Jessica
Even though there's only six years' age difference between my boyfriend and I, somehow there's a bit of a generation gap. He's always going on about video games and movies that were quite a bit before my time, and in return, he somehow missed out on almost everything that shaped “my” generation – most notably, for this review, Harry Potter.I'm not sure when I first read this book. I think I first got it as a Christmas present when I was eight, read the first chapter, dismissed it as boring (which that first chapter kind of is – crotchety, snobby English people living insular village lives, really?) and put it down for several months, after which I gave it another chance and this time was absorbed. Harry Potter captured the imaginations of me and all the other kids at my school. I remember how some of us tried to fake Hogwarts invitation letters to make all the other kids jealous, only to be immediately denounced as the vile fraudsters they were (knowing myself, I was probably doing the forgery and the denouncing). Hogwarts seemed infinitely more exciting than the boring primary school we went to; we constructed elaborate stories about our imaginary lives there (or at least I did...) and, for that reason I think, Harry Potter occupies a central place in the hearts of many people my age.Over the years, of course, my interest waned in Harry Potter, but when Mark Was Reading Harry Potter I reread the third book and #5 through #7, and was amazed at how well they stood up (especially #7, [b:Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 818056 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) J.K. Rowling https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1351958236s/818056.jpg 2963218], which I hadn't even liked the first time). My love for Harry Potter was renewed.Fast-forward a couple of years to when my boyfriend revealed he'd never read the books, nor even watched the movies, and what's more he hated the lot of them on principle (that principle being, “anything other people love that I've never read must suck”, which apparently makes sense to him). I was appalled. He was equally appalled that I'd never watched Star Wars though, so we struck a deal – for each Harry Potter book he read, I would watch one Star Wars movie.This was a terrible deal to strike.This is mainly because he refused to read the books at home in his own time like I'd envisaged, but insisted on reading this book aloud to me, “so I would know he'd really done it”. What this actually meant was that I had to spend 6–7 months listening to him read aloud, laboriously, painstakingly, torturingly, a book that he obviously absolutely hated. By the end of it all, I fucking hated it too. Hated it for being so simplistic and childish, when I know that from [b:Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 464164 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) J.K. Rowling https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1310384602s/464164.jpg 2402163] (#3) onwards they're immensely detailed and complex. Hated it for offering absolutely nothing to an adult raised on shallow, vapid action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who is absolutely determined to hate it. Hating it because I know the later books have plenty to offer adult readers (or I mean, those whose preferred genre is not action movies), but unless they're willing to have faith in that, these first couple of books are really not going to appeal to anyone who has a low tolerance for children's book. They're just not.The book isn't terrible, especially if you love immensely detailed world-building. But that's really the main thing about this book – the central plot, the mystery of the philosopher's stone, is actually very thin, and almost the whole book is given over to setting the scene for the six books to come (which is sort of incredible when you consider there was no guarantee that any of the other books would ever see publication). It just lacks almost all of the depth of the later books, like the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shall we say.I was reading a little bit about how Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been translated for overseas audiences – for instance, that the French translator attempted to sanitise it of any reference to class, particularly watering down Malfoy's bigoted comments into something completely neutral, changing his dialogue in the robe shop so rather than asking Harry his surname, so he can place him in the wizarding world's class hierarchy, he asks, “Comment tu t'appelles ?” – something completely different. The regionalisms and colloquial language of the English is gone; instead, everyone speaks in stuffy, academic French, even Irish Seamus Finnigan and West Country Hagrid. (In the Japanese version, Hagrid's dialogue was apparently written in a Japanese dialect with similar sociolinguistic connotations to what West Country accents have in English.) In the US version they made a huge number of changes just in changing individual words, resulting in this ghastly scenario where Ron's first line is “Mom, geroff!” – where these quintessentially British characters are caught with jarring Americanisms in their mouths, just because US publishers have so little faith in their country's children that they don't think they'll be able to understand what the word “mum” means. In a comparison probably no one will get, the little of the US text I've read was as jarring to me as Peter Bush's translation of [b:In Diamond Square 17356826 In Diamond Square Mercè Rodoreda https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1362917783s/17356826.jpg 225621] where there were these vividly Catalan characters running around named “Joe” and “Ernie”. Just what? The only reason any American child would be as ignorant as this (and I don't believe any more than a tiny minority could be) is because their entertainment industry insists on Americanising and homogenising everything, in a way no other English-speaking society does. It is interesting to note that both French and US publishers insisted on changing the title, on the grounds that children don't know or care what “philosophers” are – so you have US Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, French Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers.So overall I'm giving this three stars... it's an amazing children's book, one I hope I can introduce to my future children if I ever have any (otherwise I'll just target nieces, nephews, cousins... whatever it takes). It's an annoyingly childish introduction to the series if you're trying to get someone into it as an adult, though. Admittedly, you will probably enjoy it more if you're not determined to hate it from the beginning, you read it in a more reasonable timeframe than 6–7 months, and you don't insist on reading the entire damn thing aloud. The only bright side of that bet was that Star Wars IV wasn't too bad.
