Rediscovering Harry Potter

I spend roughly 2 hours a day in my car.  Days that I'm off of work it's less, some days it's much more.

Sometimes we listen to music as I take Peanut to my parents.

Sometimes we chat about what we spot out the window as we drive by.

It's when I'm driving by myself that I get bored or tired or unfocused.

After hearing so much about the Harry Potter audio books by Jim Dale, I decided to pick one up.

I've read all the books but I haven't read them in years and years.

We watch the movies a lot.

I mean, at least once a week there is a Harry Potter movie on.  At least.

*Let's take a quick detour and talk about the Chocolate Frog that my friend Courtney brought all the way back from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter for B & I!  I should have taken a picture of me holding it, so that you could see the box was the size of my hand.  You have no idea how excited I was to get this.  When she brought it to me, I sent a picture to B.  He responded by saying not to open it until we're together because they only really have one good jump anyway.
Thank you Courtney and Allen for bringing us this!!

I'm not sure what I expected from the audio books. 

 It's hard to think of one person narrating books that you know so well.  

Especially when you have such firmly established ideas of a characters sound and style.  

30 minutes into the first book and I was enjoying the morning traffic.

I stopped thinking of Jim Dale as the narrator and started listening to all characters as they spoke.

I got so hooked that I started going to the library to get the next set of CDs before I finished the previous ones to guarantee I wouldn't have any lag time in between.

I listened to all 7 books almost non-stop.

Occasionally poor Peanut would remind me that we could listen to music and then we would.

These books sometimes had 23 different CDs to listen to and it just didn't seem enough.

106 hours.
106 hours and I wanted it to be more.

I discovered quite a few things in this listening experiment:

*Jim Dale is genius.  His talent knows no bounds.

*I had forgotten so much of the books.  After years of just watching the movies I was suddenly peeking back into this amazing magical world. So much of the story doesn't make it into the movies.  I had forgotten so much of the original story that much of the audio books felt new to me.

*An hour in the car is nothing with Jim Dale to keep you company.

*I'm obsessed all over again.  I try to wrap my mind around how a person can create such stories and it's nothing short of amazing.  I want to completely immerse myself in this world.

*I'm also terribly sad that it's all over.  Again.  

I want more of the magic, more of the story, more of all of it.

I'm thinking that perhaps next year I'll re-read the books.

Are you a Harry Potter fan?
Have you read the books, listened to them or seen the movies?