In the year 2000, when I was nine years old, my mother read the first Harry Potter book for me and my younger sister over the course of several nights.

After she had finished, I was still so entranced by the world which had been presented to me that I reread it several times on my own.

 

While I did not understand it at the time, what I love about ‘Harry Potter’ is that they are mystery-novels disguised as fantasy.

Reading ‘Harry Potter’ often feels more like reading ‘Sherlock Holmes’ than reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’.

 

My mother must have noticed my entrancement, because later that year, during my tenth winter, I got the newly Norwegian-translated second and third Harry Potter book for Christmas.

I would go on to reread the three books I had, again and again, for almost an entire year.

When the fourth book arrived in 2001 I just added that to my rereading of the other books, until I did the same with the fifth one when the Norwegian version arrived in 2003.

 

By the time the seventh and last book arrived in 2007, I had started slowing my rereading down a bit, and had started expanding my reading list.

To this day, I have only read the last book once, despite the fact that I love it as much as the rest of them.

 

While I at the time was annoyed by how many of the cool small details that I liked had been removed from the movies, I have later realised just how lucky we were to get a film-series which were that closely modeled on the source material.

And I always enjoyed the fact that I was always exactly in the target demographic for each movie as it came out. Almost exactly the same age as the main characters, as I grew up alongside Harry Potter and his friends.

At the closest we were exactly the same age, and at the furthest away I was a little over three years older than Harry, as the last film came out.

But while I eventually aged quicker than the character, I never outgrew Harry Potter.