The question I get asked all the time…

When people ask me how many times I’ve read the Harry Potter books [for some reason, I get this question a lot], I honestly have no idea, because rather than a number of cycles, they were the soundtrack of my life.

Jim Dale read me to sleep.

As a kid I spent my free time tidying my room and listening to Jim Dale read the Harry Potter books to me on CD. Sometimes at exciting bits I dumped out drawers just so I could piece their contents back together while I kept listening. At night I would listen until I fell asleep. This method still works when I can’t sleep.

Less stuff doesn’t always mean more simplicity.

My yellow boom box got me through a childhood’s worth of Harry Potter, and I still recall the sound it made as the CD spun to a stop when its tracks were through. But one day the boom box broke, and listening became a faff. Gone was the simplicity of the CD system, where I had to press only two buttons to get it started. Now I have to weed through my iTunes library, and right now my computer doesn’t even have enough space for all the books. Less stuff doesn’t always mean more simplicity.

How I incorporate childhood pastimes into adult life:

A lot of friends fondly recall listening to the audiobooks on road trips, but this was never the case for me, because my whole family had to agree to the pastime, and frankly I don’t blame them for choosing against listening to someone else read them Harry Potter for hours at a time, let alone having to live with me talking about it during all those other hours.

But I found a new method for playing CDs, and a way to enjoy them on the road: by playing them in Monkey’s car! We spun through half of Deathly Hallows on the road there-and-back-again, brushing up on Harry history, and passing the time with a gripping story. Plus, we both like camping, and there’s a lot of it in that book.

So I want to know – what did you do in your childhood downtime? Do you still enjoy it to this day? Please share in the comments!