Reading Harry Potter [antikvár]

Introduction "I love your books—the real ones, I mean, I haven't read the ones for chil-dren, of course!" —Ursula K. Le Guin, reporting on the comments of some of her aduit admirers1 By the end of the twentieth century, there were few people in the English-speaking world who had never heard of a boy named Harry Potter. British au-thor Joanne Kathleen Rowling—better known by the androgynous initiais "]. K."—achieved astounding commercial success with her series of novéis focusing on the young wizard with the lightning-bolt forehead scar who finds out about his magical powers on the morning of his eleventh birthday. Harry Potter and the PhilosopheraiSorcerer's Stone,2 the first book of a planned seven, each of which follows the protagonist through one year of his éducation at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, won the 1997 British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, the 1998 New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, and the 1998 Parenting magazine Book of the Year Award. It was named "one of the best books of 1998" by Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist in the United States. An illustration of Harry Potter on the cover of Time magazine made Rowling the first children's writer to be featured in a Time cover story The popularity of Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone and the ensuing two novéis— Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (U.K. 1998; U.S. 1999) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (also 1998/1999)—led British chil-dren to vote Rowling the winner of the Gold Medal Smarties Prize for three years in a row. In the States, her books dominated the top three places on The New York Times bestseller list for over twenty months. At the time that book IV, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Tire (2000), was about to be released and