Potter Mania

I am prolly the only person in the whole wide world who
1. Did not pre-order a copy
2. Did not stand line in snaking lines
3. Is not in any way interested in

the whole Harry Potter new book (The Deathly Hallows). I have never liked fantasy. Never got into Harry Potter and abandoned the series after reading the first two and the beginning of the third. I am sure people have excellent reasons for liking Potter, but I was never the one for it and just can’t understand the Potter Mania. Question: Was such mania seen when Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings was first published or when Chronicles or Narnia made to the book stores? Who is the target audience for the Potter books? If its tween-to-teen, why are the books do damn dark? If they are targeted to the younger professional, why are they so damn shallow? I grew up reading Famous Five, Malory Towers and St.Clares as a child, but eventually moved onto to other writers.

Jenny Bristow from Spiked makes a point here

Okay, so it's good that children read books - and we can assume, for the sake of argument, that they could do with reading more of them. But the excitement surrounding Potter indicated just how far our expectations have fallen. Not so very long ago, it was not considered enough for children just to read books -
they had to be good books. For example, the very fact that kids enjoyed the
Famous Five led to the suspicion that Blyton was brain-rot, and the compulsion
to teach Narnia in class.

For all the original artificial hype of Potter's
literary qualities, it is self-evident that their readability, not their
quality, is what made them popular with children. Yet while Enid Blyton was
actively resisted by school libraries in the past, on the grounds that it might
distract from the better quality stuff, Rowling's equivalent has all but formed
the basis of English exams.

Would you still be OK, if your kids like Harry Potter in their twenties?