I read a lot of fiction. I always have. It’s not unusual for me to have three of four books on the go at the same time, which I read in rotation, a chapter at a time. I say this not as a brag. It just is. I do it because I really enjoy doing it. The fact that it might seem like a brag leads me to my point: there is nowadays an air of saintliness about reading, particularly reading fiction, that is very irritating.

A publisher has just slapped a trigger warning on, of all things, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse – and not for any specific reason, but just because it’s old so there’s probably something ‘wrong’ in it, somewhere. This follows the recent tradition of warnings and rewrites by the hallowed class of sensitivity readers, the monks of the new intersectional religion.

The idea that a lot of reading inevitably makes you a lot wiser is obviously nonsense

Yes, they will preserve culture, but there will be notes appended and bits removed, in much the same way as translators once left the supposedly shocking bits of ancient texts untouched in the original Ancient Greek or Latin. Which, of course, only succeeded in sending schoolboys racing to the dictionary.

I think this is just the most obvious manifestation of treating fiction with a hallowed tone. Being a reader has an air of saintliness. Reading is good for you, so you should be getting plenty of roughage and nutrition and books should come appended with a little official box listing their fat and salt content, and telling you if they count towards your five-a-day.

We see this hushed, reverent attitude to fiction in its purest form with the children’s writing competitions, the less than subtle vying for status of pushy parents with their sprogs’ World Book Day costumes. Then there are the book clubs, the ghastly staff recommendations in bookshops and on Audible for improvingly correct righthink titles based not on their quality but on the politics or, worse, the mere physical appearance of the author.

And then we have Goodreads, the source of much of this madness. Many of the reviews are written in the grand ‘I’ve been so enriched’ tone of Hyacinth Bouquet wanting to be seen chatting to the vicar. It was the Abigail Proctors of Goodreads who descended on Kate Clanchy, who panicked Elizabeth Gilbert into retracting her latest novel merely because it was set in Russia. Goodreads is where you will find all the worst excesses of the Saintly Reading Cult.

I confess I’ve got hooked checking on Goodreads after I’ve finished reading a book I suspect they won’t like. There is something very funny about people who read a book not for fun but to rate it against their tick list of the progressive opinion suite c.2023. My favourite was the contributor who compared reading Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief to being trapped in a lift with Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is doing both of them an enormous and undeserved compliment. I’ve been tempted to write inappropriate Goodreads reviews just to liven the place up. Of Human Bondage – ‘well done Somerset, another winner’. On The Wretchedness Of The Human Condition – ‘bit gloomy for a beach read, one star’.

There is everywhere the implicit assumption that reading is good for you and improves you. Does it really? Isn’t saying ‘I find people fascinating’ just a posh way of saying ‘I am incredibly nosey and gossipy, and if there aren’t any real people around to be nosey and gossipy about I enjoy reading about fictional ones’? I think a lot of reading is done for the same reason as a lot of watching of Emmerdale is done, and there is nothing wrong with doing either.

Passing time has a bad rep, as if we should all be doing something, as if passing time is wasting time and not essential. A lot of the holy aura around reading is trying to dress up a human function as something inherently worthy and status-conferring: ‘I went to sleep last night, look at me!’.

The idea that a lot of reading inevitably makes you a lot wiser is obviously nonsense. At its worst, it can leave you with a lot of knowledge, or with thinking you have a lot of knowledge, but with still no bloody judgment at all.

I can remember, just, how it wasn’t always like this, pre-internet, pre-video games. I have fond memories of teachers confiscating books of the New English Library imprint – Knuckle Girls and Sir, You Bastard. Reading was something that wasn’t necessarily twee and enlightening.

Thankfully there still remains a strain of pulpy fiction but even that often comes wrapped now in classy trappings.

Nobody talks about the actual unique selling points of reading. Firstly, you never run out of stuff, which makes scrolling through Netflix title cards feel a little limited. And the dead speak directly to you. You can read what Julius Caesar wrote about the conquest of Gaul for £2.99.

Plus, reading is immersive in a way no other pastime can get near. For better or worse, you step into someone else’s head. No other type of pastime can do that. But please, drop the reverence.