Entertainment Weekly named J.K. Rowling 2007 Entertainer of this Year this week. She beat out George Clooney, The Sopanos, Angelina Jolie and Will Smith, to name a few.

Rowling's feat, Entertainment Weekly's Mark Harris says, is not just writing the most popular series of books ever, not just  numbers that say "top grossing" and "best selling" and "most lucrative movie franchise ever". No, her feat is that she brought back the love of reading. In a world ruled more and more by electronic devices, cells phones and the like, we still all took time to pick up a book, a book printed with ink on paper, and, turning actual pages, we read it.

Those books are, to say the least, extraordinary. She created a world, populated it and made it internally cohesive. She carefully planned everything out, all seven books, so ideas build on previous ones. She was able to show us the journey of a child into adulthood, a world falling into darkness, to go from a mere -but incredibly well told- story, to an epic battle of good vs evil. EW's Harris says it best in his article when he says that with the books' "constant book-by-book recalibration of what their readers were prepared to absorb, they've proven unlike anything else in a century of children's literature." We travelled far with Harry, from the giggles at Uncle Vernon's fear of the Hogwarts letters, to the throat-aching simplicity of Harry's walk in the forest, the spirits of the dead who loved him most beside him. There is a timelessness to this story that started out so simply, but ends in painful, yet hopeful,  complexity.

Harry Potter was part of J.K. Rowling's life for 17 years. Now, she's moving on, working on two other books, one of them for children. We owe her much.