I hate the whole universe...
I disagree entirely. I read the entire series to my kids - it was our "bedtime stories" reading for over a year, we had finished all but the last book just a couple of weeks before the last one came out - and they were just at the right age, in the early stages of elementary school, to be quivering with excitement for it. And although the first movie or 2 had come out, I insisted that we finish the books before they started watching the movies.
Although JK Rowling seems to have turned into a nasty person, she crafted the HP books extremely well for her audience - the first book was short and simple, and by the end they were much longer and darker with an interesting crew of secondary characters. And as the father of 2 kids who were at just the right age to be her target audience, I appreciate her contribution to their love of literature.
That said, the movies were no better than most movie adaptations of books, but they did kinda sorta tell the stories ,,,,
"Young Adult" fiction (aka YA) is a mixed bag with a lot of junk, and I read a good bit of it along with them. But some of it is quite good, and Scott Westerfeld also comes quickly to mind (but the movie made of "Uglies" was awful).
