I enjoyed the 7 HP books, I felt absolutely no need to dig deep into characters, motivations and inconsistencies. I also have enjoyed some fanfic from G. Norman Lippert who wrote a series of books (4 in all) about Harry's son James (which makes more sense to me than Severus but there ya go)... For those interested, lightweight but enjoyable reads can be found at
http://www.jamespotterseries.com/indexOriginal.html