Catriona Stewart

Whether it’s The Cowboy and the Lady or The Charterhouse of Parma we should read what we enjoy.

MY brain is some kind of non-absorbent mush. It is knowledge-repellent. The slow decline of capacity for anything high-brow or middle-brow or, I will be honest, anything even millimetres above the brow has been happening for some time.

I have no interest in arthouse films, or plays or non-pop music. If it has nuance it will strike the sides of the fatty acid molecules covering my neurons and slither straight off. At leisure, all I can cope with are books — and books of only popular appeal. I am not, it appears, alone. The books people download to their e-readers are different in tone and timbre to those bought in traditional book format.

Psychological thrillers and Mills and Boon top the Amazon bestselling ebooks chart. For books, the Waterstones best-read list included Man Booker Prize-winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Pulitzer Prizewinner All The Light We Cannot See. Colm Toibin, Victoria Hislop and Ian McEwan sit there too. Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which does not make the ebooks list, is top of the print list.

I am that type. The type who buys an intellectually impressive tome from Waterstones or Young’s Interesting Books then props it on a shelf and picks up a paperback from the supermarket top 20. Something by Jodi Picoult, whose pages turn effortlessly towards a comforting end. Something trashy or twee. I want a linear plot and a simple ending. I want to be entertained, not taxed. The days of Ulysses seem far off, another country almost. I would not be happy to be seen out with the companions I am suddenly mixing with.

I thought about literary choices when I read this week that every child in Scotland will be auto-enrolled with a library membership. I had assumed all school children would be library members already. But, hoorah, the Scottish government is giving £80,000 to local authorities to make this happen.

Libraries are often the heart of communities and books often the heart of lives. There is no more precious gift to give a child than the pleasure of reading. A bookish child will never be a lonely child or a bored child. They might be a slightly bullied child — it is never good for one’s school-age cred to be caught snugging on a paperback — but it will hardly matter because of all the close companions closed between covers. And so, while we encourage all young children to take up books as, hopefully, a lifetime habit, we are approaching that same habit with something akin to snobbery, hiding our haves behind our should-haves.

Why do I take Herzog to sit out in a cafe, never finished, but lap up Thin Air on the privacy of my own sofa?

Whether it is The Cowboy and the Lady or The Charterhouse of Parma we should read what we enjoy. I wonder if it is the pressure to be seen publicly to be reading the top 100 greatest novels when privately we would rather be at the Dan Brown that leads people to drift from libraries and from reading.

I might be mush now but I am sure, in time, I will welcome back Stephen Daedalus and all his convoluted friends. One day I will again take pleasure from complexity. It is excellent to encourage all children — no matter their background into the wonderful world of literature and libraries but I hope they are also supported to find what they like and what will keeping them returning for more.

Because here is, then, the real gift of the gift of reading — a friend that will never leave you but that will change and grow with you as you change and grow.

While we encourage young people to take up books, we are approaching that habit with something akin to snobbery