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Showing posts with the label J.K. Rowling

Box Set Review: 'Harry Potter: The Complete Series' Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)

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(C) 2007 Scholastic, Inc. Harry Potter: The Complete Series Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)   Although I’ve owned two of J.K. Rowling’s bestselling fantasy novels about the adventures of a boy wizard named Harry Potter ( Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  and  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ),  I never really tried to read the entire seven-book cycle after I finished reading the first book.  In both cases, I had been given the Potter books as gifts, and though I finished  The Sorcerer’s Stone  and gamely gave  Order of the Phoenix  “the old college try” and got halfway through it, for some reason or another, I did not buy the other five books of the series.  Now, you might think that I had not enjoyed  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  or dismissed Rowling’s works as “mere” kids’ books, but you’d be far off the mark.  I like fantasy books quite a bit and I  did  like the first book a great deal; Rowling may have intended her books to be read by children but much

Harry Potter and friends return in 2002's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (review with link)

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)   If you have ever watched a film series based on a multivolume literary tale – like, say,  The Lord of the Rings  or Twilight –  you’ve probably noticed that the first movie is the “expository” installment in which we are introduced to the characters, settings and situations of the story.  Usually, these first movies are sometimes a bit long and leisurely paced so that we can get our bearings in their universe, especially if they take place in a fantasy Utopia with magical themes and otherworldly creatures.  Second films in  continuing sagas , on the other hand, tend to flow better and with a firmer grasp on the story and characters because the introduction of characters and the setup of the overarching tale have all been dispensed with.  The pacing of the story is usually brisker – even if the running time is not particularly short – and the writers, director, and actors can get on to the meat of the tale.  Such is the case with director

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: A Review

You have to have a heart of stone - or be a Dursley - to  not  like  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.   I say this not from the perspective of a child, nor the parent of a child, nor even a voracious reader of the J.K. Rowling novels about the boy with glasses and that lightning-shaped star. Indeed, I only have the first of the five books and that, dear readers, only because my former neighbor and computer troubleshooter gave it to me before he moved to South Carolina. My taste in movies rarely goes into the realm of "family fare," even though some of my favorite films ( E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind , the  Star Wars  series, among others) are geared for young and old alike.  I must also admit that I only started reading Harry Potter when I had just about gone through most of my Tom Clancy novels, Star Wars tomes, and history books. I was not sure if I would like it as much as I do, say, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings . However, I was pleasantly surp