If you gathered in one place every writer in the last twenty years who was inspired to sit down and start writing the novel of his or her dreams by the success ‘out of nowhere’ of J. K. Rowling and her Harry Potter novels, my guess is that city would rival Mexico City or at least London with respect to the number of inhabitants (and what a metropolis of lost souls that would be!). My thought-question for Potter Pundits this week is, “Was Rowling similarly inspired by a run away out-of-nowhere best seller from a ‘nobody’ to start writing her magical seven book series?”

I think it very probable that she was, though in all my years of Potter puttering I’ve never seen this specific influence suggested. The author and book I have in mind, for example, doesn’t make the extensive to the point of absurdity Wikipedia list of ‘Rowling Influences and Analogues.’

The novel is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It has supposedly sold over 65 million copies and that figure means it is ranked in the top twenty best selling books of all time (see here, here, and here). If you haven’t read the book, here are three things I’ve learned after finally reading it myself.

• Coelho’s Publication Story is as Miraculous as Rowling’s: He wrote The Alchemist in two weeks. He is Brazilian, so it is in Portugese. A publisher picked it up, it sold reasonably well (900 copies!), but they gave up on it and returned the publication rights to the author. He found another Brazilian publisher, a larger house, to pick it up and the second edition sold very well — in Brazil and Portugal. In 1993, HarperCollins publishes the translation in English and The Alchemist begins its climb to juggernaut status.
• It’s More Jonathan Livingstone Seagull than War and Peace: The take-away of the story is that, if you only believe in yourself and your dream long enough, “the universe will conspire to make your dream come true.” It’s not literature by any stretch but it is an uplifting couple of hours you won’t regret spending; think The Little Prince, The Life of Pi, even The Shack. Matt Morris ranks The Alchemist as ‘The Best Self Help Book of All Time.’
• It Really Does Feature an Alchemist: Well, eventually. And it isn’t literary alchemy like Shakespeare, Nabokov, C. S. Lewis, Rowling, Collins, or Meyer writes. But it is fun and communicates a core truth of the alchemists, what Rowling on PotterMore says is that it is a “spiritual journey” and that there is “a mystical element to the work.” 

Why do I think it likely, even probable, that Rowling was inspired by Coelho’s unlikely success to give her books an alchemical twist?

(1) The Rowling-Potter Timeline: Rowling has her train delay inspiration for Harry’s character and story in July of 1990. She moves to Portugal in 1991 after her mother’s death and lives there until December 1993. These are the year’s of The Alchemist’s breaking all sales records for books in Portuguese. It would have been impossible for her to have been a reading person alive in Porto, Portugal, in these years and not been aware of The Alchemist and Coelho’s rags to riches story.

(2) The Stories: Each is a there and back again coming of age adventure about a young man realizing his unbelievable destiny via making the sacrificial hard choices.

(3) The Alchemy: Each of the boys is guided by an alchemist whose teaching is about the unity of all things in the consciousness fabric of reality. And the transformation in Santiago, the boy hero of The Alchemist, is as magical and wonderful as what Harry discovers about himself and the world at Hogwarts.

One more note before I let you go to read the story — Coelho has made it free for anyone to download online — Rowling’s first drafts of Philosopher’s Stone was much more obviously alchemical than the one published in 1997.

There were several discarded opening chapters for Book 1, one of which had a muggle betraying the Potters, one had a character called ‘Pyrites,’ whose name means ‘fools gold’ meeting Sirius in front of the Potter’s house. Pyrites was a servant of Voldemort. …

Very early page of Book1: Argis Pyrites mentioned as author of Alchemy, Ancient Art and Science

Rowling also writes on PotterMore that Alchemy was the original Potions class at Hogwarts:

A slightly different list of school subjects appears in my earliest notes. Herbology is called ‘Herbalism’, Divination is compulsory from the first year, as are Alchemy and a subject called simply ‘Beasts’, whereas Transfiguration is called ‘Transfiguration/Metamorphosis’

Rowling was even dreaming about alchemists when she started writing Stone. You’ll forgive me for thinking that Severus Snape was originally conceived us as Argis Pyrites, Alchemy Master. More important, the alchemy was much more in the open rather than a subtlety for closer readers to become aware of on repeated readings. I think she worked to imitate the better literary alchemists — and to distance herself from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a deceit that has been remarkably successful especially considering Philosopher’s Stone and The Alchemist sit side by side on many ‘Best Selling Books of All Time’ lists.

Click on ‘Leave a Comment’ up by this post’s headline and let me know what you think!

