Why ask /lit/? It’s like the most popular book in the world these days I’m sure it doesn’t take much searching to find an answer you’d be happy with.

>>25160017
Because I want to see what /lit/ has to say about it, obviously

>>25160117
Okay, then yes. It’s a good book for kids.
There are many people here who got into literature by reading this series, and given the way /lit/ is, you can ponder yourself whether you think that’s a good or bad thing.

>>25159915
depends on the age

the sweet spot is probably 9-14, depending on the reader. it's certainly readable to an 8yo, maybe a 7yo, but they'll stumble over the length and a good deal of made up words.

older than 14 can certainly still enjoy it but that's around when kids start branching their tastes so it's not as a sure thing.

>>25160145
However, i guarantee most new readers of it in 2026 Anno domini are 25+ year old women.

>>25160145
I feel the first book wouldn’t have that problem so much, if there’s one thing I can say about Rowling, it’s that she makes things simple for anyone to understand.

>>25160153
well sure, but those aren't kids. or at least not in the way OP probably means.

it's a bit like how most pokemon players are men in their 20s or 30s. while true, it's ultimately not super relevant

>>25160157
definitely agreed, but it's more of an endurance thing for 2nd and 3rd graders. they can understand it sentence-to-sentence, but it gets harder to maintain over the course of 200+ pages. kids get frustrated by words or sentences they don't understand because they lack the intuition needed to get the gist and move on.

if you're buying for your own kid you'll know if they can do that or not. if buying for someone else, you may want a more "sure bet" if this is a gift or something meant to engender a love of reading.

>>25159915
Give your kids something good like the Hobbit or the Neverending Story, not this shit
HP is just braindead entertainment with zero educational value which only gets worse as the series progressed

>>25159915
No, give them Lewis Carroll instead.

>>25160309
Or Narnia.

>>25160314
Or Narnia, yes.
>>25159915
Harry Potter isn’t something I’ve read, or even watched, but I’ve seen some parts of the books, and to me it looks like it may as well be screenplay in some parts, painfully dry and there’s nothing exactly “literary” in there (I’m assuming you’re aspiring to get kids into lit? Maybe you’re not, but I’m responding to you with that assumption). So I don’t know OP, let them watch the movies instead, they’ll likely enjoy them more.

>>25160126
The books are addictive.
The books stimulate children in a way the real world stops being interesting.
The words are so filled with thought terminating cliche phrases that a cult leader may have written it... and it spawned a cult that worships the IP


HP is not healthy

>>25159915
Yes.
Reading pic related as a ~9 year old was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life.

It was a product of its time. Each book in the series was designed for a certain age-level and kids then grew up with each successive volume. -- A major flaw was that there was no growth and Harry ended back under the stairs at the end of each volume until the last.

>>25160326
you're overthinking it. your goal in getting books for kids is to get them something they'll actually read. they'd read Harry Potter even if it's shit (and it's not) because it's very famous and they likely know other people who have

>>25159915
Yes unless you are mentally ill and think that Rowling is wrong in anything she has ever said

>>25159915
wasnt there some popular young adult fiction series set in the age of sail

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No, kids should be reading the Land of Elyon instead.

>>25159915
All you learn from these books is that hitler was bad, that’s all we’ve had drilled into our heads for decades and I don’t think it’s really made anyone any better for it. Imagine how much more someone would gain from reading Dickens instead, Harry Potter is slop.

>>25160701
>. --
.- .-. . / -.-- . / .-.. --- ... - / .- - / ... . .- / .-.. .- -.. -.. .. .

>>25159915
They're pretty fucking gay, honestly. Even when I was reading them as a kid, Harry is a lame protagonist. He never wins by his own merit, he just gets stupid lucky all the time.

>>25162182
But in this version, Hitler was Dumbledore's gay lover.

Too demonic

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Why did he do it?

>>25162551
I’m glad he did, the books fucking suck and he proved that its fans are retards too.

>>25159915
They're okay, but I heavily dislike the way it and the modern YA movement as a whole have dumbed down language from prior children's novels such as picrel and other older kids' books. Maybe it can be a good gateway into reading for kids who are starting late, but if you look at it as an adult it really isn't that good, and a kid at the level of understanding the subject matter should already be linguistically proficient enough for better-written books.
Also the developmentally-arrested adults who never moved on from books like these sort of bias me against them.

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>>25162688
>picrel
>no pic
How embarassing

>>25159915
Yeah, if you want them to become devil worshippers.

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No
https://www.writersreps.com/feature.aspx?FeatureID=173

>>25160145
yeah that's about right, i started them at 8 and got bored around 12. If the whole series was released at the time I might've got through it

>>25162840
He should have actually written one of his *how to read* books about Phillosopher's stone bashing it

>>25159915
Honestly HP is too advanced for kids these days
I wish I was joking

>>25159915
They were only worth reading in their heyday.

>>25162914
Project Hail Marry is an easier read

>>25159915
Idk Ronald Dahl?

>>25159915
Yes.

look at the adult Harry Potter fans. Do you want your kids to grow up like them?

>>25163854
Get a job. Read a book. Go outside. Talk to pretty women.

>>25159915
I was reading for my kids and they were enjoying a lot, but the second book is very woke, I stopped reading about 2/3 of the way and switched to The Hobbit, they are complaining a lot because they wanted to finish book 2, but I won't budge.

>>25163997
By "woke" do you mean it has a heavy handed allegory for racism with the whole mudblood/pureblood thing?

Yes, the Harry Potter series were the first longer-length books I read as a young boy at the age of 10. It inspired a love of reading in me which has remained with me until today.

>>25164185
And what kind of books do you read now? You have...graduated from the likes of Harry Potter, haven't you?

