Happy Anniversary, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! Here’s Every Chapter, Ranked

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the book’s release, kicking off J.K. Rowling’s legendary seven-book series, which means we’ve been immersing ourselves in Harry’s world of witchcraft and wizardry for twenty years and now know every page, every sentence, and every comma by heart. But since I can’t exactly rank every comma in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, because no one would read it, I will instead settle for ranking every chapter. Each is crucial and a delight in its own way, but here’s where they sit on my list, culminating in my most beloved.
Chapter 9: The Midnight Duel
There are no bad chapters in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but we have to start somewhere. Besides, Harry has been at wizard school for all of two weeks, and already he’s making plans to sneak out after hours and fight Draco Malfoy? HARRY.
Chapter 6: The Journey from Platform 9 3/4
This chapter always stressed me out, because I was a child who had a penchant for getting lost in supermarkets. Look, I know J.K. Rowling had to send Harry to King’s Cross Station by himself so he could meet the Weasleys. I get that. It doesn’t mean I have to LIKE it.
Chapter 15: The Forbidden Forest
In this chapter, Harry, Hermione, Malfoy, and Neville get detention. What exactly is the discipline policy at Hogwarts, and why does it involve four children following Hagrid into THE FOREST OF DEATH?
Chapter 13: Nicolas Flamel
The only thing of note that happens here is that Harry remembers he has actually known about Nicolas Flamel this whole time.
Chapter 3: The Letters from No One
Uncle Vernon spends the entire chapter trying to avoid a series of apparently infinite letters addressed to Harry, as if he believes the magical world will give up when they run out of paper.
Chapter 14: Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback
Harry and Hermione risk expulsion to dispense with Hagrid’s pet dragon, Norbert, and the only thing wrong with this chapter is that we don’t know ONE SINGLE THING about Charlie Weasley and his inexplicable friends. What’s up with these guys? Why are they able to just fly to Hogwarts and pick up an illegal dragon at midnight? Do they have as many questions as we do? Who are they?
Chapter 8: The Potions Master
This chapter gains points because we get our first real look at Hogwarts, moving staircases and all. This chapter loses points because Snape is around, doing his Snape thing, which here means being needlessly unpleasant to an eleven-year-old child on his first day of school.
Chapter 11: Quidditch
This is the chapter when Harry’s broom goes haywire during his first Quidditch match and Hermione sets Snape on fire. I don’t think I even need to explain this. We all just know it’s tremendous.
Chapter 2: The Vanishing Glass
Harry inadvertently frees a boa constrictor and terrorizes his awful cousin, Dudley, by causing the glass over the snake cage to vanish, which is something we all tried to do at every zoo we went to from age seven onward. (Don’t try to tell me you didn’t.)
Chapter 17: The Man with Two Faces
There’s a lot to unpack here. Harry confronts Voldemort, murders Quirrell, and saves the larger wizarding world. But he also wins the House Cup for Gryffindor, and I think for many of us reading the book as kids, this felt like the bigger deal.
Chapter 7: The Sorting Hat
This is a great chapter because it includes the Sorting Ceremony. Without this chapter, how would any of us know our Hogwarts houses? How would we know what merch to buy?
Chapter 16: Through the Trapdoor
This is a fantastic chapter. Just really solid. In it, Harry, Ron, and Hermione pool their unique skill sets to overcome a series of challenges and stop Voldemort. Also, Neville is there, briefly but courageously.
Chapter 4: The Keeper of the Keys
Hagrid knocks down the door of the cottage the Dursleys attempted to escape to and tells Harry about magic, changing Harry’s life as well as ours with a single enduring maxim that I think all of us have had on a T-shirt at some point: “Harry—yer a wizard.”
Chapter 10: Halloween
Any book that has a chapter where three preteens fight a troll in a bathroom is bound to be a good one. Bonus points if the preteens in question form an unlikely friendship for years to come.
Chapter 12: The Mirror of Erised
This chapter is equal parts hauntingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. Harry is an eleven-year-old orphan who spends Christmas at Hogwarts because the alternative means returning to a place where he’s unloved and unwanted. Here, he’s given the chance to look in a mirror and see the family he never had. Excuse me while I sob.
Chapter 5: Diagon Alley
Authors, take note: this is how you do worldbuilding. Look me in the eye and tell me you can read this chapter without feeling like you’ve been dropped right into the middle of a cobblestone street lined with self-stirring cauldrons and tottering piles of spellbooks. And how often is the worldbuilding in a book so well-written they make a THEME PARK out of it? Check and mate.
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Lived
As far as I’m concerned, there’s The Boy Who Lived, and then there’s every other chapter on earth. True, Harry’s barely in it—we spend much of the chapter with Vernon Dursley as he yells at people and hates cloaks—but it will always be the chapter that started it all. This is the chapter that sparked a twenty-year journey of tears and trials and triumphs as we watched Harry grow from a baby left on a doorstep to a man taking that long, lonely walk into the Forbidden Forest, and for that reason I can give it no other ranking.