All right, I'll be that guy: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.



Lots of people hate this book, and I guess I kind of get it--it's really long and really depressing and Harry spends a lot of it yelling, though not as much as you'd think--but I love it to death.



Order of the Phoenix is a book about the personal and political aftermath of a catastrophe, and the way our reactions can mitigate it or worsen it. In the fifth book, they mostly worsen it.



It's the book where everything goes to pieces. It's the low point, for everyone. Literally nothing goes according to plan for anyone. Everyone messes up in big, messy, irreparable ways, and for totally understandable reasons that stem from their fundamental personalities. Either they're working from incomplete information (Harry), or they're unable to overcome old animosities (Harry, Snape, Sirius), or they allow their actions to be guided by love and paternalism rather than reason (Dumbledore), or they get too sure of themselves and fail to see possible consequences (Hermione, Dumbledore). So the good guys fail hard, and the bad guys fail hard too--Umbridge, Fudge, and Voldemort do not come out of that book having gotten any of what they wanted.



It's messy and it's painful, but of all of the Harry Potter books, it's probably the one that's the most grounded in emotional realism. It's character-driven. There's no nefarious plot, no mystery to solve--just a dozen or so tightly-drawn characters with competing agendas, messing up and stepping on each other's toes and keeping secrets when they shouldn't and nursing old grudges and thinking they're invincible.



And all of it has massive consequences. Order of the Phoenix is the way-station between the light-hearted(ish) beginning of the series and the endgame of the final two books: It draws on what came before it and sets the groundwork for what's to come.



It's nuanced and painful and sad, and its themes (of abuse of power, the necessity of moving on after tragedy, the dangers of viewing the world in terms of straightforward "good"and "evil") are some of the most complex and, to me, necessary of the entire series. It's the book where Harry grows up.



It's also way, way funnier than people give it credit for.