The audiobooks are among my all time favorites. I’ve listen to them 4 or 5 times all the way through. Mark Bramhall is the narrator, and he he’s incredible. Many times I think, “jeez.. how is he doing that? I know if I were reading that paragraph it would not have been that powerful or interesting”.

I think having been a young boy, and now being a grown adult, helps relate to a lot of the emotional parts of the story. The naive love of youth, and the conflicting feelings of welcome-banality and a desire for life to be more as an adult.

The books get criticism for being “Potter/Narnia for adults”, but I think people who say this maybe haven’t actually read the whole series. That is extremely surface level, and is plainly discussed in the story. The whole point is that this kid grew up obsessed with books like this, and is now just outgrowing the phase of youth where it’s not weird. All of the magic stuff becomes pretty meta after the first half of the first book.