Harry Potter

What Hacker News says

1. jep888Oct 2026
   The Narnia series, the Harry Potter series, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows,the Sherlock Holmes series (there are great versions of these made slightly easier for children to read), and of course all of Roald Dahl's books.
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2. kccqzySep 2026
   Reading a book from 2000 years ago is not the same class as reading a recently published modern romance fiction. The latter is basically consumed like a snack.

   On days when I am too lazy to be productive or be “creating” something, I sometimes take out my old Harry Potter collection and read for two straight hours. I don’t really feel that’s meaningfully different from watching online videos for two straight hours. It is indeed just consumption. And Harry Potter series is in fact one of the better ones among contemporary literature.

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3. pyyxbkshedSep 2026
   I recently enjoyed the Dark Profit Saga by Zachary Pike: https://www.goodreads.com/series/207236-the-dark-profit-saga

   It was a mix of fantasy & humor. It is a bit long but it is extremely funny & entertaining. It is the first fantasy book I have read other than the Harry Potter series (not sure if it is considered fantasy) but I loved it.

   One of the best non-fiction books I read this year was Doppleganger: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710.

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4. dangusJan 2026
   Because you’re invested. You’re a Scott Adams fan.

   As someone who likes the Harry Potter series, I hear you. It’s tough to see your idols fall into being dumbasses.

   If you sincerely think Scott Adams had zero bias, that he’s not a bigot, that he didn’t support “stop the steal,” that’s on your conscience and your value system. I choose to believe the impulse of what he said, not the 30 minutes of damage control afterward.

   I’d say nobody asked the guy his opinions on such subjects and just wanted to read his funny office comics.

   But that’s what happens with celebrities like this.

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5. kibwenJan 2026
   > In a video game you're not just the audience you're a participant.

   I'm not about to say that games don't occupy an interesting point in space to the degree that they invite (or require!) you to actively participate in the art rather than passively observe. But I still contend that such a stark division is artificial.

   When I spent my youth running around the worlds of Mario Sunshine or The Wind Waker, whatever narrative or gameplay experience the games presented was secondary to the worlds themselves that stoked my imagination. My fondest memories were imagining myself being in those worlds, at which I spent hours upon hours, using them as a canvas for creativity well beyond what the limited game mechanics could allow. And that wasn't directionally different from how I experienced the Harry Potter series in that same era, spending countless hours daydreaming that I was in that world. It didn't matter that the latter was a book, it was interactive to me nonetheless, as well as to legions of others, as the piles upon piles of extant fanfiction can attest.

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6. kragenOct 2025
   For a couple of different reasons.

   The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

   The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.

   If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.

   This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.

   Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

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