Even though there's only six years' age difference between my boyfriend and I, somehow there's a bit of a generation gap. He's always going on about video games and movies that were quite a bit before my time, and in return, he somehow missed out on almost everything that shaped “my” generation – most notably, for this review, Harry Potter.I'm not sure when I first read this book. I think I first got it as a Christmas present when I was eight, read the first chapter, dismissed it as boring (which that first chapter kind of is – crotchety, snobby English people living insular village lives, really?) and put it down for several months, after which I gave it another chance and this time was absorbed. Harry Potter captured the imaginations of me and all the other kids at my school. I remember how some of us tried to fake Hogwarts invitation letters to make all the other kids jealous, only to be immediately denounced as the vile fraudsters they were (knowing myself, I was probably doing the forgery and the denouncing). Hogwarts seemed infinitely more exciting than the boring primary school we went to; we constructed elaborate stories about our imaginary lives there (or at least I did...) and, for that reason I think, Harry Potter occupies a central place in the hearts of many people my age.Over the years, of course, my interest waned in Harry Potter, but when Mark Was Reading Harry Potter I reread the third book and #5 through #7, and was amazed at how well they stood up (especially #7, [b:Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 818056 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) J.K. Rowling https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1351958236s/818056.jpg 2963218], which I hadn't even liked the first time). My love for Harry Potter was renewed.Fast-forward a couple of years to when my boyfriend revealed he'd never read the books, nor even watched the movies, and what's more he hated the lot of them on principle (that principle being, “anything other people love that I've never read must suck”, which apparently makes sense to him). I was appalled. He was equally appalled that I'd never watched Star Wars though, so we struck a deal – for each Harry Potter book he read, I would watch one Star Wars movie.This was a terrible deal to strike.This is mainly because he refused to read the books at home in his own time like I'd envisaged, but insisted on reading this book aloud to me, “so I would know he'd really done it”. What this actually meant was that I had to spend 6–7 months listening to him read aloud, laboriously, painstakingly, torturingly, a book that he obviously absolutely hated. By the end of it all, I fucking hated it too. Hated it for being so simplistic and childish, when I know that from [b:Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 464164 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) J.K. Rowling https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1310384602s/464164.jpg 2402163] (#3) onwards they're immensely detailed and complex. Hated it for offering absolutely nothing to an adult raised on shallow, vapid action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who is absolutely determined to hate it. Hating it because I know the later books have plenty to offer adult readers (or I mean, those whose preferred genre is not action movies), but unless they're willing to have faith in that, these first couple of books are really not going to appeal to anyone who has a low tolerance for children's book. They're just not.The book isn't terrible, especially if you love immensely detailed world-building. But that's really the main thing about this book – the central plot, the mystery of the philosopher's stone, is actually very thin, and almost the whole book is given over to setting the scene for the six books to come (which is sort of incredible when you consider there was no guarantee that any of the other books would ever see publication). It just lacks almost all of the depth of the later books, like the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shall we say.I was reading a little bit about how Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been translated for overseas audiences – for instance, that the French translator attempted to sanitise it of any reference to class, particularly watering down Malfoy's bigoted comments into something completely neutral, changing his dialogue in the robe shop so rather than asking Harry his surname, so he can place him in the wizarding world's class hierarchy, he asks, “Comment tu t'appelles ?” – something completely different. The regionalisms and colloquial language of the English is gone; instead, everyone speaks in stuffy, academic French, even Irish Seamus Finnigan and West Country Hagrid. (In the Japanese version, Hagrid's dialogue was apparently written in a Japanese dialect with similar sociolinguistic connotations to what West Country accents have in English.) In the US version they made a huge number of changes just in changing individual words, resulting in this ghastly scenario where Ron's first line is “Mom, geroff!” – where these quintessentially British characters are caught with jarring Americanisms in their mouths, just because US publishers have so little faith in their country's children that they don't think they'll be able to understand what the word “mum” means. In a comparison probably no one will get, the little of the US text I've read was as jarring to me as Peter Bush's translation of [b:In Diamond Square 17356826 In Diamond Square Mercè Rodoreda https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1362917783s/17356826.jpg 225621] where there were these vividly Catalan characters running around named “Joe” and “Ernie”. Just what? The only reason any American child would be as ignorant as this (and I don't believe any more than a tiny minority could be) is because their entertainment industry insists on Americanising and homogenising everything, in a way no other English-speaking society does. It is interesting to note that both French and US publishers insisted on changing the title, on the grounds that children don't know or care what “philosophers” are – so you have US Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, French Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers.So overall I'm giving this three stars... it's an amazing children's book, one I hope I can introduce to my future children if I ever have any (otherwise I'll just target nieces, nephews, cousins... whatever it takes). It's an annoyingly childish introduction to the series if you're trying to get someone into it as an adult, though. Admittedly, you will probably enjoy it more if you're not determined to hate it from the beginning, you read it in a more reasonable timeframe than 6–7 months, and you don't insist on reading the entire damn thing aloud. The only bright side of that bet was that Star Wars IV wasn't too bad.