It's something I see said quite a lot, on the internet particularly, that Harry Potter introduced a generation of children to the wonders of books and literature.
I'm wondering how true this is for you?
Although HP is one of my all time favourite comfort series of books and I've probably read them more times than bare counting, I probably wouldn't say they got me into reading. That probably belongs to Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton, and Tolkien was my introduction to fantasy.
There's are plenty of people who I know who love Harry Potter but aren't avid readers otherwise.
There are plenty of booky people I know who love Harry Potter but it wasn't necessarily what got them into reading.
I can't really think of anyone I know who loves reading and only started because of Harry Potter.
Where do you guys stand? Does anyone know if any studies have ever been done on this? I'd be really interested to know.
by ElonH
46 Comments
Until I was 25 I didn’t really have the patience/attention span to read. I bought sorcerers stone for a relative for Xmas that year and started flipping through it before I wrapped it up
Next thing I knew it was 2am and I was 3/4 through the book. That was over ten years and a few hundred books ago.
I guess it was the first series i read.
However i dont really like them anymore, i grew out of liking fantasy so it makes sense.
HP has to be one of my favourite books ever, but I was already a reader from when I was very little, two decades before HP came out.
It did, however, get a few of my friends into reading so we could talk about it when the books all came out!
All my children read the series. Started a good trend.
I got into reading via Enid Blyton’s books, but HP was probably the first series I read after those.
I worked at a public library around the time Rowling had released the first and second books, and personally knew a bunch of kids for whom those two books were their first real dip into serious reading.
Well this question makes me feel old.
I read it as a kid bc it was popular at the time. Twilight in 2008 got me back into reading for real
I read so much in elementary school. I was always near the top in our read a million minutes competition, and yet the only books I can definitively remember reading in elementary where Harry Potter books.
Is it enjoyable as an adult who’s never read or watched any of it or did I just miss my opportunity?
No impact at all. I read the series but never gotten that much into it. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series on the other hand…
I actually thought I wasn’t supposed to read them or something 😅
Like, I was already an avid reader, and people told me that Harry Potter was good for getting kids to start reading, so somehow, my brain took that and just figured it wasn’t for me to read, same with the Percy Jackson series
Now that I’m an adult, both series are on my TBR
I think it’s definitely a major part of my first reading but I was read the puddle lane books as a kid and then the first Narnia book. I was hooked and then finished all of the Narnia books. Loved the harry potter books, I can remember reading some of the early ones in a single day
It got me into reading fiction more yes. I didn’t really read anything that wasn’t about animals before reading that series. I don’t read them anymore though.
I did.
I did read an occasional book before, mostly due to compulsory reading at school, but HP pulled me in and made me want to READ. I swallowed the books. Then when the first books ended and I had to wait literal years for new ones, I started to go through my local library kids’ section. Then LOTR the movie came out and I was way too young to probably fully appreciate or understand it, but I wanted more so I started to read the books.
HP probably single-handedly turned me from a “books for school” to “books for breakfast, lunch and dinner” type of a kid reader.
The Harry Potter series probably had the largest impact on millennial reading habits. I don’t think we would have had other series like Twilight or The Hunger Games (which also encouraged millennial reading habits – albeit at a different age range) without the success of Harry Potter. Even before the movies were released it was an international sensation. What’s the last book series before (or frankly *since*) that’s been considered a phenomenon like that?
Never got into it, even as a kid. I read I think the first three or four books, just because they were popular and I was a little book devourer.
What got me reading were Monica’s Gang and A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I didn’t think I had the attention span to be a reader when I was growing up. The first HP movie came out my sophomore year of high school. I loved it so my mom got me the first two books for Christmas. I had them both read in a a few days.
That was 20 years ago. The series is the first seven books I read every year. Just about ready to start book 5 this week.
If it weren’t for the series, I may not be the reader I am today.
Harry started it, when it was assigned as reading in 8th grade, but I was lucky enough to have a teacher give me a copy of The Hobbit after she read my final report on it.
If not for HP I wouldn’t have been open to Tolkien.
I’m approximately the right generation, I was reading Dr Seuss as soon as I could read, and Magic Treehouse were probably my first chapter book series I loved. I’m pretty sure I read Deltora Quest as it was being published, around 2000, so it’s possible I was already reading those too.
I did read Harry Potter and like it, but it doesn’t stand out to me very much. Sabriel is definitely the book that stood out the most for me as a young reader, and that’s the one I keep a copy of for comfort reading. I also read a lot more *widely* than it sounds like a lot of kids my age did, and I was at the library a lot. Anne McCaffrey has some young reader books that I really liked around that time, alongside Susan Fletcher’s work, and James Gurney’s Dinotopia books.
