"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" 2001

“Harry Potter and Sorcerer’s Stone”

I love Harry Potter. My son was about eleven when the first movie came out. I’d had to bribe him to read the book the year before. The series had just taken off like crazy and I was always trying to encourage him to read. He resisted. He has never been one to do something because his mother wants him to. But I am persistent. I told him to read the first chapter and if he didn’t like it he could stop reading it.

He was hooked. He flew through the first three books in no time flat. When the movie came out we were there on the opening weekend. And with each movie we were there until this last summer I was there for the last one. He is twenty-two and it felt a little like the real end of his childhood.

I love to read. I like a good series but I have been screwed by a couple of authors. Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series is awesome, but the wait between the books was excruciating. Then there is Jean Auel. I was in high school when I read “Clan of the Cave Bear” in her Earth’s Children series. There were eleven years between book four and five, then another nine years between the last two. I vowed never to start another series until it was completed.

This drove my son crazy. We’d done the midnight book release for the Harry Potter books. He’d stayed up reading so he could know what was happening next. He would tell me that I should read them. But I stayed strong. Finally the last one came out. Before he started the last book, he brought me the first six. I read them all in a week and had to fight the urge to steal the last one so I could discover what happened.

The movies captured the magic. They were perfectly cast and the filmmakers lucked out that the child actors grew in their roles.

But do you want to know my favorite part? When I was leaving the theater with my eleven year old son and asked him what he thought of the movie.

“It was good, but the book was better.”

That’s my boy. And he is right.