Below the fun illustrations on each cover of the four Harry Potter books should be a disclaimer to the reader: Do NOT even THINK of purchasing this book if you have anything important to do in the next four days of your life. Last year I made the tragic mistake of picking up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the middle of the finals period as a little bit of light reading. What quickly developed was a brutal fight between the pull of Hogwarts and Harry's world and my looming and ever-depressing history final. Fifty dollars and the four books later, Harry won the fight by a landslide as I pushed the studying back chapter by chapter of Harry Potter.
Those of you who have joyously opened a Harry Potter book know exactly what I'm talking about. Upon completion of book number two at 3 a.m., you curse Barnes and Nobles for not being open 24 hours a day so that you can proceed to book number three. For those of you who denied yourselves the gift of a little Harry, I can already hear your measly claims, "Oh, it's a fad!" or "Isn't that, like, for children?" Speaking with probably half the literate world behind me, you're just wrong!
I have to admit that I too resisted opening one. Wallowing in my intellectual snobbery, compliments of one too many Johns Hopkins political economy classes, I too thought that I was above Harry Potter. It was not until my mother, the literary snob of them all, read them that I decided to succumb. I was sold.
So now all you skeptics are asking, why are they so great then? In a cop- out answer, well, there's just something about Harry. From the moment you step into Number 4 Privet Drive, you are mesmerized and enchanted. After just a page, the book is simply irresistible. No book has ever hooked me in from the first paragraph of book one to the final sentence of book four as thoroughly as Harry has. Perhaps it's the detail with which J.K. Rowling weaves her tale of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione. You can taste Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Beans as Harry and Ron anxiously munch away dreading the selection of a vomit-flavored bean, you can smell it when one of Snape's potion experiments goes South, and you literally sit on the edge of your seat waiting for conclusion of the Quidditch matches that come perilously close to letting Slytherin win. It could be the quirky characters that J.K. introduces and develops in the most intriguing ways. Or maybe it's the utter inventiveness of the stories she tells like none other.
Harry Potter whisks you away so completely that you can entirely forget about the surreal world of finals and end of semester papers just for a few hours. Even surrounded by the tangible stress that pervades the MSE, you can feel like you too attend Hogwarts where the stress is more about avoiding being turned into stone or falling off your broomstick than studying genetics. Which would you choose? For those of us whose imaginations have gotten a little rusty as jobs, internships, and the like have pushed us dangerously close to becoming adults, Harry Potter is a refreshing return to childhood when wizards and dragons did roam the world.
So give yourself a break, spring for the $7 copy of book one, and let J.K. Rowling spin her charming story around you for just a few hours. I would be shocked if afterwards you didn't just wish you had an owl instead of dreary old e-mail to post your letters.
