Goodreads | Harry Potter Boxset Books 1-7

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which ones better	3	17 days ago, 04:39PM

David rated it:

(review of isbn 0739352245)

04/15/08

I was pretty excited to find this collected version of the Harry Potter books on here, an audiobook collection read by Jim Dale. I've consumed the Harry Potter series several times now -- first as books, and then as audiobooks. If you saw me on the S.F. MUNI at any point between something like September of 2007 and January of 2008, wearing headphones, this was what was going through my head. I've done my best not to break into tears in public spaces during key emotional moments in the reading, ...more I was pretty excited to find this collected version of the Harry Potter books on here, an audiobook collection read by Jim Dale. I've consumed the Harry Potter series several times now -- first as books, and then as audiobooks. If you saw me on the S.F. MUNI at any point between something like September of 2007 and January of 2008, wearing headphones, this was what was going through my head. I've done my best not to break into tears in public spaces during key emotional moments in the reading, but at certain times this was difficult. I am an absolute sucker for protracted narrative and detailed insular mythology, and so really, I'm not surprised the degree to which Harry Potter owned me, and I kind of knew all along this would happen. I can read Kathy Acker without batting an eye but when a certain character dies at the end of Book 5, I wept like a god-damned schoolgirl . . . I didn't actually get into the series until just before book 7 came out, but I read them all at once in the span of a few weeks or so, and while I missed the epic craziness of reading the series over the course of a decade, absorbing it all at once had a magic to it, too.

Although I want to talk about the books themselves -- what the hell, everyone else has -- I'm actually more excited to write this because of the audiobooks. This is because Jim Dale, who reads all 7 books here, is fucking awesome. There -- I said it. He is an absolutely phenomenal storyteller; an artist in his own right. His narrator's voice is warm & measured, and he has a perfect sense of how to deliver the books' biggest moments (his rendition of Voldemordt's big speech at the end of book 4 is cartoonishly, chillingly, awesome), and he does a great job in finding the natural rhythms of J.K. Rowling's prose -- one feels almost guilty for how enjoyable being read to in this way is. And Dale has a truly spectacular range for doing the different voices -- Hagrid and McGonagall and Dumbledore and Snape and Draco and Lupin and Sirius and the Dursleys all sound exactly like you want them to, and he lends a gravity and personality to each . . . . and Voldemordt is, of course, perfectly evil, and even the goblins have amazing goblin-voices. These voices are not as pronounced in the first two books, but by book 3 and 4 he hits his full stride, and you feel like you're immersed in a true audio play.

Reading the books was a great experience, but listening to them was something else entirely. Listening to all 7 books this way reminded me of the importance of storytelling as an actual art form; of what it means to be able to convey a narrative using only your voice. If you're a fan of the series at all, or have a lot of time riding public transit, I can't recommend the Jim Dale audiobooks highly enough. If you're already a fan of the series but haven't checked out this audio collection, its an almost completely new way to experience the stories.

So far as the books themselves go: I don't know how much more can be said at this point. You can examine them as literary objects, as children's books, as social commentary; you can examine the social-cultural phenomenon of Harry Potter; you can talk about the folks who love the series and paint their firstborn's room with Gryffindor colors (what, no Ravenclaw babies out there?); you can talk about the oddity of grown adults obsessing over what is considered essentially a kid's book. And there's something useful in most of these examinations, I'm sure.

But in a way they all seem like excuses, like people don't want to admit the degree to which the books swallowed them up; its easy to make fun of 30-year olds dressing like wizards and drawing lightning-bolt scars on their heads and waiting in line at midnight to get the next book in the series and ordering replica wands; its harder to admit that you enjoyed the books entirely on their own terms.

First though, the books do work as a spectacular coming-of-age fantasy series --- on par with Lord of the Rings or Narnia, which are also very much about how youth inherits responsibility and power. Interestingly, the books have a distinctly 1960s vein of anti-establishment sentiment, and are wonderfully scathing, and at times downright Orwellian, in their appraisal of government and power. Even more, Rowling seems to take a dim -- or at least, honest -- view of how groupthink works, and her vision of an English society that sits back and quietly allows an evil wizard and fascist government to take over, and believes whatever is printed in the newspapers, is a chilling reminder of the social lessons of World War 2 and how large-scale atrocities are permitted by large groups of people; the fact that the books actually touch on these things through the metaphor of good wizards / evil wizards & little kids learning magic is a pretty impressive achievement in and of itself.

The core message of the books is about friendship and family though, and this is no slight thing. Considering that the subject of Harry Potter is magic, which in the HP universe is an innate gift that blossoms in certain individuals, the books are surprisingly, almost defiantly, secular: Christmas and Halloween and Easter are celebrated in the books without any religious fanfare, and there is never any discussion on the possibility of divine/cosmic origins for magic: quite the opposite, in fact. Magic in the Harry Potter world is primarily a *social* problem, with a staunch division between magical & nonmagical folks, and with further divisions of class & standing within the magical world itself.

Trust the English to turn a series of novels about magic into an examination of social strata -- think "Pride and Prejudice" with wands. And yet all of this somehow works to the series' advantage; the persistent message seems to be that the rituals of friendship & family are what holds a society -- especially a society under extreme duress -- together. This actually becomes a fairly profound argument, as the books unfold. The books' advocation of the Hogwarts school as a haven for magical individuals is also a kind of appraisal of radical education in general; the message seems to be that while institutions are not to be trusted, free-thinking and gracious individuals who remove themselves from power in order to help pass on their knowledge are a society's most valuable asset.

There's more than a few times where Rowling's maddening writing ticks raise complaints -- characters come off as too flat, good & evil are oversimplified, and plot shortcuts & inconsistencies abound (although all in all, she's a pretty stellar mystery writer, and these books are as much mystery novels as anything else). But all of this is nitpicking, in a way -- there is a boundless joy at the heart of the books which is linked to a profoundly, staggeringly realized universe. As the books grow progressively darker (the atmosphere of doom that pervades starting with book 5 is just mesmerizing), and as the body count mounts, and the parallels to the role of the West in World War 2 and the other serious conflicts of modern day imperialism (no, really) become more apparent, its hard not to be completely invested -- Harry Potter really is an all-or-nothing proposition, and its hard to get to book 7 without being emotionally invested in every character & event (even if you're rooting for Voldemordt, who is probably the most fascinating character, imho).

In the end I would actually dare to compare Harry Potter to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (which has quite a persistent emotional core) -- while Rowling doesn't quite possess Douglas Adams' perverse wit or deadpan sense of the absurd, the Potter books do share the Hitchhiker series' sense of radical social commentary and subversive, dark view of politics and culture. And really, as Dale's reading reminds us, it's just a ripping good story.
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