It is a curious thing that you are now just as likely to find a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a second-hand bookshop as you are to find a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It reminds me of the comedian Stewart Lee’s joke that, considering the current condition of the literary world, the man who is said to have read all the books in the world is no better off than the man who has read nothing at all, which is a fantastic inversion of Mark Twain’s observation that ‘the man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.’