I genuinely liked it. Read it last summer. I guess it got so popular because it reads so easily. People ain;t gonna bother catch a trillion obscure refferences to some retarded philosopher or pretentious fuckwad. People want to have fun reading, something /lit/ and autists in general will never understand.
Favorite female character is that quirky Luna Lovegood.

>>7882903
>Harry Potterfu

reported and saged.

>>7882923
OP here. Would you agree that part of the success of HP is that there are a trillion obscure references (folklore etc) but they just blend into the writing and don't stick out or read awkwardly?

I also re-read Philosopher's Stone recently and it's amazing how she manages to establish an entire alternative reality and backstory in the space of 200 pages.

Also claiming Ginny Weasley.

>>7882944
There is no namedropping on HP though, and most of these folklore references are explained in the book. You can read the whole series with nothing in your head and by the end of it you'd still know what's going on. Like I said, it'd really easy to read. You can down half of the series in like a day of reading.
I mean, I did try to read Dune around that time and the first 5 pages contained more random names and shit than I cared to remember, so I dropped it. I finished Philosopher's Stone in less hours than it took me to read 5 pages of Dune.

>>7882903

Why didn't Voldemort just get one of his guys to go back in time, warn him about his stupid mistake to kill the Potters and then come back instead of destroying all the time turners? Surely he must've had people loyal enough to go about doing that.

>>7882903
I really don't enjoy the way Rowling writes at all. I think it's incredible how she created a very rich and full world and was, at least for the most part, able to consistently follow the rules that she created for that world, but the characters that populated that world were by and large one note and uninteresting. She got better at dialogue in the later books, but the first few were pretty hard to get through for me.

But they're made for children so whatever.

Read it when I was a teen, don't consider myself a fan but it was all right, don't regret the time wasted.

No favorite character. I think my favorite book was the 4th.

It's good YA fiction but it's not Shakespeare. If you go in with reasonable expectations, I think most people will enjoy them. That said, the series has its share of filler, (mostly books 2 and 5), and ends on a fairly obnoxious deus ex machina. Seriously, Harry basically beats voldemort on a fucking technicality. Over all good, much better then shit like hunger games
Luna>Granger>Ginney this is fact

>shitposting aside
thread disregarded

I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

I remember reading this shit in elementary school.

Was very impressed. Kids today missed out on being the age where you still believed in Santa and then having this well written book about magic come out.

Shit was capital "T" Tight breh.

>>7882903
I can't believe adults read these books, let alone they have a presence in academia as literature.

Children's literature is now considered adult literature because we're a generation of adult children.

>>7883030
>i too enjoy italian food

>>7883030
>tfw the phrase "stretched his legs" isn't in the book at all, not even once

>>7882903
If it was one book or a trilogy, it would be better.

I think it's popular because it combines real world nostalgia over school with the wish fulfillment of a more interesting world.

Did Harry Potter do more damage to literature or cinema? I think it did a fair amount of both but cinema probably suffered the worst blows, because when Harry Potter ended it opened up all the flood gates for copycat wannabe YA authors to be optioned into series without countless entries.

>>7882903
Idk, I didn't like it. Not in the "2patrician4u" way, I actually enjoyed the first 3 books but it got kind of boring after that so I dropped the fourth book.

As for why it's popular, I have no idea. Luck? J. K. Rowling said multiple times on interviews that she tried publishing books under pseudonyms after Harry Potter's success, and nearly every single one of them got rejected. She's not an spectacular author by any means, it's just that some genre fiction writer had to be the first to make a billion dollars, and it happened to be her. But it could've been any other writer of any other fantasy series, I can't think of anything that sets Harry Potter aside from the rest.

>>7882903
I love Harry Potter. That being said its popularity is mostly due to an after shock of globalization. The world suddenly becomes interconnected with relatively few restrictions on trade and suddenly a book that is pretty good sells quite a few copies. So people report on it and it sells even more in the chain reaction of hype that wasn't really possible before. A score of people to translate the thing into a different languages and the fear of missing out. Also a neverending and universal demand for children's reading material. Readily adaptable for series of movies, toys, and games to add gasoline to the fire. All of the forces were there for something like this to happen.

Now that kind of global reach is more normal, but this was the first phenomenon of its kind making it one of the biggest. It had to happen with something. Might as well have been Harry Potter.

>>7883099
*that being sad