The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter

Algunas partes son interesantes pero otras... buff, que sueño me entraba con el libro :( ( )

I have the first edition of this book. It only included the first four novels, because that was all that was published when I bought this one.

I love this book. I read from it all the time. So many interesting things. ( )

A great book for enjoyment as well as research for beginning writing topics. ( )

To start with, the Disclaimer: I am working on a project regarding the folklore of Harry Potter, meaning that, to an extent, it will be competing with this book.

It's not much competition, though. This book is a compendium of data about the "real world" tie-ins of the Potter series, with particular attention to the paraphernalia of magic -- "wands," "spells," and so forth.

Because I've been researching similar topics, I've had to work my way through a number of Potter reference books. And "work my way" is generally the relevant word; too many are shallow and silly. This book stands rather higher on the list. The entries are relatively comprehensive, and often give hard-to-find material (e.g. on tea leaf reading).

Sometimes it's not as accurate as might be desired; as with many such books, some of the articles could have been stuck together based on little research except Wikipedia reading. There are no footnotes. But the defect is rarely that the book is actually wrong; it's that it fails to appreciate the cultural differences between classical Greek, British, Roman, and other traditions.

Do I trust it? Not entirely. It is my reluctant conclusion that no reference work on the Potter series is entirely reliable -- perhaps because J. K. Rowling herself had no qualms about producing a universe full of logical and economic inconsistencies. But if I had to pick just one Potter reference, this would surely be the one. ( )

While not actually a horrible book, this didn't contain many facts that I didn't know already. I suppose it depends on who the book is read by — I might have gotten more from it at age 12 than at age 28 (when I read it a bunch of years ago). If you're reasonably fluent in mythology and so forth, you won't learn much. ( )