A 24 year old's entry into the world of Harry Potter

I don't feel like I read for fun that often but reflecting on the past year I realized that I don't do too bad. Especially if I can count audiobooks, and I do. I missed the whole Harry Potter thing as a child. I was one too many years old when the first book came out and was too concerned with other things when the craze began. So after putting it off for about a decade I decided to catch up with pop culture last fall. I successfully listened to all seven books in audio format in the course of about two months. At the time I had a job in which I could listen to music/books at the same time as working. However, after the second book I could no longer limit myself to just listening at work and I started listening whenever I had a free moment. This culminated with me finishing the seventh book at 4:30AM sometime in November. Yeah, it was sweet.
Needless to say the Harry Potter series is a set of books about a orphan boy who finds out he is the most well known wizard in the "wizarding world" it chronicles his journeys for seven years as he attends wizarding school and eventually defeats the extremely powerful dark wizard...well you know.

I don't think that Harry Potter changed my life in anyway, it was simply a lot of fun to read. It did change my feelings about the Harry Potter movement however, prior to reading the books I'd seen a few of the movies and came away feeling like wizards were pretty lame. The book changed my perspective. If I learned anything from these books it was that your imagination can do a much better job than a movie if for no other reason than that you can customize your own version of the characters. For example, in my version of Harry Potter the competitors in The Goblet of Fire don't wear lame jerseys. Everything is a lot more hardcore in my version as well. And finally the Weasley boys aren't as ugly in my version (this might sound like a strange one but Fred and George were my favorite characters and they were grossly different than the version in my head, I simply chose the most blatantly skewed characteristic).
Books are awesome, all the best ideas start out in written form and they aren't limited by technology nor do they become laughable with time. Books are timeless, otherwise we wouldn't still be reading the Odyssey and the Illiad, or the Bible for that matter. I don't feel like I've read too many books in my lifetime that have resulted in some sort of epiphany but that doesn't mean that there isn't an impact in some way or another.