First found HP

[meriaugust]

No: HPFGUIDX 100481

I like this thread. I was fifteen (a rather late bandwagon jumper as 
it were) and my mother had seen JKR on the Today show and she had 
bought a copy of SS for my brother (who was ten at the time). I was 
bored one afternoon (it was the summer vacation right before my 
junior year in high school, 1999) and I happened to pick it up. I 
wasn't hooked until I got to the last chapter of SS. I was so sure 
that Snape was the bad guy that when the last lines of "Through the 
Trap Door" said that it wasn't Snape or even LV waiting for Harry I 
was sure I had read it wrong. And then when it was Quirrell I was 
blown away. I thought, this is a kid's book and the author is 
putting in complex plot twists? COOL! Needless to say my mother and 
I were at Barnes and Noble the next day for my copy of CoS. I read 
PoA straight through my first weekend after starting school 
(ignoring, in perfect Harry and Ron fashion, all my homework) and 
then I thought, well it'll be only a few weeks till the next one, 
right? Wrong. I waited an agonizing eight months for July 2000 to 
roll around during which I reread all three books three times. Then 
GoF day rolled around. I was at the local mall at opening time to 
get my book (my parents flatly refusing to drive my up at midnight 
the night before and not yet having my drivers permit) and I spent 
all that Saturday devouring it. I had made it up to the Pensieve 
chapter by around 11 that night (almost five hundred pages in 12 
hours, a personal best not yet beaten) when I discovered a massive 
printing error in my book, right in the middle of young Barty 
Crouch's trial. I got to the bottom of the left hand page, with 
Crouch Jr. begging for mercy in DD's memory, and then at the top of 
the right hand page I was back at the Quidditch world cup. Over a 
hundred pages of the book were missing, and as that couldn't be 
rectified at 11:30, the next morning we again were at the mall at 
opening minute for a new copy. (Incidentally, I still have the old 
one. The man at the bookstore had never seen anything like it. I am 
hoping to sell it someday and pay off my school loans!) Anyway, that 
night I finnished, and after that I proceeded to read anything I 
could that even mentioned Harry's name (and got quite well versed in 
the various controversies, from HP is the devil, to HP is Christ, to 
HP is mysoginistic). Then three interminable years, two movies, a 
dozen conversions of relatives and friends and one memebership to 
HP4GU later, I got my hands on OotP (which, by the by, I checked to 
make sure all the pages were in the appropriate order before leaving 
the store). HP also got me interested in some other classic authors: 
Tolkien, Alexander, L'Engle, LeGuin, etc. And now here I am, 21 and 
waiting with all of y'all and countless children for the next 
adventures of the boy wizard. 
Meri - who isn't honestly sure who bothers her the most, the people 
trying to argue that JKR is trying to convert us to her secret devil 
worshipping sect, or those trying to convince me that HP is an 
allegory for the Bible...