Welcome to part three of my little series about my favorite books and authors, part of this month’s #SixteensBlogAbout topic over at The Sweet Sixteens.

I’ve already written about two of the seminal books of my adolescence, Watership Down and The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes talking to me is probably expecting this post, because I have never been a quiet Harry Potter fan.

Back in 1998, I was on a mock-Newbery committee made up of local children’s librarians. I read hundreds of books that year, and one of those was an unassuming, unknown book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. It showed up in the midst of a pile of other books, and I had never heard of it. I was hooked by chapter two, and stayed up all night to read it and recommended it left and right.

And then, well, you know what happened next. It’s easy to forget, now that it’s such a phenomenon, that the first Harry Potter book was rejected by just about every publisher in Britain, that it was released quietly and didn’t gain momentum until kids started passing it around on the playground. I was lucky to be able to read the first book (and the second and third, which I quickly ordered in British editions, as they weren’t yet out in the U.S.) with no expectations and no hype.

Continue reading Books That Made Me: The Harry Potter Series →