] I ended up loving it better than P&P because of its theme of choosing true love over infatuation;

Yes, I love that about it too, although I'd be hard pressed to say which is my favorite. :-)

] I was rooting for Colonel Brandon from the time he first appeared in the novel (though it never occurred to me that he would look anything like Alan Rickman -- sigh).

LOL! Yep, same here on both counts! One thing that I sense your touching upon in your post--and I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth--is the idea of how the experience can vary depending upon how you first come to the story. I, like you, read the story myself before seeing an adaptation and I'm thankful for it, as I think it allowed for a fuller, richer discovery of JA's tale.

As for when that happened, I had just left college and felt a need to read books that I'd seen assigned often to others but hadn't been required to read myself. P&P was one of them and I loved it so well I went right out and bought S&S, ready to gobble up everything and anything by this wonderful "new" author.

I remember that I was dining alone in a restaurant when I first opened it up, mere minutes out of the bookstore. At first I was disappointed because it seemed to be gloomy where P&P definitely was not. Then I got to the point where we get to really see the characters and whoa! What a flood of interesting things washed over me! I can vividly remember my anger at John and Fanny's rationalizations in Chapter 3. I kept flipping back and rereading paragraphs with such emotion and much head-shaking; my waitress probably thought I was nuts. ;-)

Anyway, I gobbled up the book in a couple of days and then moved on to read the rest of JA. For a few years I would set it (and the rest of the canon) aside just long enough to forget some of the ending details, so that I could reread it and have it feel "fresh" in a way.