Truth is, Mak - I've never read a word of any of the HP books. I've just absorbed a few of the more well known names by osmosis. They filmed Hogwarts at Gloucester Cathedral, not a great distance from here, so it kept making it onto the local news, and you'd have to be dead, or deaf and blind not to have picked up some references from such a massive global publishing phenomenon.
JKR went from penniless divorcee, sipping endlessly at drawn-out coffee in her local cafe to keep warm while she wrote her first book; to UK's richest woman in just a couple of years !