I never saw / read them until a few years ago but, even as someone who’s now a fan, this is pretty accurate. I ended up reading them all to my wife when she got a severe concussion and wasn’t supposed to do anything but lay in a dark room for weeks — no TV, no games, no phone, no reading … nothing. Just lay in the dark and try not to go crazy with no stimulation.

The first two books are pretty awful when taken outside of the amber tinted glasses of nostalgia. The characters are pretty silly, the plots are generic, and the “action” scenes are some of the worst I’ve ever read. On top of that, she ends up wasting a chapter or two of the first few re-setting everything up as if people were going to read it who hadn’t read the ones before.

Truman Capote once said about Jack Kerouac that “That’s not writing, thats called typing.” I can’t say as I agree with him on Kerouac, but I definitely agree about at least those first two Harry Potter books. The third one was the first time it felt like there was a point to any of it, nonetheless a coherent story.

I guess the upside is that those first books are short enough that if one really wanted to they could breeze through them in an afternoon? I think they’re a bit of a “you had to be there” kind of thing