Sometime in the late 1990s, my Year 6 teacher recommended that our class read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

I ignored her.

It wasn’t a protest against Harry Potter. I wasn’t taking a principled stand against wizards, boarding schools or popular books. I simply wasn’t a reader. A teacher telling the class that a book was worth reading was not enough to make eleven-year-old me pick it up.

More than twenty years later, I have just finished listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

She was right.

Returning to a story I thought I knew

Like most people of my generation, I did not completely miss Harry Potter. The books became too big for that. The films arrived, the characters became part of popular culture, and Hogwarts was everywhere whether you had read the novels or not.

So I came to the audiobooks with the strange familiarity of someone who already knew the destination but had never taken the full journey. I knew the major characters and remembered the broad shape of the films. What I did not know was how much had been compressed, rearranged or left unexplained along the way.

Prisoner of Azkaban made that especially clear.

The film is memorable in its own right, but listening to the book filled in holes I had never quite realised were there. Relationships had more history. Revelations had more room to breathe. The story of Lupin, Sirius, Pettigrew and James felt less like a collection of twists and more like the remains of a friendship that had gone terribly wrong.

Even familiar scenes changed when they were given their missing context. Things I had accepted because the film moved quickly suddenly made sense for reasons beyond the immediate plot.

It felt less like hearing a longer version of the same story and more like discovering the story underneath the one I already knew.

The right format at the right time

There is something fitting about finally reaching these books through audio.

The child who ignored the recommendation did not suddenly become the sort of person who always has a novel in hand. But that does not mean the stories were never for me. Audiobooks provided a route into them that a printed copy on a classroom desk could not.

That distinction matters. For years, not reading a book could easily feel like not being interested in stories at all. Yet I have always enjoyed stories through television, films, games and everything else that held my attention. The problem was not imagination. It was the form in which I was being asked to engage with it.

Listening removed that barrier. It allowed the story to unfold without turning it into a task I had to force myself through. By the end of Prisoner of Azkaban, I had not merely completed it. I had had a grand time listening.

Perhaps this was simply the right format arriving at the right point in my life.

A recommendation with a very long delay

I wonder whether my teacher would remember making that recommendation. To her, it may have been one ordinary moment in class: here is a new children’s book everyone seems to love; perhaps you will love it too.

I remember ignoring it.

At the time, that was the end of the story. The class moved on, primary school ended, and Harry Potter carried on becoming a phenomenon without any help from me.

But recommendations can have unexpectedly long lives. Sometimes they work immediately. Sometimes they sit somewhere in the back of your mind until you become the person who is ready for them.

More than twenty years after my teacher pointed our class towards Philosopher’s Stone, I have made it through the first three stories. I can now see why she wanted us to begin.

There is a small sadness in arriving so late. I missed the experience of growing up alongside the books as they were released, of waiting for the next one and discovering the world at the same time as everyone else.

But arriving late has its own pleasure. I get to revisit a world I recognise and find all the detail that the films could not carry. I get the nostalgia without being limited to what I remember. Most of all, I get the surprise of discovering that something I dismissed as a child can still reach me as an adult.

The next book is Goblet of Fire, where I am told the distance between book and film becomes much greater.

This time, I won’t be ignoring the recommendation.