It occurs to me that there are six ages of book-reading. The first is picture books, then 2) books with more illustrations than words, then 3) books with more words than illustrations, then 4)books with no illustrations, just a map maybe, or a family tree, but lots of dialogue, then 5) books with long paragraphs and hardly any dialogue, then 6) books with no dialogue, no narrative, just great long paragraphs and footnotes and bibliographies and appenixes and very, very small writing. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology is very much a book of the sixth kind, and, intellectually speaking, I'm still stuck somewhere between ages four and five. I read the first sentence, flick through in a fruitless search for a map or ohoto or illustration then fall asleep.

Of course if Shelley had released Mont Blanc as a seven-inch single, then I'd be able to recite it word for word and tell you the highest chart positions, but because it's literature, and it's actually demanding, then I just don't have a clue. The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It's just that they don't love me back.