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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3128551" data-attributes="member: 18280">Just my 2 cp (and there are untagged spoilers, so don't read it if they bother you):The Harry Potter books will always have a place in my heart because, after the first film, I could hear a child behind me whisper "The book was better".   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> However, while I find the HP books to be adequate reading, they don't hang together well (certainly there is no unified theory of magic behind the snippets of classes we see), they are adequately written (but not inspiring), and I keep reading them more for the soap opera quality rather than because each new book is a brilliant gem.I think that The Philosopher's Stone was a book intended to be taken lightly, a fairly good children's adventure yarn that proved far more popular that expected.  The next book, Chamber of Secrets, is the weakest IMHO.  Having killed off her main villian, JKR is forced to make the memory of him into the villian.  I feel that the Chamber movie was superior to the book, for no other reason than that the film makers had a better idea as to where the series was going than JKR did when she wrote the book.  I know that this isn't what JKR says, but I think it shows in the plotting, the writing, and the retconning that comes in the later books.Only on the 3rd book do we see any sense that there is a metaplot, and it is done by (apparently) retconning what happened previously.  Also, in this book JKR seems to realize that she has to do something about the magic system she created in the previous two books, and begins to take steps to retcon what is being taught at Hogwarts.  I would say that her writing definitely grows here.  There are still quite a few problems (the biggest that the whole muggle world/magical world dichotomy is given only the barest lip service; the second biggest that only Harry Potter, of all the children the Death Eaters killed, was apparently loved enough by his parents to be protected!).Will she be remembered 20 years from now?  Undoubtably.  She is very good at getting the "children in school" thing right.  She uses a very strong premise with the "special boy" and "underdog" combined theme.  As for The Half-Blood Prince, I think it is fairly obvious that:[spoiler] <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Snape isn't really a bad guy.  He is going undercover in a plan concocted by Dumbledore.</li> </ul> <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This plan requires that Snape be trusted absolutely, so Dumbledore allowed himself to be "killed" and Harry to witness it.</li> </ul> <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dumbledore isn't actually dead.  Which is why attention is given in the book to a potion that can fake the effects of death.</li> </ul>[/spoiler]So, while I agree that they are interesting and have energy, I don't buy that they are great literature.  The depth of the series has increased over time, but not to the degree that many people seem to think.IMHO, anyway.RC</blockquote>

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