Twenty years ago today, June 26, 1997, the very first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in the United Kingdom, thus beginning a fantasy phenomenon that has not only changed the book industry forever, but also one that defined our family for years, and which has lived in my imagination in a way no other geek property--not Tolkien, not Star Trek, not comic books, nothing--ever has, and almost certainly ever will. So, on this occasion, 20 memories and moments of fun to commemorate:
1) Actually, it's not 20 years; more like 17 years and 10 months. The first Harry Potter famously did not make a big splash in the UK--except among a few thankfully well-placed book-sellers and reviewers who championed it, and made sure Joanne Rowling's vision didn't die a premature death. The re-titled first book didn't make it to America until September 1998, and I certainly knew nothing about it. It wasn't until the summer of 1999, which our young family spent in Germany while I worked on my Ph.D., that we first heard the name "Harry Potter"; some Canadian grad-school friends of ours wrote us, telling my book-loving wife about this new children's book series they'd discovered. Returning to the states, attending a book club at a local children's bookstore in Alexandria, VA, my wife discovered the excitement which those in the know were feeling about the third Harry Potter book, which had come out in the UK at the beginning of the summer (Rowling cranked out a book a year from 1997 through 2000), and had developed enough of a following in America for Scholastic to manage to publish it just a few months later. And that was our start.
2) Though, again, actually MY start came even later. Through 1999 and 2000, Melissa read the first three books: Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban. I didn't. But Pottermania was building; references were showing up in all sorts of media, and there was all sorts of buzz about a film adaptation of the series in the works. Melissa wanted the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was published in July of that year--the series by then having become a big enough deal that a trans-Atlantic release date were coordinated--for her September birthday, so I bought it for her...but then read it before wrapping it and giving it to her. So I read the fourth book first, more than three years after the rest of the world had started to figure out what amazing thing Rowling had released on the world.
3) Finally Reading the First Three Books, and Truly Catching the Potter Bug. If we didn't have such a bookworm first daughter, I don't know when I would have gotten around to reading them, or if I ever would have. Maybe I would have continued to let time go by, and I would have become one of those grumpy folks who proudly insists they don't have time for all that Harry Potter crap. But fortunately, Megan demanded, and we responded, and the Fox household descended into a Pottermania that, in some senses, we've never recovered from (thankfully!).
4) - 11) Less History, More Internet! The Harry Potter phenomenon was, and still is, inextricable from the way in which the internet absolutely transformed all our lives, how we shared information, how fan theories were assembled, we associated with fellow geeks, and more. The number of websites, blogs, e-mail lists, e-zines, and more dedicated to Harry Potter is probably incalculable. I certainly never perused anything like a 100th of them, even at the height of my fan addiction. Still, even just reading or watching or laughing or being thrown into nostalgic thought only 1% of this stuff is more than enough to allow judgments to form. So herewith, some favorites, many of which I suspect a fair number of anyone who actually reads this will already be familiar with:
Fan Fiction: "Interlude." Have I read a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction? Indeed I have. Did I ever actually write any? No comment. But seriously, read "Interlude," which is the best Rowling-compliant, tone-appropriate, world-building contribution to the huge "what happened to Harry, Ron, and Hermione next?!?" genre that I've ever read. (Also very good: "Roger and Lisa: A Romance," a wonderfully imaginative story created out of two barely-even-there characters from the Harry Potter canon; and "The Test of Time," a fic written back during the three-year gap between Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I didn't read until years after the series was completed and found to be a cool look into what the real hard-core fans were imagining long before Rowling let her biggest secrets out of the bag. Plus, anything written by little0bird and Northrumbrian is worth checking out.)
Fan Film: "The Battle of Hogwarts" (Documentary). Be sure to watch all five episodes!
Fan Reading: "Wizard People, Dear Reader." Yeah, I really don't know any other way to describe this.
Fan Puppetry: "The Mysterious Ticking Noise." The first, the best.
Fan Music: "Cold, Wild Yonder." I never got into Wizard Rock as much as some, but Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls were really quite good.
Fan Musical: "A Very Potter Musical." All three of Starkid's Harry Potter parodies are worth watching, but there was an innocence, a hilarious "can-we-get-away-with-this?" joy to this first production, before these college kids all graduated and became YouTube sensations and went to Hollywood (or tried).
Fan Music Video: "Dark Lord Funk." Really good, but as my old online friend David Salmanson commented, "needs more Hermione."
Fan Feminist Criticism: "Hermione Granger and the Goddamn Patriarchy." Speaking of Hermione, there was this.
12) Reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I picked up my copy of Half-Blood Prince at a midnight release event in Jonesboro, AR, where we lived at the time, and by the following afternoon, I was stoked. I had back through the previous two novels in preparation, and I was sure that this book was going to be where Rowling really kicked out the jams and let this fantasy adventure she'd been developing take flight. I thought that her way of keeping her story in the realm of children's literature was just a delaying tactic; that something in the stories of Harry, Ron, and Hermione just had to explode, sooner or later. I went through most of Half-Blood Prince therefore slightly frustrated...until: BOOM! The Horcurxes! The death of Dumbledore! The betrayal of Snape! It was, and remains to this day, one of my great reading memories; I was just so excited by what was on the page!
13) Getting into the Fandom. As the link above shows, my response to Half-Blood Prince touched a nerve with some, and suddenly I was part of a broad--actually world-wide, if you look at my blog's stats--argument about Rowling's agenda, about Harry, about Snape, about the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. The two years between Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was really the closest I ever came, in all my years of blogging, of breaking away from the great anonymous pack of online scribblers and becoming someone who was known and read. I put up a bunch of predictions I worked out in my own head for the final book, and it unleashed a torrent. And it was great fun....even though it turned out I was basically wrong about pretty much everything.
14) Getting to the Ending. But who cares about bring wrong? When I finished Deathly Hallows, around 10am after having read straight through since picking up the book at another midnight release party, as much as there was stuff I felt Rowling hadn't done as well as she could have, or hadn't done at all, I was nonetheless exhausted and delighted. I rode the story all the way to its conclusion, arguing all the way, and that was a memory to treasure.
15) Making it Part of the Family. Through all these years, and in the years since, through the movies and a trip to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, I read the books to our daughters: to Megan (whose passion for Harry Potter has continued all the way up through her Honors graduation at KU--her thesis title: "Reading a Gender Binary into the Magic of Harry Potter: The Case of Neville Longbottom"), to Caitlyn (though less to her than the others), to Alison, and most recently to Kristen. It became something we all shared, a language, a way of thinking and laughing, and in that way became more than a series of novels. It because part of our collective consciousness--and what more can you say about a work of literature than that? So thank you, Jo Rowling: you've given our family something we can never repay. 20 years is just the start of it, I think.
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