Back in May, I watched this year's Big Brother contestants being announced to the world. As they filed into the house, a notable piece of information about each one appeared on the screen, writes Conor Goodman
When Craig ascended the steps, they flashed up "Craig. Has never read a book!", and I snorted at his philistinism. Then I thought, hang on a minute, am I really in a position to scoff at another person's reading habits these days?
Oh, I'm tearing through the books just now. Read two yesterday. Can't work out which I liked better. Was it The Three Billy Goats Gruff? Maybe The Magic Porridge Pot was better. But the truth is that in recent years most of my reading time has been taken up with children's books, and the "grown-up books" I've read could be counted using only the Ladybird Book of Counting.
Perhaps worryingly, this suits me rather well. Reading children's books is nice. (I do have a child, by the way, not an unhealthy obsession with pre-school literature.) If, as CS Lewis said, "we read to know that we are not alone", well, when you're reading to a child, you're certainly not alone - even if that's not quite what Lewis meant.
It also offers great opportunities for dramatic self-expression. I quite fancy my Rumpelstiltskin voice based on Eddie Hobbs. And my Ronnie Drew-inspired Gruffalo just cracks me up. It's almost as much fun as singing in the shower.
But, mostly, I like kids' books because they're really, really easy. I have some standards, of course. Won't read just any old crap. I'll opt for Hillaire Belloc over Walt Disney; force my two-year-old to listen to Spike Milligan poems; and impose vintage nursery rhymes when she wants to sing the songs from Barney's Playtime. If you're going to have an infantile brain, it might as well be at the upper end of the scale.
You can overexpose yourself to children's books, though, and it gets worrying when they become your cultural universe. I once asked a mother-of-three friend of mine to describe her new house and got the response: "D'you know Postman Pat's house? It's a bit like that." I said, "sounds lovely", and meant it.
There are many good things about being a parent, but best of all is how many of your own inadequacies you can blame on your child. Feeling unsociable? "Sorry, but the kid's sick." Punched your boss? "Little Johnny hasn't given me a wink of sleep all week." But, tempting though it is, I can't blame my daughter for the fact that I haven't read We Need to Talk About Kevin or any other books of the moment. I haven't read them for the same reason I enjoy reading children's books: I'm a literary lazybones, and have been for some time now.
I'm reminded of this fact every summer. As much as the next person, I like to plan a highbrow holiday: a couple of political tomes, a bit of Anthony Beevor, maybe a biography or two. The stack starts in March. No time to read it now; throw it on the holiday pile. Come the vacation, my tower of printed matter is so high that I wonder if I should apply for planning permission.
In those pre-holiday months, I foresee my annual break as a fortnight of erudite calm, in which I am part man, part book, part deckchair. My brow is anointed by a contemplative frown, fingers turn pages with slow precision, the brain grows an inch a minute. In this vision, a wiser, more distinguished me returns two weeks later, ready to dissect the major battles of the 20th century and great issues of our times with the keenest minds in Ireland. But it never works out.
The weightiest tomes I eliminate at packing stage, throwing them out to make room for a beach towel, an extra pack of Pampers and anything else that'll let me dump most of the heavy stuff and get stuck into whatever PG Wodehouse happens to be lying around the holiday house. This year, my final tally was The Elves and the Shoemaker (50 times), and eight-tenths of a biography of Scott of the Antarctic (just the once).
I do buy books; the house heaves with them. A glance at my shelves would suggest a fine mind, schooled in all sorts of esoteric subjects. But buying a book can be like joining a gym; where would the publishing and fitness industries be without the money of well-intentioned optimists?
Is it the job? People who have to read for work (six newspapers cross my desk every morning) can't be expected to derive much pleasure from reading more when they get home. An academic acquaintance reads only 19th-century literature, always with a notepad by his side. Recommend any other book or article to him, and he'll ask: "Can I do a seminar on it? No. So what's the point in reading it?" It's not that he's narrow-minded, just that the volume of literature he is required to consume professionally is greater than the amount of reading time available to him.
Instead, he spends his nights scoffing at Big Brother. Which is where we came in, I think.
Roisin Ingle is on holiday