I also shit on Harry Potter for years. I was living with a couple that had two kids at the time and I read literally everything on their bookshelf other than her guides to scrapbooking and his MOPAR repair manuals. Finally I grabbed their 9 year old's Harry Potter book. It was fucking fantastic. Excellent word play, pacing, character development, it's everything you could hope for in a novel. It starts off fairly light but by the end they've killed off roughly as many main characters as Game Of Thrones. She's in the top ten best selling writers of all time for a reason and I've never met a person who finished the first book and didn't enjoy it. That being said, I didn't like the movies at all. If they do release a pinball machine based on Potter I hope they stick to the books.