No, seriously.
I kept encountering Honor Harrington examples everywhere, and given that the work page ever so kindly pointed to the Baen CD archives... well, the rest, as they say, is history.

I want to say that was just after the release of Torch of Freedom, but it might have been just after the release of The Shadow of Saganami - I'm not really sure. At first I had them in electronic versions only - in PDF, if you can believe that, since at the time I was still terribly skeptical of this whole "e-book" thing - but I do have about half a dozen of the books in paperback thanks to secondhand bookstores.
I can tell you for certain that it was definitely my gateway into literary science fiction - up until then I'd been more interested in fantasy.