From Matt Haig´s instagram
Anyone who has followed me over the decades knows my thoughts on book snobbery. (It’s narrow-mindedness masquerading as superiority.) But just when it looked like it was waning and the internet seemed to be a force for good, the reverse is happening. Book snobbery is rising again. And now people don’t just disparage books they don’t like but the readers that read them. As a writer of thirty books that have had different reactions I have quite a unique insight into this. For instance, I once wrote a book called The Possession of Mr Cave which no-one read, had endorsements from highbrow writers and the London Review of Books and was nominated for a prestigious prize. I have also written The Midnight Library, which has found many readers and nice reviews but has also been called ‘the death of literature’ by one vlogger and ‘the worst book ever written’ by another. It has even - according to Slate magazine - started a new genre for people to be snobby about, called ‘therapy lit’. (It’s just a story. And a better one than The Possession of Mr Cave.) Anyway, that’s not the problem. People liking and not liking books makes life interesting. There are books I love and books I too like to think are the death of the literature. It’s cool. Less cool is the new element of attacking readers. Snobbery is not taste. Taste is what you like and don’t like. Snobbery is thinking that what you like makes you better than others. It used to be solely sexism. That is why the Brontës and George Eliot pretended to be men. Post Virginia Woolf and modernism it became subtle. Books mirrored class. High, middle, low. Difficult = good. Easy = bad. Sexism remains. Chick lit derision becomes BookTok derision. If movies can be fun why not books?Story is harder than style, anyway. Books aren’t members clubs. Books are keys to other worlds. The very act of turning a page feels like opening a door. Snobbery is the enemy of that. This is personal to me. I used to be a book snob. I did a Masters in English where I was taught that difficulty equalled value. Then I became ill and all I could read was The House at Pooh Corner. I still think that is the best book ever written.
