Empty Shelf/Mad Reviewer #17 - "Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone" by J.K. Rowling

To me this kind of feels a bit like cheating, as I've read this book before (I'm trying to just read books this year that I haven't read) but I picked this up at the weekend when I went home to visit my mum and her husband. I was helping them move and they had found a few of my Harry Potter books that I had misplaced when moving my stuff out.

It was so good to start this series again as an adult. There was a writer who, a few weeks ago, told J.K. Rowling that she should stop writing for adults to give other authors a chance - but by all means, she could keep on writing for children. As if writing books for children were any less important. This writer was also dismayed that adults were reading Harry Potter for themselves instead of just reading them for the benefits of their children. This writer did admit after that she had a touch of the green-eyed monster, but still. Not cool.

Because it's been so long since I read the books it was almost like starting again from scratch. Yes, the main events were still in my head but there were several parts of the writing that I had never noticed before. For example: "...for neither as a cat nor as a woman had she fixed Dumbledore with such a piercing stare as she did now." This phrase almost seemed jarring with the sentences before and after it, it's such an elegant composition of words (I know that sounds awfully pretentious, but that's what I thought!). The whole book was so fluid and easy it's almost difficult to believe that this was her debut novel.

It was wonderful meeting the characters again from scratch and reading the descriptions of them, as they must have been in Rowling's mind. Knowing how the characters end up, it was also really interesting to see them at the beginning of their arc, and how much they grow just in this short book (only 256 pages).

If I get far enough ahead of myself in my reading challenge again (I'm aiming to read a book a week and am currently 3 books ahead of time) I'll continue this series. It's still got it.

"After all this time?"
"Always."

Until next time!