You could boil it down to "HP Fandom: The Book" as told by one of the witnesses to the phenomenon, and for that, I love it. I started reading them when I was roughly the same age as the characters, so I missed on some of the earlier nuances when they happened (the PotterWar and H/Hr vs H/R), but as someone who dives straight into fandom whenever I find a piece of media that I like, it's oh so relatable.

It's also kind of weird, because PotterCast was the very first podcast I started listening to, back in early 2008. ( )

Wide ranging, this book chronicles the cultural phenomena surrounding the Harry Potter series - books and movies. Some of what the author shared was particularly interesting, while other parts just weren't that compelling. One thing she did nicely was to show her own growing up process alongside Harry. ( )

This is just crazy from every aspect! Very interesting details. I really had no idea that there was that much vicarious living through Potter, boy do I feel dumb. Mandatory reading for anyone interested in the publishing industry, literature in general, or even in understanding how to communicate with the wifi generation (whatever they are called) -- or Harry Potter. Reading is just no longer about the books anymore. I had never put two and two together about how Harry Potter books and movies were so related to the growth and explosion of the internet and all it had to offer (as well as its vices), but my eyes and brain are now definitely opened. ( )

This tells the story of Pottermania and Anelli’s role as webmaster of The Leaky Cauldron – the # 1 website for fans of Harry. I like the Harry Potter books. I enjoy Rowling’s writing, and I’ve enjoyed a couple of the movies. But I’m not obsessed with the phenomenon. By Anelli’s own account, she first heard of Potter when she was buying her college text books. Her mother suggested “something light” to provide some entertainment and escape from all the heavy college texts. Anelli was hooked from the beginning. She quickly was spending virtually every spare moment reading, thinking, talking Harry Potter. In fairness, the book does go beyond Harry Potter to explore the world of children’s-book publishing. And she also talks about how the web-friends joined together to support and inform each other in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. She nearly lost me entirely in the section devoted to Harry and the Potters and other bands that formed using various themes / characters from the books. Boring. But that was enjoyable compared to the section concerning those who would ban the books because “they teach witchcraft to children.” The most interesting part is the way in which Harry Potter changed the publishing world, the marketing world, the sale of intellectual property to the movies, etc. The best testament to the “power of Potter” is that this book debuted at #18 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Audio book narrated by Renee Raudman, whose reading of this work is perfectly fine. She sounds appropriately young and enthused when describing the phenomenon, distressed and frantic as she reacts to the Sept 11 attacks, and doesn’t completely put us to sleep when reciting statistics or history. ( )

I read this back in 2104 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Was looking for something on audio to be background while doing a lot of chores and putting books into LT and whatnot and thought this one would be fun to revisit. And it was. Anelli does a great job giving the history of the HP phenomenon. A few parts dragged for me this time (mostly the bits that I was never super interested in (like Wizard Rock) in the first place), but that's really just an interest-level thing. I wasn't in love with Raudman's reading (she makes everything sound really precious. Yuck.), but she did a good enough job I was content to carry on listening. I very much recommend the book if you're interested in the history of HP or fandom. ~April 2017, audio version

Does what it says on the tin and does it well. Anelli ran the website The Leaky Cauldron for years (she might still do, I don't know), so is able to write from an inside perspective (she was given press access to aspects of the films and developed professional and sometimes personal relationships with members of the publishing team and Rowling herself) as well as from the perspective of a fan. Her writing is very engaging, and she does a great job exploring many different aspects of the HP phenomenon, including fan fiction, wizard rock, massive release day parties, and book burnings in protest of HP-ian witchcraft. The book uses the countdown to the release of Deathly Hallows as a kind of framework for the story of the whole phenomenon, and we get a really good sense of what the HP craze was all about. I have two quibbles--one is that chapters sometimes forget that they're in a book instead of standing on their own (events summarized again, sometimes in the same language as last time), though this was only a minor annoyance. The other is that Anelli doesn't do much to situate the HP craze within the context of what else was going on at the time. There's no doubt that as a publishing phenomenon Harry Potter did things no other books had ever done before (and in spades) and that Harry Potter fandom was (is) enormous and in many ways a new thing, but it didn't spring up out of nothing. Anelli doesn't suggest that it did, but a little context about how HP fandom fits into the greater picture (other things (Star Trek and Star Wars, just for instance) laid the foundations, and there was at least one other pretty significant fandom (The Lord of the Rings films) traipsing along during much of the HP years) might have been nice. But, the book was a joy, and I highly recommend it to HP fans and anyone interested in fandom. ~July 2014 ( )