It's so difficult to look at past phenoms and see just when reader investment trips over into generating because of its own power. I wonder if book seven could have been Voldemort meets Harry on the Quidditch field and not just kids but smart adults would have attributed all kinds of brilliant symbolism to sometimes clever, sometimes funny, but mostly banal text.

I also wonder in ten or twenty years if these books will have the Trilby effect: someone reads it wondering what the HELL anyone saw in it?