kooky moves for sex #842: gratuitous book-carrying
Nipped from Nick:
One in three has bought a book just to look intelligent
John Ezard
Monday October 24, 2005
The Guardian
Books are the new snobbery, according to a survey today. Social competitiveness about which titles we read has become one of the new mass forces of the era and only middle-aged people are relatively free of it.
Driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book “solely to look intelligent”, the YouGov survey says.
It finds one in every eight young people confessing to choosing a book “simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title”. This herd instinct dwindles to affect only one in 20 over-50 year-olds.
Chalk up another tic in the plus column for genre fiction: nobody carries the latest STAR TREK novelization or LORD FOUL’S BANE around to look “cool”. Or get laid.
Rugged individualists, us genre types.
