Love

What Harry Potter meant to me

Harry Potter’s 20th brought back a ton of memories today and I want to share with you what Harry Potter meant to me. Before I even start, I would like to extend deep gratitude to J.K. Rowling for opening up her world of magic to us. I started reading the Harry Potter books secretly when I was 14. My grandmother lent ‘Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban’ to my sister one day and asked her to try it out. I don’t know why she handed over the 3rd book first. I didn’t even know it was a series. All I knew was that my sister had something interesting and I had to read it. I started picking it up every time she left the room. Though I had no clue what happened before that, the sheer joy of secretly reading about magic, was incomparable. I was instantly hooked.

I ended up finishing the book even before my sister got to the end. At the end of the book, I read that it was a series and I just had to read them all. I patiently waited for my sister to finish. I hoped she would ask my grandmother for the remaining books once she did. She was elder to me, so she got to sign off on whether I could read the book. I waited with puppy eyes for that approval. It finally came and I got a chance to read every book (of course we fought about who would read it first). We had a year to finish the first two books before ‘Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire’ was out.

Back in our childhood, there was a queue to read the book. My grandmother read it first, then passed it on to my sister who then passed it on to me. It just became a tradition even as we grew up. That’s exactly how we read each and every book of the Harry Potter series (except ‘The Cursed Child, now that I live oceans away, I got my own copy as a gift from bae). Since I never got to read the book first, I usually read through the night whenever I got my hands on the book and finished it at lightning speed. The books made me laugh, cry, believe and hope in ways that I can’t even explain.

To this day, I can start reading the series and I wouldn’t be able to put the book down for a minute. I am as hooked as I was when I was a kid. The thing I’ve always found amazing though is how the book had us as kids and also our grandmother as fans. How it made people of all ages believe in magic is wonderous to me.

A line from the series that has stayed with me and will stay forever,

“…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever” – Albus Dumbledore

Harry Potter has been my one true love in the book world and its place remains forever. #Potterhead #believer #magic

You may also like...