Tag Archive for 'reading'

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams on MPs’ reading habits:

On The Da Vinci Code:

Mention of this book is often suffixed by how many copies it has sold, as if sheer weight of numbers obviates all consideration of how rubbish it is. And it’s a bit late to launch into a critique of a work that makes people feel physically sick when they finish it, like a pound of strawberry bonbons, but the question remains – why aren’t they embarrassed? Why aren’t they at least pretending a greater intellectual evolution than this? What are they trying to hide? That they really prefer Enid Blyton?

On Harry Potter:

This isn’t a question of literary snobbery, of failing to understand the joy of an undemanding read. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve been working; if you can find pleasure and, more importantly, diversion in a book that has been written with deliberate preteen simplicity, a very low level of ambiguity and an emphasis on dog-level clarity (Yes! No! Good! Bad!) then you are not very bright.

I’ll get some stick for agreeing, I’m sure, but The Da Vinci Code was a poorly written novel. The Harry Potter movies have (so far) been light-hearted fun, but a couple of hours slumped on the couch watching an easily-digestible film is a very different notion to wading through several hundred pages of a children’s book. Perhaps this is subconsciously why I haven’t got round to reading them yet, despite several people’s insistence that I should do so immediately.

I left the education system with very little to show – my last formal examinations were taken at the age of 16, and I didn’t even perform to my potential in those. Yet I try to better myself, and have made my way through the various works of eg. Virgil, Joyce, Tolkien, Wilde, Yeats, Orwell… And all the while, those who would represent me – those luminaries of the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge – are reading pulp fiction and children’s stories.