I'm sorry, I don't believe that anyone who has read regularly since childhood would still count Harry Potter as the best book they've ever read.
It's funny when you look at old articles from the early 2000s amongst literary types, saying, "Yeah, okay, it's pretty derivative, but at least it's getting kids reading, right?" And then they just never read anything else and now they're grown adults writing articles in The Telegraph claiming that JK Rowling is the greatest female author of all time.
This entire 20-year-old thread on an old SFF forum is fascinating reading, but this comment is downright prophetic:
What exactly is Rowling doing to "subvert the genre"? While her stories are engaging, they're second-rate writing. It's all so simplistic. Sure, she knows how to throw a shocker in there, but it's not exactly a plot twist, especially since everyone guessed her major decision with this last book [Note: The author is alluding to killing off Dumbledore in Half-Blood Prince] well before release. She's still using all of the classic fantasy devices too! Come on, subvert the genre? It sounds to me like she never even READ the genre. Otherwise she'd know she was a good bit behind the greats of fantasy. Especially if her description of fantasy as mentioned in that article is what she really thinks it is. Pratchett is about 1000x more entertaining than Rowling anyway. I've got news for her, instead of subverting the genre, she's only created a place in it for herself instead. Fantasy will go on being what it's being long after Harry Potter and JK Rowling. No one is going to look at HP and say, "Wow, what a revolutionary fantasy series that changed the genre forever!" They'll say, "Wow, look at this series that got kids to read! Isn't that nice?" And even with that, most studies that looked at readers of Harry Potter found that Harry Potter was ALL they were reading. [Note: emphasis mine] It's not exactly encouraging as many new young readers as everyone seems to think. Besides, good fantasy explores the human condition first and foremost, using fantastical means. How does HP do that? By saying his mother loved him, and died for him? By showing Harry's sense of loss regarding his parents, godfather, and now Dumbledore? By writing a cheesy teenage love story into this last novel? Yawn Sorry, but that's nothing spectacular.



















