Today is J.K. Rowling's birthday and bookstores and libraries should celebrate the world over.

The Harry Potter series has sold over 400 million copies and been translated into 68 languages.

Besides wishing a heartfelt happy birthday, I want to publicly thank her for making so many millions of readers. How many children, and even adults, only read what they had to before a young man with broken glasses and pure of heart came into their world?

Harry Potter, or rather J.K. Rowling, turned non-readers into readers.

It does not get more magical than that.

Hogwarts is as vivid to her readers as the rooms they are sitting in. Possibly even more so.

Like many adults, my entree into the series was through my children. A family friend gave my daughter "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."

My daughter, a voracious reader, and I cuddled up and my plan was to read it to her. She was six and we took our first steps into this wondrous universe that begins:

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."

By the end of Page 1, we were hooked. Now, my daughter, like I, needs no excuse to read and so nighttime reading started to come earlier. Our evening sessions got a little longer. Really, is there a time limit?

Covers from the seven Harry Potter books which take dedicated readers through the lives of Harry and his magical friends at Hogwarts.

Then I would tuck her in, turn off the light and go about the evening. The next morning, my daughter told me what happened next. She knew what Harry, Hermione and Ron were up to. My daughter could not help herself; she could not wait and wound up reading much of it in one night.

But I had another chance to read it with her younger brother. And so I did. Out loud, every night. It took four years or so to get through every last page of all seven volumes. Yes, we read other books in between.

I cried when Dumbledore died. And as we neared the end of the mammoth "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" I found myself doing the opposite of what I had started doing those years ago: Rather than racing to the next page, I was savoring every sentence. I was rationing. I was taking little breaks with other books. I did not want it to end.

When we finished, I felt a little bereft. My son later shared another series with me and we all still read a lot. But cuddling up and reading Harry's adventures with them was one of my favorite parts of being a mom.

I was lucky; both of my children love to read. Yet I know some who do not - except for Harry Potter. And when I hear that, I marvel at the absolute genius of J.K. Rowling.

Yes, I love that she uses Latin in her spells. And for her birthday today, I offer felix natalis! I adore that she worked in gay characters, that people are sometimes mean and often noble, that things are rarely what they seem.

But what I love and honor most about Rowling is that she created readers and that is magic everlasting.