The Monster Book of Monsters

Included here for a reason that is only obvious once you see it on a readability scale: this is the sole entry in the catalogue rated mention only because of an obstacle inside the fiction rather than outside it.

Everywhere else on these shelves, the reason you cannot read the book is authorial. Borges declines to transcribe the Book of Sand. Lovecraft withholds the Necronomicon because withholding is scarier. The absence is a decision made by a writer.

Here the absence is diegetic. There is nothing stopping Rowling from telling us what is in it. The obstacle is that the book bites. Its contents are unknown to the characters and to us for the same reason, which puts the reader and Harry in an unusually level relationship — the only book in this collection where you are stuck for exactly the reason the protagonist is stuck.

And the solution is characteristically Hagrid. Not a spell, not a counter-charm: be gentle with it. Stroke the spine. The dangerous creature wants reassurance. That is the entire man’s worldview compressed into a sight gag, sitting in a first-week-of-term comedy scene, three chapters before the same worldview gets Buckbeak sentenced to death.

On the readability rating. Nothing. Not one line of its contents survives anywhere in the series. A bestiary that never names a beast.