I remember when Sixter shoved me her copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and commanded me to read it. Yeah, my older siblings (and there are five of them) do enjoy bullying me around. Like an obedient baby sister, I complied meekly. But from the moment when I read

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you verry much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

(those were the first words of the first chapter), I was mesmerized and read the entire book from cover to cover so fast and so furiously that I hardly understood half of what I read. Sure, I get it that Voldemort was under Quirrel’s turban and Harry was victorious in retrieving the Sorcerer’s stone with a little help from his friends… but I missed a lot of the action… the excellent game of wizard chess Ron played, how Harry retrieved Neville’s remembrall, and so on.

So right after I finished the book, I immediately reread it… much slower this time… relishing Dumbledore’s few but absolutely delightful lines, imagined Hogwarts and its secret passages and magical paintings more vividly, and experienced blow-by-blow the action in the Quidditch games.

It was the same in every Harry Potter book after that. I was always too impatient to know if it was Malfoy who was Slytherin’s heir in The Chamber of Secrets, why Sirius Black wanted to attack Harry (but he did not) in The Prisoner of Azkaban, who would emerge victorious in the Triwizard Tournament in the Goblet of Fire, what was hidden in the Department of Mysteries in The Order of the Phoenix and what was the task assigned to Malfoy and who was the half-blood Prince in The Half-Blood Prince.

Read more in Toe’s Kurokuroatbp.