Harry Potter Boxed Set (Volumes 1-4) [Paperback]

It's kind of ironic that a children's book should make me fall in love with reading again. But this book did the trick. From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, I slowly read the next book in the series, then the next and the next. Each book got progressively thicker, but that didn't matter. The stories come to life with humorous characters and this world of witchcraft and wizardry. I was beginning to imagine again!

After reading the four books in the series, I said to myself "Hey, that wasn't so bad. I wonder why I stopped reading." From that point on, I started with The Hobbit, then The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. Then I saw the movie trailer for The Bourne Identity which stars Matt Damon and I looked for the book it was based on. That led me to explore the world of espionage and international conspiracies according to Robert Ludlum. From here, I realized that I should probably balance my reading between fiction and non-fiction. So I read Good to Great, a business book by Jim Collins (the author of Built to Last), Jack: Straight from the Gut (about Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE), Made in America (about Sam Walton, the founder of WalMart). With a seamingly endless sea of titles to choose from and written by authors I did not know, I started one book at a time from each "famous" (atleast to the world around me) author. I've read current books by John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Sandra Brown, Carol Higgins Clark, Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen, and many many more. From this sampling, I've developed a sense of what I like and don't like. I've discovered what "formulas" these authors use. All this in a span of 5 months.

I don't even realize how caught up I get when I describe to my friends the books I've read and the books I plan to read. It's truly an indescribable feeling to once again find the passion for reading. And it all started with this simple children's fantasy book.

So would I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly! To kids and adults alike.

It's not enough to simply get children to read. A good book can also get them to think about what it means to be human. Harry Potter fails to do what all great books do: to examine the complexity of human relationships with others, with nature, and with the unknown. A quick comparison with Tolkien's masterpiece shows Rowling's biggest weakness as a fantasy writer. The Lord of the Rings allows the heroes to be susceptible to temptation. It works on the level of allegory to paint an epic of individual human struggle against self-centeredness. Harry Potter doesn't struggle with his ego. Ever. He's an orphan who becomes rich and goes to prep school, where he makes all the right decisions and wins every time. One doesn't feel for Rowling's characters because they have no human complexity. Humans aren't even humans in Rowling's world. They're Muggles.

Rowling also fails in her portrayal of magic. It has long been understood in the wiccan community that all magic, "good" or "bad," has unintended reprecussions. In Lord of the Rings, the One Ring makes characters invisible, but it also wastes them away until they become invisible for eternity, ghosts walking the earth. Even the makers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer understand the fundamental principle that anything you do with magic can cause harm. Harry Potter, by contrast, wears his invisibility cloak without ever fearing the reprecussions, because there are no reprecussions. He is invincible and, as a result, seems more spoiled than heroic. Again, in a very important way, Rowling's world is simplistic and fails to reflect in any way the compexity what it means to be human, let alone a young human.