How much of that do you think is the content of the books themselves, versus how much it managed to create itself as this shared experience that everyone reads at once, which very few books of /any/ variety manage
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Like it felt like it was in this odd place of being physically books, but itself also being this marketed product in a way that TV shows, or video games, or certain childrens toys do semi-regularly, but books very rarely achieve
sep 1, 2025, 6:29 pm • 3 0 • view
I read the first book when i was 19, in 2001. It was physically placed in my hands by my childhood friend (who was the other avid reader I knew back then). “You have to read this”. And I loved it and devoured the four that were out by then. I even compared following the next books coming out to->
sep 1, 2025, 7:26 pm • 0 0 • view
following the Beatles in the sixties. How f-ing sad. When she went full terf I started noticing the bigotry in the books as well. (Which I probably should have earlier, but you know, privilege). Done with them. Still love the Beatles, though :)
sep 1, 2025, 7:26 pm • 2 0 • view
Re: story. It was also the outsider perspective, finding a place where you would be a star instead of a weirdo. Not original. But I had only read one Norwegian series that felt similar. Not yet LOTR. Which I suspect is also a thing - the first of the kind for many. World building, mythology etc
sep 1, 2025, 7:32 pm • 0 0 • view
I think it’s a lot of the first, but not entirely. My oldest started reading them in kindergarten, probably a decade and a half after they first came out. A lot of her friends did, too, but by the 2010s it wasn’t lines-around-the-block-in-Times-Square like it had been 10 years earlier. 1/
sep 1, 2025, 6:31 pm • 6 0 • view
And it wasn’t that she was the child of Millennials who had grown up with it—I was well into college before they came out and refused to read them until law school, when my wife and I had just moved to a new apartment and I had a cold, so I grabbed what had been unpacked. 2/2
sep 1, 2025, 6:31 pm • 6 0 • view
The shared experience part is huge. My mum was working in the uk in 99-03, and they released a version of the series with different covers so adults could read it on the tube, etc. without being embarrassed. I loathe JKR, but nothing remotely comes close to HP in terms of general popularity
sep 1, 2025, 6:39 pm • 2 0 • view
mayyyybe Pullman (His Dark Materials/Subtle Knife) but even that was more for the nerdy kids (me) and never quite hit mainstream.
sep 1, 2025, 6:39 pm • 1 0 • view
I think for my mum's generation and a bit older The Chronicles of Narnia was big big, but even then not as big as Harry Potter. I never read His Dark Materials but I do remember it also being big in the 2000s, you also had stuff like Alex Rider that was big for the time but nowhere near HP big.
sep 1, 2025, 8:07 pm • 2 0 • view
Yes, agreed!
sep 1, 2025, 8:36 pm • 1 0 • view
It had an unprecedented marketing budget, I seem to recall, and it was forced on some American schoolchildren.
sep 2, 2025, 2:58 am • 0 0 • view