Spoiler Warning: there are a few plot spoilers coming up. I try not to give away too much, though, and I believe that none of them will take away the joy of reading the books, in any case.

I’m a millennial, so it’s almost a given that JK Rowling was my favourite author while growing up. But though she may have been my first favourite (or maybe it was Enid Blyton?), she certainly wasn’t the last. I soon replaced her with Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, and Robert Jordan, and, once I entered my teens and started understanding the classics, I took a liking to Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. I’m sure colonialism contributed to my preferences, but in general I enjoyed British more than American literature. The few famous American classics that I read – The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, mainly – didn’t appeal to me one bit, as I couldn’t relate to the characters and lacked a lot of the cultural context needed to appreciate these works. Also, American prose tended to be too simple, whereas British prose was more complex and poetic. So, until my late teens, the books I read were English, while the TV shows I watched were American. ¹