have first marveled at, and then fallen in love with these stories.  But there is really nothing new in these books.  Loyalty, friendship, hope, endurance, and love are the stuff of every story worth reading.  Witches, wizards, and a world of wonder are all things we have seen before, many times.  We are not strangers to the story of the orphan, who, after much suffering and the learning of many valuable lessons, finally comes to find a place where he truly belongs.  But these elements, though they are as familiar as our faces in the mirror, are also as timeless as the stars.  We do not grow tired of them because they are the stuff of which our lives are made.  And in these books we find them coupled with characters who seem wholly real, whose doubts and fears and faith and hopes we fully understand, and set in a story, a rolling, leaping story, which excites and inspires us.  J.K. Rowling may have drawn us in with her story’s charm, but she captivated us with its substance.