Blackcatter, you read things that are appropriate to your age, intellect and stage of development. To make children read anything that *isn't* fun is to put them off reading for life. HP has enough depth in it to provide more than just fluff, but is still interesting and fun enough to keep kids involved. On the TV/films front, if you only ever took your kids to the cinema to watch Ingmar Bergman and Dogme "arthouse" films, you can guarantee they'd never want to go to the cinema!

If you think fantasy is just fluff, you're reading the wrong stuff. I can find you tons of fluff in every department of book-dom, and some unmissable gems as well. "Literature" is no less fluffy and valueless (yes, Thomas Hardy, I'm looking at you ;-) than the rest. For fantasy, think of HG Wells, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein, Aldous Huxley, etc, and then dare to say that fantasy is all just fluff...

Re your discussions of books with your dad, he was doing a good job in following you through reading. OTOH though, the lessons learnt best are the ones you pick up yourself. So rather than a discussion of "where did that monster come from", follow their HP book reading with a book of Greek myths, for instance, and they can work out the derivation themselves. Or contrast with Terry Pratchett's witches, with the emphasis on power imposing a duty to protect.

Graham.