OMG, your experience with reading the series sounds so much like mine - the bookstore my mom worked at got a bunch orders of them because "the book about a boy and magic - it's selling really well in the U.K." So, my mom brought it home for me to read, late 1998, and it was the only book I hadn't read in my room, I was 11. 12 when Chamber of Secrets came out.

God, I was in that angsty period when I started reading R/S fanfic. I was in Paris at an internet cafe reading fanfic of heartbreaking R/S, and it hurt so good, because #angstseeking