Protest

People who buy Katie Price novels in Asda are on the whole not the people who buy the new hardback Salman Rushdie in Waterstone's, and it doesn't look good for the largely middle-class, university-educated literary community to be sniffy about them.
says today's Guardian. I'm not sure this is true, and it's a bit patronising. Although as someone who hasn't bought a Rushdie in hardback since The Moor's Last Sigh maybe I can't comment. Also I haven't read any of the novels attributed to Price, though I wouldn't be averse to picking one up cheap in Asda, and although they might turn out to be Jeffrey Archer/Dan Brown/Ken Follett-style revolting trash I'm betting they aren't. I understand they were written by the same ghost as her autobiographies, some of which I have read, and they were very readable and quite funny, with the same sort of charm that Katie Price herself projects, unexpectedly; an impressive skill to pull this off in writing, and it seems to augur well for the novels. The Guardian annoys me with its attitude to literature as some sort of duty that a large part of the population is shamefully neglecting. Aren't they lucky that the rest of us are here, working away at reading all those biographies and minor European classics in translation?