Harry's catching a snitch, flying a broom, and showing us his 'O' face in one complete package. What's not to like?

 

It's amazing how the covers influence us. Even after all the movies, I still picture Harry as he's depicted on the UK cover of Philosopher's Stone:



Though with less extreme curtains lol. And messier hair. But the face is totally how I picture him.

Oh, I just remembered another hilarious one: the way I imagined wands. When I first read the books, I imagined the wands like this:



Because I was really into my Lego.

But then I realised that those wands were silly. Of course they looked like this:



The actual proper wooden wand image didn't occur to me until around the time I read PoA, I think.

 

It took me about 5 reading to understand who conjured the Patronus in Prisoner of Azkaban.

Weirdly, I got all the pronunciations right...

 

Reading your posts, I wonder if you were thinking of Cair Paravel, from the Narnia books?

I was already familiar with the name Hermione. For one, there was Hermione Gingold, who was in Bell, Book and Candle, with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart.

 

Spells. I've spent entirely too many years reading fanficiton, and there are certain spells that are used so widely I'm constantly surprised when I find out they actually are never mentioned in the books.

 

Rufus Scrimgeour: For whatever reason, my eyes switched the m and the g, so I've since, and still pronounce it scrig-more, rather than scrim-jer.

When I watched the DH movies, it was really jarring to hear Hermione say "scrim-jer" and I was all like, "wtf, you stupid bitch! It's SCRIG-more." Then I went back and checked the book and was like, "well, now I feel dumb."

 

She was in the Order. Never stated outright, though. It did crop up in the question thread once, and is a time when Taure made a canon mistake.

 

I always thought the Philosopher's Stone and the Resurrection Stone were the same thing. No idea why.

 

A lot of the pronunciation things I'm guilty of,

One I haven't seen is that I've pronounced Flitwick as Filtwick and McGonagall as McGongall.

The funniest one I can remember though is just as I was introducing the books to my little brother, we were talking about how he couldn't believe that anyone thought that Harry was the heir of CEE-rin-th. By which he meant Slytherin.

 

I skimmed over descriptions when I first read PS/SS and pictured Dumbledore as being in his thirties and clean shaven for quite a while. I also mispronounced 'Hermione' as 'Hermy-one' and 'Hermy-oh-nee' until I saw the first movie, despite having read the fourth book with Hermione's mini pronunciation lesson.

Now for a misconception I thought I had but actually didn't-- When the first movie came out, I was surprised by the Hogwarts uniforms and assumed that I'd, as usual, skimmed over the text describing them. After seeing the movie I reread the book and only then realized I hadn't missed anything, and that they were only canon in the movies.

 

Taure's image of a wand fits mine perfectly, I was so surprised when I watched the Sorcerer's Stone. I am also one of the people who read enough commonly used fannon spells to mistake them for canon, the Notice-me-not was one I think.

 

There's some debate over that; the UK artwork shows him in movie style uniform (at least on PS), and that's certainly the image I have of them in my head - shirt and trousers, maybe a jumper, underneath something more like a choral cassock than the traditional wizard robes. I know that there's a couple of bits in the text that suggest it's robes and nothing beneath it, but eh.

This. I quite like the idea of more individual wands, but I still just think of them like this for the most part.

 

Perhaps not, but you can bet that almost every classics teacher everywhere is a hardass about pronunciation. To this day I still flinch whenever someone makes the c's in latin soft, expecting the sharp rap of a pointer or yard stick, quickly followed by the deep voiced rant-chant of my classics teacher giving a four minute diatribe about why the person who just did that is a moron and should give up on any dreams of college.

...to be fair, it's a fact included the very first lesson of not only his Latin class, but his classics, philosophy, English, AND history classes.

And inevitably some wise-ass tried to counter his diatribe with "But the Church does it!", and a half-hour of hilarity ensued.

OT, I too pictured wands as more basic, and often even not "straightened out" but following the natural twists and turns of branches, and such. Certainly none of that posh comfort grip handle-laden nonsense in the movies.

I suppose the biggest misconception is that I had thought I was reading a youth fantasy in a modern fairy-tale style, but the later books disabused me of that notion.

 

I'm still not sure if they wear those pointed hats.

 

When I was much younger and I had skimmed read the first book I was under the impression that Dumbledore looked closer to this guy - link - who appeared on the back of my version - apparently it isn't a depiction of an actual character but after I realized it wasn't Dumbledore it became my version of a generic wizard

 

Exact same here. They actually redid that back cover to depict Dumbledore in the next version - presumably a lot of people thought it was him too.

 

I never thought of him as Dumbledore, but for some very strange reason he was my mental images for Remus and Fudge, alternatively.