There's a reason why Dan Brown sells so many books...

Reading and writing should be for everybody and anybody, we thankfully don't live in times when it was only academics and journalists who were the only ones who did so. But this still has not stopped a sense of superiority of literature critics and English professors who still pride themselves on the old classics, most well educated people hate culture unless it is high culture, and considered 'Art'. Two weeks ago Clive James wrote a scathing attack on Dan Brown's work in the i Newspaper, 'calling it pretentious' among other other things. The column was mot without some merit, and at times quite funny. But I sensed a feeling of envy and intellectual arrogance in his piece.

What intellectual snobs and academics forget, is that most fiction books are now written for a variety of different people, including those that write them. Now of course certain books have more literaturey merit than others, the same way music has more artistic merit than others. The difference with writing a book compared with music is that for the most part a book is an individual piece of work, it's more personal, compared with popular culture music, of which I mostly detest, and of which I am completely snobby about. Of course old classics such as The Colour purple and Lord of the flies should be studied in schools rather than something like Twilight.

But like the Twilight series, Dan Brown's books have a large audience because they are both accessible, readable, and have story's which are engaging. In Dan Brown's case, the books are focused on a central topic, his chapters are short and tightly fitted together, it's easy to see why they have been turned into films. The language itself, the prose, the style is by no means perfect at all, and some of the imagery used to describe situations can be laughable, particularly to those who are hardened readers, and the artsy fartsy literature academics.

But where Dan Brown succeeds, and where all authors have to succeed in, and if they want there books to be read all the way through, is that they have to ultimately be interesting. The narrative and characters have to keep the reader involved, and in the (story driven) genre Dan Brown writes in, the plot changes have to rewards you with the time that you have spent reading.

The great thing about reading is that it invokes emotions while at the same time requires you to use your own imagination. And for all of a book's substance, it has to be entertaining, whether that's with witty dialogue like Oscar Wilde, imaginative worlds and great characters like J.K Rowling, or Dan brown's narrative led mystery/thriller novels.