This was the first real series that I had read. I remember it clearly because back then my schooldays were busy, and yet I was just glued to this series. The first two books I had finished in a week. It was September 2016 or somewhere around that time, as far as I remember, that I decided to read this series instead of watching the movies. And GOD was that one of the best choices I’ve ever made.
The wizarding world, right from the letter, to the final chapters of Deathly Hallows, keeps you involved. The narrative style, the story, the characters, the plots for each novel, Tom Riddle himself, everything has been just so vivid, brilliant and mind-blowing, that it still brings out the teen kid in me that read that book in class 9th.
I read the books first, and then watched the movies. Hoping to see all the things I had imagined visualized in a realistic movie was something I would have loved to enjoy. And I have to say the first three, even the fourth movie, had done very well. But the 5th movie… Utter massacre of the original story. The differences in the experience of reading The Order of The Phoenix compared to watching it are so much that I can’t emphasize this enough. It might probably be also because when you read something, your imagination takes you where you wanna go. So even though you are following the author’s narrative, the reading experience in itself is unique to you. It’s as if two people reading the same books can have completely different experiences based on their own mind, expectations and imagination. Whereas for a movie, this is not true. It has been recorded and is being played the same way again. However, reading the same book twice might give you a different experience both times.
Regardless of all that, the amount of sheer mental engagement the series have had, especially the last 3 books, was so much on me that even though I was in an NCC camp, I was reading and finished the deathly hallows there. I won’t give any spoilers, and the book does have some elements which I believe 7–8 years old are better left off with. But for early teens, this is one of the best introductions to the joy of reading. The entertainment world of reading. The exploratory and imagining world of reading. Reading that series had almost taken me into a dream like state, where I wasn’t even reading words, just the sheer ongoings of the events in the story. Words that were not part of my vocabulary, I barely used to look them up because opening up a dictionary used to break the flow. So understanding the meaning based on usage and context became a common thing to speed up the reading.
Damn, I went really off rail.
Regardless. This was one of the most amazing series I have read. Most joyful to be accurate. Because I might not read it again now. There’s too much of the literary world my heart desires to explore now than revisiting the same world again. But definitely I wouldn’t have developed the love of reading and chasing amazing stories in any form, had it not been for this one. So yeah, thanks JK.