For what it’s worth, I was bullied pretty intensely in school, and I vastly preferred anything that wasn’t set in a school. I really struggled to relate to Harry having friends and looking down on some of the other kids. I like to explain to people that Island of the Blue Dolphins was one of my other favorites- I used to see it as escapist fantasy more than a survival story, because she didn’t have to navigate social drama at all.
na, percy jackson got me into reading when i was ~7
The authors that got me into reading are Tomie dePaola, Jon Scieszka, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I enjoyed them so much when I was beginning to learn how to read.
I only started reading the Harry Potter series after the first film came out. Although J.K. Rowling wasn’t the author that got me into reading, the Harry Potter series quickly became one of my favorites. To this day the Harry Potter books have been the only books I have ever bought on release day and one of the few books I cared about physically owning. Years later I still have them in pristine condition because even as a small child I took good care of my books.
After Harry Potter I got into Greek mythology, Tolkien, Crichton, Wells, and Dumas. I feel that even without Harry Potter I would still be a big reader. But Harry Potter helped with introducing to other works earlier on.
Not me. I couldn’t get into the first one. Got through a couple of chapters then tossed it
Curious George did it for me. I was reading long before my reading level was sophisticated enough to digest a proper novel. My mom’s old Hardy Boys novels were probably the first substantive things I read. Harry Potter was good, and I did read them all, but I much preferred Eragon and its sequels.
Unfortunately, my undergraduate and professional degrees have made reading feel like a chore so my preferred medium is audiobooks/podcasts.
Whilst I read the Wizard of Earthsea at school, it was township’s main library that got me into reading.
Just to add, the impact on English learners is massively overlooked.
I grew up with HP as books 5 onwards were being released (I wasn’t a huge fan, and I’m still not really into fantasy, but I enjoyed the first 4), but I was really shocked by how big an impact the books had internationally when I worked as an ESL teacher.
Millennials can be broken down into three groups with regards to which series got them into reading for fun:
* The Scholastric Trio (Goosebumps/Animorphs/The Babysitter’s Club)
* Harry Potter
* Twilight
What’s interesting is seeing what books each group reads predominantly now.
I definitely didn’t start loving reading because of Harry Potter, but I did enjoy the series when it came out. I had a lot of loved books long before HP came out when I was 9–I had already started reading *The Animorphs* and a lot of wonderful children’s literature like *Taste of Blackberries* and *Bridge to Terabithia* and *The BFG.* And even before that stage, I always loved reading picture books with my mother.
Yes. I was 6 and barely able to read. My mum bought it for herself and then gave it to me. I got discouraged by all the foreign words at first. Even though I read the translated version, the names and street names and a bunch of other things were English. Then I got sick for a week with nothing else to do so bit by bit I got through the first few pages, then it was hard to stop…
Definitely didn’t get me into reading, but I was around 8 when the first book came out so it was the most formative literature of my life. But I was reading long before that. I read Little Women around the same time I read Harry Potter. 🤷🏼♀️
Yeah I didn’t like to read as a kid, I associated it with school work and that was always no fun. Picked up Harry Potter at 11 or 12 years old and it shattered my belief that reading is boring or work, and instead that it can be a fun and a transformative adventure!
I think it’s probably the reason I got into reading as early as I did, but I would’ve been a reader anyway as I come from a family of bookworms. I was hyperlexic and learned to read at 2, but when my stepmom bought me and my twin the first three in the series at 7, that was when reading became my main hobby. She actually got them to prove her coworker wrong because they said we were too young for them. She got them from a then up and coming online book retailer, Amazon, in 1998.
It definitely helped foster my love of fantasy. It’s still my main genre now in my 30s.
I got into reading because of the Harry Potter of its day, *The Chronicles of Prydain.*
Yup, my reading journey started at 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, England. I think what worked was that I was 11 at the time too, so Harry and Hermione were relatable and magical all at once.
I had read books before but in 2002 I picked up a Harry Potter book for the first time and I fell in love with reading. Waited in line in my junior and senior years for the book release, and crying at the end of the series. Just an amazing ride, now I don’t deify the books anymore and I do see they aren’t literary masterpieces. But, nothing will take away those memories of falling in love with a book series when I was a teenager.
That would be The Hobbit in my case. I still love that book.
I think it was the Magic treehouse books that started me reading on my own. But Harry Potter was the first “big book” that I read in elementary school and that I was obsessed with.
I got into reading at age 4 because I went deaf at age 3 in 1974.
