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For convenience sake, I offer Harold Bloom's commentary on Potter. It mirrors my own 100%. Yes, yes, I know. I'm a curmudgeon, a party pooper, and likely a mugwup. Can't be helped. It's in my DNA.

From Dumbing down American readers By Harold Bloom, 9/24/2003:
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

For convenience sake, I offer Harold Bloom's commentary on Potter. It mirrors my own 100%.

From Dumbing down American readers By Harold Bloom, 9/24/2003: What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times.

As has since been noted use use of the phrase "stretched his legs." to refer to going for a walk does not occur "several dozen times" in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone , but just one (1) time (on page 4 - which is probably as far as thst old fraud Bloom actually read).

Harold Bloom doesn't only look like a decayed Michael Moore.