Audible/Amazon found a collection of American adults who knew nothing about Harry Potter, which I guess means they had not read the books or seen a film adaptation. These are the folks for whom the Hogwarts Saga is NOT a ‘Shared Text.’ They don’t get the references to the series in everyday life, and, if they laugh at the jokes, it’s a very nervous kind of laugh. The audiobook company filmed their first experience of the stories.

That experience was not after reading to themselves but after they had listened to the Jim Dale audio-book version performance.

As important, they were not read the story, any one of the stories, beginning to end, but in short excerpts. This resembles the Loris Vezzali project, ‘The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” except I think those studies involved the participants reading the passages to themselves rather than listening to a performed reading.

My experience of the books from the very start involved (1) reading each novel to myself, (2) then reading it aloud to my children, and (3) finally listening to Jim Dale’s recorded versions on Cassette tape (!) and on CDs. I only read the books aloud once, I think, but the Dale audiobooks, because my children loved them so much, was the background-sound or elevator music in our home for the better part of a decade.

As I morphed from enthusiastic fan to ‘Potter Pundit’ to “Dean of Harry Potter Scholars” (TM), I was of course reading the books repeatedly. But the number of hours I spent in cars with my young family during which we listened to the stories would be difficult to calculate. I remember driving a moving van across Colorado during our exodus from Texas to the Olympic Peninsula in 2001 and having something of an epiphany about the Goblet of Fire Triwizard Tournament Tasks and the three stages of alchemy. Which realization was due entirely to the audio experience.

If there is an ideal experience of the Potter stories, I think it is the conjunction of reading the story aloud ‘live’ to someone else and that person or audience experiencing it beginning to end in their own imagination. My favorite part of this video, a simulation of sorts of the ideal described, is the look of wonder as the listeners enter the world of Rowling’s witches and wizards for the first time.

In contrast with the ideal is the nadir, of course. The worst experience of the story is via the film adaptations, the only value to which, apart from the film making arts about which I am admittedly and willfully ignorant, is their serving as entry ramps to the reading experience — an imaginative experience, alas, forever compromised by the time watching the movies…. The audiobook point of entry is much, much closer to the ideal than that nadir.

Let me know your experience of the audio books, if any, and what you think the ideal entry point to the series is!

Post: Louise Freeman, Potter Pundit extraordinaire, wrote last year about her experience listening to the books for the first time after years of reading the books and watching the films: ‘Some Thoughts on my First Listen through the Harry Potter Audiobooks.’ Enjoy!