Stuff that sparked my passion for reading includes Marvel Comics, DC Comics, MAD magazine, CRACKED magazine, CRAZY magazine and SICK magazine.
Nowadays I always aim to read 80 books each year.
Currently reading a few books (I often read multiple books at once, a few chapters here, a few chapters there, bookmarks are good friends of mine.)
I got into reading way before Harry Potter. I read a whole truckload of different authors; Dianne Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Stephen King, Dennis Jürgensen, Knud Holten, William Sleator, Jørn Riel, Douglas Addams, Terry Pratchet, Bjarne Reuter, Klaus Rifbjerg etc. (if you don’t recognize a lot of those, it is because they’re danish)
When Harry Potter became a thing, I had some sort of avertion against it being so popular. Maybe because fantastic literature was kind of a thing I had for myself, so it felt like some strangers were moving in on my turf, and I didn’t like it. So I very much was a person who did not read Harry Potter.
Later in life, I realized this were just me being resentful, closing myself off out of spite. But with the author turning into a head mistress in the tranphobic movement (documented pretty convincingly [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k) if you’re interested) I’m sorta glad I missed out, so I was spared for a tainted memory.
As someone who was born and lived in India as a kid, Harry Potter was a huge craze as far as books go. I definitely got into reading because of Harry Potter, and so did many of my friends around from then.
But after I moved to the US, I realized that kids here were already surrounded by a huge selection of literary works. Harry Potter was a one of a kind for an English language book series to become so popular internationally, that it affected people in non English speaking countries quite differently
Not me. I have never read harry potter
Goosebumps
I enjoyed HP when it was coming out, but I was already an avid reader by then. For me, it was likely the same as you, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, in my youth, and Philip Pullman, Tolkien and Stephen King in my teens.
This isn’t exactly the same, so my apologies for not exactly answering the question, but hear me out.
I was an adult when the Harry Potter books came out. At the time, I was really involved at a deeply conservative evangelical church. I don’t know how many people remember, but a whole lot of conservative Christians were up in arms over the HP books because of the witches and wizards; it was evil, satanic, etc.
My 6 year old daughter’s best friends mother was reading her child The Sorcerer’s Stone, and the girls would play Harry Potter when they were together. I was so afraid of the terrible danger my daughter was in, being exposed to the Harry Potter books.
So I decided to read The Sorcerer’s Stone. I wanted to find out how to protect my kid. So I did. And I saw it for what it was: a fun kid’s fantasy. I ended up reading the whole series to my own kids. It was also the first time I saw all the fear-mongering and indoctrination I received at church for what it was. Reading Harry Potter was the start of a 10-year process of extricating myself from Conservative Evangelical Christianity.
I know that these days, JK Rowling is a controversial figure due to her take on trans rights, and I get that. Nonetheless, the Harry Potter books will always have a soft spot in my heart because they may not have been the books that got me into reading, but they were the books that got me into thinking.
I actually stopped reading for 3/4 years because The Order of the Phoenix was so boring and I realised I didn’t really care about any of the characters after 5 books.
I broke my dry spell with some morbid curiosity as a late teen dipping into apocalypse books with I am Legend and then The Road – then proceeded to devour Cormac McCarthy’s entire bibliography.
I found my way back to Fantasy eventually as my main love but HP is just not my kind of thing unfortunately. I also eventually learned that it’s better to give up on a book/series than it is to let it kill your entire.love for reading (Thanks for that lesson Robert Jordan)
I’m not sure if it was /because/ of Harry Potter, but definitely Harry Potter was the first series I connected with. I related to him and the slow build in complexity as I aged kept it interesting, the characters were always roughly my age give or take a few years.
Harry Potter being in an abusive home and escaping with the help of love and friends resonated with my childhood, and unfortunately MOST people will relate to that whether it be issues with bullying, neglect or abuse in some part of their childhood, and overcoming it.
Despite overall being a good person the character was also rather simple. He tried to do the right thing but it never went overly deep into methodologies or philosophies on what the right thing is, which is because 1 the author likely isn’t strong in that area, and 2 , it’s more relatable to the everyday person.
The famous meme that Harry becomes a cop is an example, it’s such a simple minded “good” thing to want to be a cop, but deeper thinking you might justifiably have reservations. You see this in Harry’s enjoyment of magic, caring about and loving Dobby but unlike Hermione not caring for the systemic issue of slavery as it is widely accepted, and being kinda a jock. He for better or worse connects with most in some way.
In conclusion; I think I 9 when I started reading Harry Potter and it felt like I was on his adventure with him through my childhood. As an adult I find it simplistic, but when I remind myself Harry was a child too, the series is better. Shame about the author though.