SEX HAS ALL sorts of provable health benefits,” says John Lanchester, “but that’s not why people do it.” He’s talking – and you’ll have to bear with us for a minute, here – about books.
His point (this being National Year of Reading) is that if literature is truly enjoyable, we shouldn’t need to, ahem, bang on about its benefits in order to encourage people to pick up the habit. Instead, he says, segueing neatly from one vice to another, “We should be more like drug dealers. If teenage boys, say, are resistant to reading anything but comics or manga, let’s get them hooked on that. It doesn’t matter what starts people reading; we just need to be giving out that gateway drug.”
Certainly the author’s new novel, Look What…
