YA New York

If it takes me until May of next year, I will compile the most complete list on the Internet of the best YA books of the 2000s, so help me God.

Anyway, my next pick for Best of the 2000s is obvious, so brace yourselves: It’s the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling.

Some of you are moaning. Others are cheering. Others are tired and want to take a nap.

I was one of those people who refused to read Harry Potter because it was popular. Indeed, up until about 2003 I had a pretty negative attitude towards teen fiction in general, in spite of the fact that I was already a Meg Cabot fan.

Then one day I realized that I should probably just get on with it. And I did. I gulped the first two books down in one sitting, and then went to the grocery store in the middle of the night to buy the next three. By the time I was done with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a week later, I was well on my way to being Queen of Harry Potter Predictions.

I have to say, I love Rowling’s sense of whimsy, her world-building and her plot twists. What was most awesome about the HP days was the anticipation of the next book. We’d all of us work ourselves into a frenzy about which character would do what and why.

And the fan fic! In the days leading up to the release of the final book, I read one piece of fan fic that I think may (in some ways) be better than the real thing. There are authors out there who got their starts writing HP fan fic, and then went on to build their own fantasy worlds. It’s incredible, how inspired we all got — kids and adults alike. We talked about canon, timelines, themes, motives and all sorts of other things. We talked about it for hours. Nay, for days. Weeks. Months. Years.

I can’t think of any other series that was so universally exciting to me, mainly because I cared about what happened, and I thought Rowling had a methodology — a grand plan, if you will — for how it would all turn out. Other people cared even more than I did, and they had websites devoted to it all. Fandom has not been the same since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because all the fans have nothing left to do. Except maybe read other books.

Now, if you ask me, the best and most rewarding of the HP books was Half-Blood Prince. It gave us some backstory, but not too much backstory. We saw that Snape was maybe (but totally not really) evil. We also got to spend some time guessing what items would be horcruxes. And because it was the penultimate book, we were all in a super-frenzy afterwards. (Which is one of the reasons, if you ask me, that Deathly Hallows couldn’t have met anyone’s expectations.)

Fast forward to 2010: I’ve read all the books so many times I should probably have memorized them. I’ve got a boxed set that I keep in its original shrink wrap so that I’ll never drop any of the books into the bathtub, and I’ve had to recycle several copies of each novel because it really, seriously, has gotten dropped into the tub too many times.

Anyway, that’s my own personal Harry Potter story. I’m sure you must agree that the Potterverse belongs on any thorough Best of the 2000s list. If you don’t, I’ll bludgeon you with a quaffle or perhaps turn you into a bouncing ferret.

Tags: best of, harry potter, jk rowling, the 2000s

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.