But is it a good read?

I have given up arguing with my wife about the merits and demerits of potboilers.  She likes to read them and I don't.  I have picked up Dan Brown's magnum opus and put it down just as quickly.  The writing is execrable and the plot absurd (although, mea culpa, I haven't actually read it all the way through so that might well disqualify me from comment but, since the book has become such a cultural icon, I feel quite comfortable criticising it).  Good friends and colleagues agree with my wife and one, when carelessly challenged, spewed forth a closely argued discourse on why Dan Brown was both well-written and intellectually stimulating.  No, honestly, she did.  If only I had read the fine article by Jeanette Winterson in today's Guardian newspaper.  'There are plenty of entertaining reads that are part of the enjoyment of life.  That doesn't make them literature.  There is a simple test: does this writer's capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?'  All this apropos of the Booker prizewinner announced last night as Julian Barnes and the view of at least some of the judges that 'readibility is the key to a good book'.  Well, maybe but, as Winterson continues, 'There is such a thing as art.  There is such a thing as literature'.  Hooray for that!  I suppose what has tripped me up on previous occasions was a failure to discriminate between 'a good read' and literature.  Must be more careful with my dialectic in future and tonight over dinner I will try out my new line of attack on my family of voracious readers.

P.S. Sadly, never managed to insert my praphrasing of Winterson's argument into our table-talk.  Perhaps another time.