Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The third Harry Potter book is easily my favorite in the series. It breaks away from the plot mechanics of the first two. This keeps things interesting and proves that Rowling is more than a one-trick pony. It takes things deeper and story gets a little darker. We begin to learn about Harry's dad and his time at Hogwarts. It's not all pretty. And we get the wonderful twist involving Sirius Black and his quest for vengeance.
The last 100 or so pages of this book are just amazing. It's one thing after another, and Rowling manages to maintain a pretty high level of excitement throughout all of it. There's a lot of information to be relayed during the climax, and Rowling intersperses it perfectly with action sequences. I even cried, which is pretty amazing for a book I've read so many times. Though those tears had more to do with Black's ultimate fate than any plot point in this book.
There are also plenty of callbacks to the first and second books. Rowling planted seeds like Black's motorbike, the Whomping Willow, and Hagrid's fear of Azkaban. Here they start paying off, and this is a big part of why this book is so important to me.
I'm a fairly astute reader now. I pick up on a lot, and I can almost always predict the end of a book, or at least the next twist, before it happens. This book is where I got the initial spark for that. Picking up on the clues and understanding that every single description or off-hand remark can have importance later on was very exciting for me. It wasn't until later (when I read Discworld) that I started actively putting together these clues while reading a book, but this is where it started. Books that are intricate and dense, accessible yet layered, they'll always be my favorites.
What makes this book better than later books, in my opinion, is that it's still fairly short. Some of the later books, Ootp especially, get a bit rambly. But here the editing is tight and the plot keeps on moving. There's a lot going on, but the story never slows down too much. Even on this read-through I was excited to keep turning the pages. And I've read this book enough to notice a missing sentence in my new edition, which should tell you all you need to know.
The last 100 or so pages of this book are just amazing. It's one thing after another, and Rowling manages to maintain a pretty high level of excitement throughout all of it. There's a lot of information to be relayed during the climax, and Rowling intersperses it perfectly with action sequences. I even cried, which is pretty amazing for a book I've read so many times. Though those tears had more to do with Black's ultimate fate than any plot point in this book.
There are also plenty of callbacks to the first and second books. Rowling planted seeds like Black's motorbike, the Whomping Willow, and Hagrid's fear of Azkaban. Here they start paying off, and this is a big part of why this book is so important to me.
I'm a fairly astute reader now. I pick up on a lot, and I can almost always predict the end of a book, or at least the next twist, before it happens. This book is where I got the initial spark for that. Picking up on the clues and understanding that every single description or off-hand remark can have importance later on was very exciting for me. It wasn't until later (when I read Discworld) that I started actively putting together these clues while reading a book, but this is where it started. Books that are intricate and dense, accessible yet layered, they'll always be my favorites.
What makes this book better than later books, in my opinion, is that it's still fairly short. Some of the later books, Ootp especially, get a bit rambly. But here the editing is tight and the plot keeps on moving. There's a lot going on, but the story never slows down too much. Even on this read-through I was excited to keep turning the pages. And I've read this book enough to notice a missing sentence in my new edition, which should tell you all you need to know.
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