Read it aloud to my daughter, then again to my son.

The count is odd for this one. I read it to myself once around 2001, out of curiosity, then aloud twice, years apart, at bedtime. My list counts three, though the aloud ones are a different exercise entirely.

Reading it out loud you discover how fast the first half moves. The Dursleys, the letters, the wall at the station, Diagon Alley. All of it done at a sprint, sentences short, and it's very hard to lose a seven-year-old's attention in any of it. That's craft and I don't think it gets said often enough.

You also discover that the villain plot is thin. The Quirrell reveal is fine. The obstacles under the trapdoor are a corridor of party games, and my son, who was six, asked me, reasonably, "why is the chess one the hard one?" I had no answer.

What changed for me: Snape. First time I read him as a mystery to be solved. Now he's a teacher who bullies an eleven-year-old in front of a class while none of the adults do anything, and the book serves that up as flavour.

Eight. It does the job it set out to do almost perfectly. My daughter has since read all seven twice and I've stopped at three, which is probably the correct distribution of effort in this house.