Last November, my son came home school and announced that he and a group of friends were founding a Harry Potter Club. He had a sheaf of promotional items he’d made for it?posters written in a mispelled mishmash of second grade franglais, including a picture of a castle mysteriously labelled ?HAGWORESDS??and was very keen to tell me about the club’s first meeting. Each of them had decided which Harry Potter character they were and he thought he was a Ron, but he couldn’t be entirely sure because he hadn’t actually read the books or seen the movies.
I pulled out my old copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the same one my mother had given me some twenty years ago. It had been a mute (if well-thumbed and slightly waterlogged) witness to most of my life’s major dramas: I’d packed it deep in my suitcase when I left home for the first time, brought it with me on two cross-country moves, clutched at it like a raft in a storm when my life turned upside down and I needed a familiar escape. Handing this book to my son felt a bit like a ritual, like I was inducting him into something. In some ways, I guess I was. That first night, we read four chapters in one sitting, right up until Hagrid’s iconic ?yer a wizard? scene. My son was immediately smitten, consumed by that very specific type of obsession that accompanies a dizzying first crush. We’d read books together before, but this was the one that made him understand t...