2011 was a wild ride, wasn’t it? Harry Potter fandom experienced the  ‘end of the beginning’ when the last movie adapted from the Hogwarts Saga was released [for a longish explanation why this is an ‘end of the beginning’ rather than a ‘beginning of the end,’ read Harry Is Here to Stay]. The Hunger Games entered into an ever larger audience of readers, setting records for sales on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader and receiving daily news updates from film sites in North Carolina. Twilight lovers, too, had a banner year with the wedding album and Renesmee birthing in Breaking Dawn, Part 1.

And we discussed it all here on HogwartsProfessor.com! Our faculty took shape this year with the official appointments of Elizabeth Baird Hardy, John Patrick Pazdziora, Louise Freeman, and M.Brett Kendall as full professors, James of TwilightNewsSite.com as an adjunct prof, and a gaggle of Guest posters with special insights about Harry, Katniss, Bella, and great reading in general.

The year ended with a MuggleNet.com feature interview with me about Ring Composition (you can listen to or read the transcript here). This sort of linkage always brings with it a relative flood of new visitors to HogwartsProfessor.com — ‘HogPro’ among friends — so, as welcome and means of introduction to what we do here, I’ve collected links after the jump for something like a ‘HogPro Greatest Hits of 2011’ page with links to outside sites and our vaults as well.

Welcome, newcomers, to the conversations about the 21st Century’s most popular and arguably its best reading and writing! Thank you, All-Pros, for a delightful year gone by — and Happy New Year!

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Touchstone is a great magazine, period, and if you don’t subscribe, you really should. I read every issue cover to cover and always find something to make me think and re-think what I’ve thought. For example, where else but Touchstone can you read a critique of Jack London’s short story ‘To Build a Fire’ from the traditional lens revealing the four layers of meaning? David Haddon’s purpose in ‘Never Absolute Zero’ isn’t to advocate that lens — he works pretty hard to make the point that London transcends his atheism in his art — but he opens his critique with a short review of its value:

Dr. Louise Cowan, longtime professor of literature at the University of Dallas​, taught that an analysis of a work of literature is not complete until the critic has evaluated it not only at the literal, allegorical, and moral levels, but also at the anagogic level—the critic must evaluate the work’s relation to ultimate spiritual reality. Thus, at the two highest levels, we must compare the morality and metaphysics discernable in an artist’s narrative with the moral order discernible in what C. S. Lewis called the Tao (or Natural Law) and with the order of creation revealed in Scripture.

Those of you who have Spotlight or Harry Potter’s Bookshelf or even just the posts here at HogwartsProfessor know that this sort of reading, what we call iconological criticism after Northrup Frye, is a large part of what I’m after in writing for ‘serious readers’ of popular fiction. As such Mr. Haddon’s article was a delight to read and I encourage you to read it in full. He makes his point about London’s story being evidence of a perspective greater than the materialism of his professed politics and offers a different perspective on the anagogical than I have.

Some of the best conversations I have been part of at Harry Potter conventions the past few years have been with Andrew Slack, the head of the Harry Potter Alliance, and Travis Prinzi, author and fellow Potter Pundit, on the spiritual dimensions of the Hogwarts Saga. The details of these exchanges are all over the map but the insights and engagements of Messrs Prinzi and Slack have stretched most of my ideas of how to understand our favorite boy wizard’s adventures.

As much as I enjoy Mr. Slack’s company and admire the intentions of his Harry Potter Alliance’s book drives among other things, however, I haven’t been a big fan of the giants they labored to slay or admired the way they chose to demonize folks who disagree with them.

I was delighted, consequently, to learn that HPA has decided to “speak truth to power” to a foe that not only lives in the Harry Potter fandom house, but one that you could say owns the house fandom lives in, namely, Warner Brothers. This is a Goliath that could conceivably hurt the Alliance and its leaders.

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Start your 2012 out right! Resolve to read about Harry and Edward (or Bilbo and Batman?) at least one more time in the New Year — 10 (Research-Tested) New Year’s Resolutions, Culled from the Work of University at Buffalo Faculty

Resolution #6 – ‘Read More Fantasy to Combat Loneliness.’

Reading fantasies like the popular “Twilight” vampire series or the Harry Potter collection of novels helps to satisfy a need for human connection, according to the research of UB associate professor of psychology Shira Gabriel, PhD, and graduate student Ariana Young. When we become engrossed in fictional narratives we feel close to others in the comfort of our own space and at our own convenience, their research shows. “In our subjects, this led to a reported increase in life satisfaction and positive mood, which are two primary outcomes of belonging,” Gabriel says.’

For more, see ‘We Actually “Become” Happy Vampires or Contented Wizards When Reading a Book’

Hat Tip, Kitty!