I thought I would need to elaborate sigh
I loved the Harry Potter books. They were great reads and excellent adventure-thrillers. They weren’t original - they owed enormously to previous popular books and were, broadly speaking, a mixture of Enid Blyton’s many mystery-adventure series and her school stories (along with, of course, the rest of the boarding-school genre of children’s fiction, like the wildly popular and long-running Frank Richards’ Greyfriars and Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series).
But Harry Potter is - quite literally - a closed book. The series finished thirteen years ago. It’s fine for people to see Cursed Child or Fantastic Beasts, but they’re still poring over memes and fan theories and teasing out more details, and large swathes of such fans aren’t reading other books.
When the series first became popular, it was the era of the first PlayStation, and parents and teachers were concerned that children were dedicating too much time to it and encouraged them to read as well. That’s a major part of its initial success. Parents read them to children, and then told their friends and relatives how good these books were and how they could be read by adults too.
Unfortunately, though writers like Phillip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz benefited from this resurgence of Young Adult fiction (it was this period which popularized the term), many HP fans didn’t explore a great deal else in the long term. Other books have come into fashion, of course, like Twilight and The Hunger Games, and that’s great, but what about the thousands of other books which have been published since that time? I speak from experience, and this is purely anecdotal, but I’ve noticed this through my time in school, college and university with HP fans. The series was talked about and some people reacted with shock when I said I couldn’t remember them as vividly as they could (having read them only once or twice - which is normal, surely).
Bond, on other hand, is ongoing. Since the last Harry Potter novel was released, there have been fifteen Bond novels, over a dozen non-fiction books, and another dozen graphic novels, and four films of new material have been filmed. And more of all this - perhaps many more - are expected to be released in the future.
I just want books to be read and be a success, and as I love reading, it’s a slight frustration to see so many great books - books just as good as HP - go ignored because they aren’t buoyed by marketing muscle or because they’re simply new and untested.
I’m glad the Harry Potter books are favourites of many young people. But what about their future favourites?
That’s all I’m saying.
