Having never read the Harry Potter series my expectations for the books was rather low. Having enjoyed the movies, yet not finding they were anything special, I expected the books to be similar. However, I have been pleasantly surprised and am thoroughly enjoying them. Plotlines that were extremely confusing and poorly explained in the movies are not being fleshed out and added on to (characters or scenes that were left out of the movie).
Expectations that I did have going in to the first few books revolved around getting a better understanding of the overall conflict, rather than the minor conflicts that occur in individual scenes. Again, the movies did a poor job explaining what the nature of the conflict was. I frequently found myself thinking, “is all this fighting over who is allowed to go to Hogwarts?”
Well, no.
Thanks to be books I’m finding out more of the overall conflict of the series. I had expected to find that the first book would describe the conflict almost completely but have found that from Harry, Ron and Hermione’s perspective the conflict is narrated in a forward fashion and for the older characters in a backwards/past-repeating-itself fashion.
The failure of the first book to meet my expectation of describing the conflict and giving tantalizing clues and teasers towards the “whole story” serves as motivation to continue reading so that we all know what happened and how, as well as how it’s all going to end.
I think it's interesting to get someone's thoughts who have never read it before. When I watched the movies, I often thought, "would this make any sense to people who haven't read the books?" A lot of movies seemed quite vague and confusing. Because they had to leave so much out, much of the emotion of the books is also left out.
ReplyDeleteI'm very happy that you've found the books to be enjoyable! They only get better as they go!!