>>25164203
You should know better anon, if you start with Harry Potter, you remain forever stagnant in your reading.

>>25159915
Honestly they are kinda meh even for children's books. The reason they got so big is that they were the first REALLY popular YA books to reach people who weren't niche nerds. If you were a millennial in the 90s, Harry Potter was a gamechanger, but for anyone else it's been outdone in every manner you can think of.

>>25164312
>reach people who weren't niche nerds
Is that so? Harry Potter himself looks like a 70 pound weakling, appealing to those like him, scrawny kids with glasses, generally nerds, to (maybe mis)quote the sopranos.

>>25162840
he went easy on her

>>25164110
It teaches kids to love immigrants

>>25164386
I don't remember that being a thing in the second book.

>>25164320
He's baiting or retarded. Normal kids were not into hp until the movies popularized it.

>>25163854
They are a cult and the books use linguistic viral loads.
The movies use occult symbols and subliminals to enter the subconscious

>>25163997
Book 2 depicts an LLM demon ai trapped inside of a diary that prompts in and out

>>25164205
This. You end up reading Stephen King and Sandersloppa

>>25164312
>The reason they got so big is that they were the first REALLY popular YA books to reach people who weren't niche nerds.
You’re literally saying they got big because they got big. At least give a real answer.

>>25164672
Zoomer revisionism. Harry Potter got a lot of kids into reading back then who wouldn't be readers otherwise. The movies got made because of how much of an unprecedented hit the books were, not the other way around.

>>25164936
I don’t understand how they got popular. Are they like, ridiculously easy to read or something?

>>25159915
Yeah they're decently written kids books.

Ironically, I was its target market as the series was being released. I couldn't get into it. I was a contrarian even back then

>>25164203
>>25164684
Mainly literary fiction. At the moment, I'm reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, Infinite Jest by DFW and No Country by McCarthy.

>>25165225
You get lost on the way to reddit, fag?
Faulkner is good I suppose.

>>25165270
Says Faulkner is 'good, I suppose.' You are an idiot - he's one of the most influential modernist authors. Get off /lit.
What do you like to read - Stephen King?

>>25165386
Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Rimbaud mostly.

>>25165386
Faulkner was a hack, brother.

>>25159915
If I have kids, they're never reading the Harry Potter books, so they'll never become insufferable plebbitors.

>>25166289
Your only consolation would be that they may rightfully hate troons.

No, your children should read the works of Plato and the classic Greek plays.
After that they should move onto the philosophical canon, the thoughts of Nietzsche, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Being and Nothingness

>>25166756
>Camus
>Sartre
You’re better off giving them Harry Potter

>>25162211
This a first: a total non sequitur in Morse code. -- Thanks for the laugh.

>>25166289
This. What's worse is when their pre-adolescent pukes start going around dismissing everyone as Muggles without a shred of self-awareness.

>>25167520
I hope this doesn’t happen in real life.

>>25160363
>that a cult leader may have written it
Rowling only ever wrote the first two books and even that is dubious given that it's not that infrequent for books to be overhauled once they're greenlit.
>HP is not healthy
It's derivative, foremost. Not only did the first book copy numerous books that were published between in the early to mid '90s. the entire premise is based on a 'chosen' kid, hence appealing to a kid's narcissistic sense, going to the wizard version of his British school, just think of why they all wear that uniform. The notion of dread and doom around the wizard teachers correspods with what the student feels around his teachers.
It's perfect, a book written by market strategists. It's like Garfield and Marvel all over again.

>>25159915
They are so-so at best.

>>25165045
>I don’t understand how they got popular.
Movie producer David Heyman's assistant happened upon the book and loved it and talked Heyman into buying the rights to it, this all they way back in late 97 when the book was barely months old and was on it's way to sell a grand sum of... 500 copies.

>>25167666
No one here actually likes them, well those who do are people who grew with them and to that I say it’s time to grow up mentally. It doesn’t surprise me, the part about Rowling not actually being the writer; she’s certainly no artist, which leads me to wonder how the hell that series was successful and not something else? What did these books have that others didn’t?

>>25167756
That answers >>25167760 this question I guess. Big if true

>>25167760
>No one here actually likes them
I also think no one actually likes Harry Potter, is more like, people like magic school idea but wrongly identified Harry Potter as the series to provide them with said setting.

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>>25167773
>people like magic school idea
yeah women love stories about school because womens entire lives are defined by school. basically all professors and principals must be wantonly slaughtered

>>25168070
That too, women are really drawn towards teen-drama and series set at high school or college. What I tried to illustrate was that people (women particularly) like the school genre but when Harry Potter managed to hit the spot light people didn't bother to look for stuff maybe more suited to their age or tastes, they just took Harry Potter and re-wrote it fanfics and head canons that suited their tastes, kilometers of run on sentences on horny teen drama and wiccan larping and "fixing" world-building mistakes when there were probably dozens of fantasy series from the 80's 90's that were already what they deluded themselves into thinking they were reading when reading Harry Potter.

>>25159915
drop it after book 3

>>25159915
It was made to expose children to witchcraft and satanism disguised as a children's story as they go over children. It's been exposed by satanists and occultists since the 90s.

>>25160145
Nah, 6-10 is the ideal age range. Preferably just read the first three or four and then move onto Alice or the hobbit

Literally skip them, they offer nothing but cheap entertainment that won’t get anyone into literature, look at all the adult fans. I feel as though people would get more out of watching the movies like an anon well above me said. They’re slop but they’re enjoyable and not a waste of time like the books are bound to be.

>>25170863
ur wrong though, if you have watched the harry potter movies and never read before it is possibly the best entry point into literature
you will be supplied free mental imaging of every scene

>>25159915
If they're at the reading level for it, yes

>>25162215
We're talking about Voldemort not Grindlwald.