Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is 223 pages long. And I mean long. I have read every word on each of these pages to my daughter. At times I wished we had started Ulysses. Nina would have dozed off just the same, and at least I would have achieved something.

I thought it was awful: pedestrian, clankily plotted, flatly written. It reminded me of the Malory Towers stories I read as a little girl, with their midnight feasts and lacrosse rather than owls and quidditch. But, as we plodded dutifully through yet another chunk of woeful dialogue, I reminded myself that Harry, Hagrid et al have become part of an eight-year-old’s cultural world. It would be mean to deny it to my daughter. It is not meant for me.

At last it was finished. She asked for a Roald Dahl and I sneaked the other, even longer Rowlings up to an obscure shelf to gather dust until she can read them herself.

So it came as something of a surprise to discover that readers of The Book Magazine have voted J K Rowling as the greatest living writer in Britain. How can this be? She is no more the greatest living writer in Britain than George Galloway is the greatest living statesman, or Jack Vettriano is the greatest living artist. She is not even the greatest living writer of children’s books. She had one good idea that became a formula that she has now worked into the ground.

Her books are astoundingly successful and have made her a fortune of £435m. This does not make them works of literary merit. I don’t grudge her the money. I did grudge every minute I spent with Harry, Ron, Hermione and that bloody stone.

Clearly the readers of The Book Magazine disagree. Three times as many of them voted for Rowling as supported Terry Pratchett, who came second. They are, I presume, the people who buy Rowling’s novels with tasteful black and white covers, so that from a distance nobody can tell they are reading the Enid Blyton de nos jours. The type who like stories with a beginning, a middle, an end and a moral that even a sleepy-eyed eight-year-old can identify.

It is embarrassing and depressing in equal measures. By the time you have graduated from The Beano to The Book, you are old enough to read proper books, ones written for grown-ups with big words. Not to mention ideas, narrative devices and complex moral dilemmas.

The top 50 living authors, as chosen by readers of The Book Magazine, includes children’s writers Anne Fine, Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo, as well as the teenager-friendly Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, George MacDonald Fraser and Helen Fielding. The author of Bridget Jones’s Diary won more votes than the Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst, poet laureate Andrew Motion or playwright Tom Stoppard.

Pullman and Morpurgo are fine authors who can stand and be judged against the hardback stalwarts — Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro — who take other spots in the top 10. Fine writes for children of all ages as well as for adults, a rare talent. But as good as many of these children’s books are, there comes a time when you are ready for a character that goes deeper and wider than Wilson’s bossy Tracy Beaker. The Smiths (Zadie, No 33, and Ali, No 28) do this brilliantly. They write books for people who want to be surprised, unsettled and provoked as well as entertained. To be the greatest living writer in Britain you have to make the reader think, not just help them get through a long train journey or drop off to sleep.

Some of the other names make me wonder if readers of The Book Magazine actually open the handsome volumes they buy from Borders, or get as presents at Christmas. Irvine Welsh, No 21, has not written anything worth reading since Acid House. Martin Amis is No 17. His most recent novel, Yellow Dog, is worse than Harry Potter. And that is saying something.

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