Junk Reading

One of our team was caught last week reading a Danielle Steele romance. He tried to hide it inside a dust jacket for "The Collected Plays of Harold Pinter," but was found out.

This led to a serious discussion of junk reading, a condition as pernicious as junk eating. We picked up a popular novel the other day, and found the sugary prose instantly addictive; it was like opening a bag of Twinkies and being unable to stop gobbling.

It was bracing, therefore, to read in an old New Yorker magazine Judith Thurman's words on writers who "serve their readers junk food in sentence form with the rationale that slop is what sells, is what the American public is used to, and is all that it can digest."

Feeling intellectually restored, we were able to confidently return to our current literary choice: "Archie and Jughead Go to Mars."