The Harry Potter Project

Sometimes I feel the need to treat myself (and you all, of course) to a blog that has nothing to do with Burkina Faso save the fact that it was written here. I hope you find the following piece to be distinctly germaine yet decidedly out of left field. Enjoy.


The Harry Potter Project

By Joel Turner

I hold, obstinately, to the belief that you can judge a book by its cover. Assuming that it is a paperback. Let’s place credit where credit is due. Book covers provide the background: Title, author, publishing company and on occasion, price. Book covers, quite literally, paint a picture of the story. Just when the magic of book covers couldn’t get any more, well, magical, my readers will be happy to know that for every front cover there is its equal back cover. This back cover generally includes something known as a plot summary. This way, if the front cover’s pictorial depiction is just a little too cryptic, you can supplement your vague comprehension with a succinct, “spellbinding” overview of all those bland pulpy pages in between. Sure, the back cover seldom gives away the ending, but let us be honest with ourselves: Do we really ever want to know how a book ends? I rest my case. But not yet.

For 22 months, I have had a copy of J.K. Rowling’s “Extraordinary New York Times Bestseller” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone* hibernating on my bookshelf between Lord of the Flies and Chicken Soup for the Jaded PCVs Soul. One could say that the book and I go way back. After more than a year and one half in village, I felt the time had come to begin my project. The Harry Potter Project. As I pulled the book from its place, disturbing the spider webs, dust, and lizard poop that had come to rest on and around the book, I knew at that moment that I was embarking on an odyssey of Scholastic® proportions.

Upon first glance, the magic of this book cover takes immediate hold. The front depicts an intrepid young adolescent, most certainly the buzz-word-worthy “Harry,” adorned in Benneton’s Fall Sport-Casual line (even Hogwarts can’t escape product placement), flying (yes, flying. I found this to be a tad incredulous) with a broomstick. He appears to be retrieving some sort of Nerf-inspired handball as it is falling to the Earth. The first sentence of the back cover, however, stresses that “Harry Potter has never played a sport while flying on a broomstick.” I find this direct and dare I say, audacious contrast between pictorial and written depiction to be, at the heart of it, the genius behind Rowling’s craft.

Essentially, the entire book is a canvas of contrasts. Light and dark. Good and Evil. Season tickets to Shea Stadium and junk diving in the Hudson. Brooms and vacuum cleaners. Unicorns and genetically modified produce. Rowling captures these contrasts and immediately unleashes them with lyrical authority, leaving the reader intoxicated with her tonic of prosetic prowess. But like a finished canvas, there exists hidden layers, not revealed to the even partially-clad eye. One is only offered a muted glimpse of Harry’s dark past, forcing the reader to both pity and question the motivation and heart of this young protagonist. Again, contrast. One mustn’t, however make the assumption that this is a story of regret. Above all, it is a story of hope. And flying broomsticks. And a frolicking unicorn. And feral creatures looming in the shadows. And a woman holding a candlestick (who is she?).

Reading this book, cover-and-cover almost makes me want to see what’s written on those grainy pages in-between. But then I was reminded of the quote I just made up, “A picture isn’t worth a thousand words. It’s worth about 308 pages of words.”

*Rowling, J.K. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Scholastic. New York. 1997