Thanks to Travis for the heads up that for the first time in ten years a Harry Potter book is NOT on the New York Times Best -Seller List.

What is interesting is that this comes on the same day as Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People came out with JK Rowling conspicuously NOT on the list.

So what does this mean?  Now that almost a year has passed since  “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released, is Harry Potter slowly but surely fading into obscurity?  I know it isn’t reasonable to assume that Harry Potter would stay on the Best-Seller List forever, or that JK Rowling would continually be honored for her influence on the world of literature, but this seems like a hasty fall from grace in my opinion.

More and more schools are making Harry Potter required reading so children will still pick up the series and hopefully devour it with the same zest that we’ve all done.  Unfortunately there won’t be any “between the book excitement” that helped to make the series as exciting as it was; however, we can hope that these children will still eagerly anticipate the beginning of each new book as they finish the last one.

But one has to wonder how many new adults will start reading  the books at this point. Have we come to the end of the mature examination of this series?  Adult fans of the Harry Potter series were forced to analyze the books prior to the release of each one.  In order to get the most out of the series, we spent hours pouring over the books to look for clues and hints to what was going to come.  This won’t be the case anymore.  Analysis will be all but unnecessary and this saddens me the most.

So now we can only hope that either JK Rowling will somehow decide to continue the Harry Potter Series or hopefully the next JK Rowling will emerge sooner rather than later.