Was Harry Potter Worth Reading?

Leo Yan

     Harry Potter is one of those classic book series that nearly everyone you'll meet has read. In fact, the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, has a staggering 120 million copies sold, making it the third most sold book of all time. Most readers will know exactly or at least have an idea of what Harry Potter is about. A boy is sent to a magic school, escaping his abusive relatives and reveals secrets of the school to ultimately defeat a dark wizard. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and very little further explanation is needed. But was it worth reading? There are a lot of factors that can affect whether someone thinks a book or series is "worth reading" since there is no conclusive definition. It is considered as one of the "big dogs" of classic fantasy literature, but here's the problem.

    The idea of classic literature usually necessitates either contribution to a literature/genre or can represent a writing style. The Harry Potter series is in a genre that hosts many of the greatest works in literature as a whole. This list includes, but is not limited to, The Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and The Name of the Wind. Compared to these literary works, the Harry Potter series all of a sudden becomes much smaller. Many even consider Harry Potter to be a ripoff of J. R. R. Tolkien's aforementioned The Lord of the Rings. When put into scale, the Harry Potter series just can't reach the standards of "proper" literature.

    While the series can't fully represent the fantasy genre, it still achieved an incredible feat. As previously mentioned, with 120 million copies sold and an age range of 8-12, the Harry Potter series managed to hook in an impossibly large amount of young readers into literature, thus contributing heavily to not just the fantasy genre, but literature as a whole. One of the main drawbacks of the greatest pieces of literature is that a younger audience just can't understand what's going on in the text because the stacked layers of nuance require more experience to break through. The Harry Potter series, however, is written for children. While being its biggest strength, it also remains its greatest drawback.

    For children's books, there's a limited amount of literary technique you can use. Many of the bigger literary works have a knack for vivid imagery. When the movie for The Lord of the Rings came out, it affirmed what the readers imagined. When the Harry Potter movies were released, it showed the readers what it was meant to look like. Another limitation that can't be put on Rowling is the lack of character depth. Every character in great fantasy pieces has their own motivations, allowing readers to hold a connection between them. On the other hand, most Harry Potter characters are undeveloped. You could replace most if not all side characters with new people and nothing would change. You could even change their personalities and still, the plot would generally remain in line. Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort seem to be the only Harry Potter characters with some amount of detail put into their backstories and motivations. The convenient random addition and omission of certain plot devices (such as the Time Turner) also drags the book along, where easy tasks are unnecessarily difficult while hard tasks are solved within half an hour. Conclusively, a lot of the criticism can't be put on the author simply because of the limitations of the style she chose to write in.

    To answer question simply, yes. The Harry Potter series, though it may never live up to the standards of its "colleagues," still made a massive impact on literature itself, especially because of the age range of its targeted audience. Many things could have been improved in the books, but that doesn't change the amount of people that were hooked into literature because of it. If Harry Potter was never written, I highly doubt many modern books would have been written either. Whether if it's an overrated book or not, the influence brought by Harry Potter remains undeniable.