Lethal White was the first Cormoran Strike novel for which I did not buy the jewel case audio CD set. I may eventually get it if I see one at a library sale just to complete my Rowling audio collection for the bookshelf but my family has been won over by the offers on Amazon’s Audible on price points and convenience. It was fun listening to Lethal White (and Rosmersholm) on endless repeat for the better part of a month when my Muggle job allowed me to do that. 

Last week I spent two monthly credits to buy the Career of Evil and Prisoner of Azkaban audio editions on Audible because we couldn’t get the CDs we already owned to transfer to my son’s iPod (Yes, I’ll be doing another post for Career and Prisoner just like the one I did for Lethal White and Goblet). Audible was so pleased that I bought two books in one month that they sent me a $5 gift certificate to use at their site. I searched their ‘Best Books for Under $10’ file and purchased Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for $4.86.

But I was curious. How much could I download from Audible for free? It turns out the answer is quite a lot — and if you’re willing to spend $1 for whole sets of books and plays, you’ll be listening to fun books and interviews with authors you like in free time you might otherwise spend driving or walking the dog along with your free thoughts. Join me after the jump if you’re interested in seeing how I found the ‘Free Page’ at Audible, and, no, I’m not getting a kick back if you sign up for Amazon’s audio book outlet.

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I hope in the New Year to make twice a month updates here about our ‘Pillar Post’ project. Consider this Report #1.

As you may have noticed, I collapsed the almost forty listings in the left Pillar Post sidebar down to eight. This has the downside of making the subjects within the larger files impossible to see on the home page, e.g., ‘Literary Alchemy’ is hidden inside KEYS FOR INTERPRETATION, and ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’ inside INDIVIDUAL ROWLING WORKS, but the list was so long it seemed unlikely to me that a reader would scroll through them all and sense anything but a grab bag rather than a coherently organized collection of posts. File this decision under ‘Lamentable but Necessary Trade-Offs.’

I also put together a new introduction to the project that now heads the list, the only subject not in ALL CAPS: The ‘Why’ and ‘How To’ of Pillar Posts. Let me know what you think of the new explanation by writing a comment beneath that post or this one — and please share the items and points of organization that will help you most. The whole idea is to make the HogwartsProfessor blogpost collection much easier to use — and only you can tell me what needs to be done to make sure that happens.

Thanks in advance for your feedback, and, as always, for your stopping by and joining in the conversation!

Happy St Basil’s Day! It’s the ‘Russian New Year’ (at least that’s what it was called in Pennsylvania years ago) and the beginning of 2019 on the Church calendar. I’m excited about the coming year and projects on hand from the Pillar Posts and podcasts to speculation and research into the clockwork guts of Fantastic Beasts and Cormoran Strike. Thank y’all for joining us in the past year and in advance for joining the conversation in the New Year. Maybe I’ll find time this weekend to put up a Greatest Hits of 2018, a very busy year indeed for Rowling Readers.

I managed to read a book that had been on top of my pile of things to read (apart from the PhD thesis mound of ‘Must Reads’) in the first week of the twelve days of Christmas, and, as I expected, it was both a delight and a revelation. I rush to share the three things I learned from Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade. Two points are in order as introduction, though, for the Harry Potter fan out there who may not know the basics about Agatha Christie.

We joke that only God and Chairman Mao have sold more books than J. K. Rowling and that Mao had help with his Little Red Book’s sales and distribution. Rowling’s sales, though, while unprecedented on a per volume basis at least with the Hogwarts Saga parts, fall far short of the hard to fathom book sales of two English women writers, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie. Christie is not only the ‘Queen of Crime Writers’ by common acclamation, her Poirot and Marple novels have been translated into more languages and sold more copies than any other writer of fictions in history with the possible exception of Shakespeare. Big Bill, much as I love the Bard, except for his place in the English canon and consequent forced readership in schools, would only be read by thespians and antiquarians. Christie’s mysteries still sell millions of copies annually to readers who delight in them for their own sake.

Agatha Christie was a very private woman, however, and would be happy, I think, that the reading public today knows very little about her life. One event in that life, however, that is well known and Christie worked her whole remaining time on earth trying to downplay (it was a condition of every one of the rare interviews she granted that the topic not be raised) was her disappearance for eleven days in 1926, which vanishing act was the occasion of a national woman-hunt. She turned up in a spa at Harrogate; she claimed to have suffered an attack of amnesia, a story from which she never broke in all the remaining decades of her life.

Jared Cade in his  Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days demonstrates what has always been suspected, namely, that the amnesia story was a deliberate fabrication and that Christie disappeared in order to punish her husband who had just told her he wanted a divorce so he could marry his mistress, a mutual friend of theirs.

Why should a reader of J. K. Rowling care? Three things in this short biography of an author whose work Rowling knows well struck me as meaningful, even important. Join me after the jump for those eye-openers!

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