Turning The Big Read into The Big Whinge

Recently, the BBC hosted The Big Read - a list of Britain's favourite 100 books. The books were nominated and voted on by the public via the BBC website and local libraries. It wasn't something I would have expected to have seen back home in the States and I felt a surge of pride for living in a country where reading is celebrated and made to be the subject of an ongoing, nationwide project such as this. And, as the list grew and the votes began to pour in I was happy to see the list itself was as diverse and eclectic as the Brits themselves. Books like 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' ranked up right alongside with the likes of 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Jane Eyre'. The list gives a great snapshot of the British public - a society able to appreciate a novel regardless of whether or not it's commonly known as a 'literary classic'. In the end, 'Lord of the Rings' was voted the national favourite.

And then the snobbery started.

The snobbery is best embodied by the column in Tuesday's edition of The Daily Mail, written by John Mortimer. In it, he turns The Big Read into The Big Whinge as he bemoans the nation's choices. He whines that Tolkien's work is 'meaningless, babyish and tediously overwritten' and argues that the final list 'has revealed [our] woeful inability nowadays to recognize truly great authors'. Or perhaps Britons have simply voted with their hearts instead of their pomposity. Some people - indeed a good many of them - read for entertainment. There are times when we don't want to gain any noble insights to the human condition, times when we don't feel the need to delve into the gravity of 'classic' literature. Believe it or not, there are those of us who read for pure enjoyment, as a means of escape from the humdrum and intensity of daily life - a rare and treasured chance to retire to a world wholly unlike the one we muddle through from day to day.

His missive reminds me of people I've met who declare smugly, 'I only read non-fiction' with an arrogant tone of self-righteousness. These people are literary snobs. They look down their noses at the likes of Douglas Adams or JK Rowling and insist that the only good fiction is that which was written by long-dead authors. These are the kinds of people who moan over the fact that no one reads Shakespeare anymore and, because of it, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Oh yes, well of course! Now it all makes sense! Never mind that England has evolved into a nation of readers, let's focus on the fact that they're reading new authors and not forever lost in the abyss of 'The Classics'.

Mass marketed novels are the only thing keeping the majority of people from being totally illiterate. These are the kinds of books that get young people interested in reading. A kid reading Harry Potter today may become interested in magic, which could lead to an interest in the paranormal sciences, and that interest could conceivably lead to an interest in quantum physics. Books we read as children open the doors not only to what we don't know, but to what we want to know about. Let's be honest, a sixth grader isn't going to be able to sit down and trundle their way through a copy of Plato's 'The Republic' but mass marketed books appeal to that child in all of us ... and they, in turn, can open the door to more high-brow fiction and, more importantly, they help to cultivate and expand our own imaginations.

The only way to ensure that people do anything is to make it interesting, fresh and, most importantly, fun. We're human, we want to have some fun. So where's the harm in that? Pulp Fiction was a major source of entertainment for the plebs in the beginning of the 20th century, offering the working man a fantastic hero, bright lights and high adventure his own life was lacking. Several writers whose works are now considered amongst 'real' literature got their start writing short fiction for magazines and pounding out mass market novels. Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner were all once part of the hordes of writers offering up column inches to magazines of their day and Hunter Thompson still writes the occasional missive for Rolling Stone.

While I rally alongside those who condemn the growing lethargy of the human mind, I don't find the fault with books, but with the owners.