Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

I'm on a bit of a re-reading kick at the moment, and I decided to crack into Harry Potter again.  What I really wanted to read was A Song of Ice and Fire, but that goes against one of my reading rules: I don't re-read a series until it is finished.  I could have done Wheel of Time, but that damn thing takes up a whole shelf on my bookcase; I'd be reading it all year.  So, by process of elimination, Harry Potter got the nod.

That said, I'm a fan of the series.  It's not one that consumed me like the aforementioned hefty fantasies, but I was there buying the books on their day of release.  I think this is my third time reading the first book (my rule only came into place a few years ago, as a way of stopping myself from re-reading too much).  I can be a bit hipster about Harry Potter, because the first time I read it was when it was assigned to me at Uni in 1998, before it became a massive thing.  I can remember reading that Rowling intended for the book to last seven volumes, and scoffing at the notion.  I guess she had the last laugh there.

At first Philosopher's Stone felt to me a bit "kitchen sink".  It's held together very well by the boarding school structure, but there's the sense that a whole lot of disparate elements have been thrown in that are extraneous to the plot.  It turns out that I was fooled, because everything in this book ties back into the main plot, even down to the bloody wizard trading cards.  Rowling sets about world-building with abandon, throwing all sorts of bits and pieces of the wizarding world at the reader, but the great thing is that nothing is there purely for world-building alone.  It's quite remarkable that the book feels both rambling and tight at the same time.

Rowling's other particular skill is that she can establish character very quickly.  It helps that she's working in children's fiction, where broadly drawn characters are more acceptable.  Even so, she's good at it, and good at hinting around the deeper things going on with certain characters.

If I have one complaint with the book, it's the Dursleys.  They are bastards on an absurd level, to the point where the wizard characters seem more realistic than they do.  It's very effective at getting the audience's sympathies pointed at Harry, but there are times where it feels like way too much.

So I'm done with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and I enjoyed it so much I'm cracking straight into Chamber of Secrets.  I remember liking that one a great deal, but that was over a decade ago.  Let's see how it holds up.