Countless children and adults will be reading with great pleasure “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” this Sunday and beyond — including Barack Obama and his daughter.

The books, though, have a wider audience than enthusiasts looking for their latest fantasy ride and politicians looking to solidify their middle-America-suburban-Main-Street credentials. (The fact that it’s Barack Obama himself — and not his wife, Michelle — who “handles all that” and is “the Harry Potter parent” admittedly puts a little gender-bending twist on the old-fashioned political narrative he’s constructing).

Many cultural critics are taking this opportunity to step back and ask why and how “Harry Potter” matters — and what will be its legacy.

Kira Goldenburg of the Hartford Courant interviews English professors across the country and found their reaction to the series mixed.

Many of them include the book in their courses — and a few them, like Philip Nel at Kansas State University, devote an entire course to it. Nel explains:

We can talk about theme and character and political dimensions of the work, just as we would when we talk about Faulkner. And I think that too often people fail to see that — because they think of children’s literature as somehow lesser because it’s for children.

Nels believes, though, that reading the books is much more than a satisfying literary exercise. Their huge popularity enable us to view them as reflections and conduits of cultural values. Unfortunately, Nel writes, “[T]he novels and the hype become intertwined, resulting in analyses that fail to take into account the full complexity of either.”

Ron Charles of The Washington Post, though, sees the novels and the hype as inseparable, and for him, the hype is the message, not the novel itself. In this sense, Charles believes, far from encouraging reading, the Harry Potter phenomenon is part of its destruction:

Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn’t encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands — and rewards. Consider that, with the release of each new volume, Rowling’s readers have been driven not only into greater fits of enthusiasm but into more precise synchronization with one another. Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy “The Deathly Hallows” on a single day. There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves — without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling’s, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.

If you think he’s just a party-pooper, check out some of the stats he cites:

According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, “In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.” There’s not much reason to think that things have changed. As Albert Greco of the Institute for Publishing Research puts it: “People who read fiction want to read hits written by known authors who are there year after year.”

So we’re experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity. All those people carrying around an 800-page novel looks like a great thing for American literacy, but it’s as ominous as a Forbidden Forest with only one species of tree.

Charles and others wish readers of “Harry Potter” would transition to other, more complex fantasy texts — such as Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” or Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series.

Charles argument, though, begs the question. Is the “real” reading he’s talking about incompatible — and inherently antithetical — to popular culture?

In many ways, for those of us who have fallen in love with reading at some point in our lives and felt the thrill of gobbling up story after story over the course of a summer or a lifetime, his cynical voice rings sobering and true. Most of us have bought the myth that reading is a solitary exercise — an act that scorns society and marginalizes the reader. Reading a text in such a communal, public way — as people will soon be doing one final time with “Harry Potter” — isn’t really reading at all.

But the logic doesn’t fit. If you want reading to become more popular, you can’t define it as inherently “out of sync” with the mainstream. It’s that elitism — and not “Harry Potter” — that will turn off the next generation to unique wonders of the written word.