the one book I have definitely, actually finished

Right, this is the exception. This is the one I've read all the way to the end more times than I can count, and I think that says more about me at eight years old than it does about the book.

I got it for Christmas when I was seven or eight. Paperback, the old cover, and it lived in my school bag for about two years, and by the end it didn't really have a spine any more so much as a suggestion of one.

Here's the thing though. I reread it properly in March, as an adult, and it's shorter than I remembered and also thinner than I remembered, and I mean that in both senses? Like, the actual plot is: boy finds out he's magic, goes to school, plays a sport, there's a stone. That's it. That's the entire book. All the stuff I thought was in it, the politics and the war and the enormous sad backstory, none of it is here yet. It's mostly just school. Feasts and homework and a troll in a toilet.

And the school stuff is so good, that's the thing! The sorting. The staircases that move. The Mirror of Erised, which I had completely forgotten is in the first one, and which is still the best idea in the whole series by an absolute mile. Ollivander in the shop. The letters coming down the chimney.

What doesn't hold up for me now is Quidditch, sorry. The rules make no sense. The snitch is worth so many points that the rest of the match is basically decorative? I said this out loud at a pub quiz once and a grown man got quite intense with me about it.

Also Snape. I know where it all goes, obviously. But in this one, read on its own with no knowledge of anything that comes after, he's just a teacher being horrible to an eleven year old for no reason, and it's a bit odd how much the book wants you to enjoy that.

Oh, and the audiobook. Stephen Fry. I put it on when I can't sleep and I've never once got past the Dursleys, because I'm out cold somewhere around the zoo, so I've now heard the first two chapters roughly three hundred times and nothing else whatsoever. Which is very on brand for me.

I have complicated feelings about the author that I'm not going to get into on a book website, and I know some people would rather I didn't rate it at all, and I do understand that, and I'm not going to argue with anybody in the comments about it.

Eight. Not a ten, because I can see the joins now. But it's the book that turned me into a person who reads, even if it also somehow turned me into a person who starts four books and finishes none of them, so, mixed results there really.

My mum still has my old copy in the loft. She says she's keeping it for my future children, which is an enormous amount of pressure to put on a paperback with no spine.