Hey! How are you? Oh, you’re . . . sad, right? Is that a sad face? You were having a bad day, feeling a bit vulnerable, bit teary without knowing why, and your friend made a joke that was meant to be funny but stung? Well that must be sad. I guess. Probably. Anyway, do you like my new Blahniks?

No, I have not been hired to write a screenplay for Sex and the City 3 (yet). Instead, I’m doing some very scientific guessing as to how my small talk will most probably sound by the time I’m thirty, based on the fact that I read chick lit.

 

Yes, a new study has discovered that due to the “intellectual engagement and creative thought” that more highbrow books demand, people who read works by authors like Chekhov will (in the immediate aftermath at least) score more highly on tests assessing the reader’s empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence. In fairness, if, as reports are suggesting, the discovery could be used in rehabilitating prisoners or helping people with autism improve communication skills, then great. I’m hardly against progress being made in those areas.

 

But what bothers me is that this could, and probably will, drive a further wedge between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fiction. I’m slightly saddened by the cultural shifts and attitudes that have brought us to a place where people are simultaneously decrying the fact that nobody reads, and complaining that books that do sell in large numbers are ‘bad’.

 

Because it’s not that no ‘good’ books are being written anymore. I don’t follow literary awards very closely, but I’m fairly sure there hasn’t been a year where they had to sneak in Jane Eyre and hope nobody noticed. The best a ‘bad’ book can do is take off massively, and open up a dialogue about things like pornography, or BDSM, or fantasy series, or double standards (the skeeviness and crass assumptions that lie behind terms like ‘mummy porn’, for example), or what makes a bad book. The worst a bad book can do is have you rolling your eyes and deciding never to trust Richard and Judy again (a good rule to live by in general, I think), before moving onto another book which will hopefully be better, and may or may not be written by a man, and may or may not be aimed at women, and may or may not be pre-2000s.

 

I just don’t understand the need to demonstrate empirically that reading Gillian Flynn does not in fact bestow one with the kind of enlightenment that would have Joseph Wright of Derby itching to capture the precise moment when someone gets halfway into Gone Girl and pauses to mass-text YOU MUST READ THIS AFTER ME. And why limit ourselves, really? Why is no one proving that Mexican waves, iPood t-shirts, and Farmville all do nothing for our intelligence?  If I spent all day doing only self-improving activities . . . I can’t even picture how that would go. But it wouldn’t be pretty. And I would be too tired afterwards to empty the dishwasher.

 

It just isn’t super great that we need to defend our reading. You bought two books at Tesco’s today because of the 2 for £7 deal? I approve of this, now let’s be good friends. If you’re reading a book, that’s a really great thing. If you’re reading a book with a shoe on the cover, that’s a really great thing. If you read the blurb in Waterstones and it was about a woman looking for love and you already worked out the ending while you were standing there surrounded by the works of Woolf and Nabokov and Joyce, and you still bought the book, and you’re really excited to read it on the way to work, and sitting on the toilet, and lying in bed, and in advert breaks, and when you’re sad, and when whomever you’re waiting to meet is running late, and actually they’ll have to prise those 275 pages of Charlene looking for love in the big city out of your cold dead hands? That’s still a really great thing and I’d still like to be your friend.

Because however they may hinder our ability to recognise the emotions in a black and white photograph of someone’s eyes, I don’t ever want to sacrifice the nuanced, humorous, sensitive, occasionally clumsy or hilariously awful portrayals of contemporary issues I find in lad lit, chick lit, chic lit, and everything popular.