Let’s come out of the Kindle closet and reveal what we’re really reading – The Guardian

There’s a gulf between what we are seen to be reading and what we’re really reading. “Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

T hey British reading public are a bunch of hypocrites. A recent list of Waterstones top-selling paper books or 2015. Compared with the top 20 eBooks Purchased from Amazon in the same period, HAS revealed the gulf between what we are seen to be reading and what we’re really reading. The real book versus ebook list is like seeing Dorian Grey’s public face right up against his portrait.

While on paper we dole out our wages to prop up the careers of Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan and Richard Flanagan, what we read on our Kindles is very different. We’re American like winos, hiding our cheap, nasty, yet oh-so-satisfying liquor in brown paper bags – or the dead gray plastic or a Kindle. We sip fine literary wine in public and neck any old drain clearing hooch when, we’re left to our own (e-reading) devices: harrowing first-person accounts of abuse, marshmallowy love stories, gritty killings, true crime, contemporary commuting -based psychodramas with “girl” and “train” in the title.

We like our fictional characters to be multidimensional (except for Ana Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey, who’s as thick as a post), but as readers we remainning resolutely two-faced. I’m not surprised, though. Who would not be desperate to find out the ending or Dare She Dating Again? by Amy Ruttan, in the Mills & amp; Boon Medical Romance line? It’s about a widow, – a paramedic turned air ambulance pilot – who falls for her hunky trainee. Genius

Related:. The Girl on the Train tops Amazon’s UK ebook sales this year so far

And right now in the Amazon Kindle top 100 I am excited to see Stone Deep: An Alpha Bad Boy Romance by Tess Oliver and Anna Hart at number 86, and Cover Model by Devon Hartford at number 89. Both feature striking cover images of nameless, faceless, oiled beefcake – and, no, I ‘ m not talking about a late-summer barbecue platter from Lidl.

Meanwhile, copies of untouched prize-winning novels languish on our shelves, impressive but remote, like an exhibition of Elizabeth Taylor’s evening dresses. The hardbacks are what we feel we ought to buy, or better yet give as gifts, How many followers show our high-mindedness while Ensuring That we pass the reading burden on to someone else.

We tout our beautiful Edwardian- green Virago Classics or zingy orange Penguin Classics, giving a little eye-sparkle of recognition to the other person on the train reading That year’s much-Admired novel-that-proves-the-novel-isn’t-dead. We pay for hardback editions or thoughtful, exquisitely written meditations on something or other, firing-which years to write.

But They only take a few seconds to shelve and forget. What we really responded to was the old kiss-kiss-bang-bang, the thrill of the penny dreadful, the glitter of the music hall, the big-screen swoon. Well, we yearn in our imaginations; perhaps not in life, where kiss-kiss etc would disrupt the school run. Your Kindle library is like your personal web dark, the place where your basest instincts and Truest, rawest, subconscious Urges settle like slime at the bottom of a lake forbidding. Indeed, Slime at the Bottom of a Forbidding Lake is the title of my forth coming enovel, How many followers I am generously releasing on to the market for 99p, complete with authentic spelling mistakes, a cover image ripped from Shutterstock and the promise of a sex scene on every page That does not have a murder on it.

The real book versus ebook list is like seeing Dorian Grey’s public face right up against his portrait

Let’s embrace the truth. In our hands we have highly wrought prose about highly wrought characters and Their personal, political and cultural issues. In our heads it’s all bums, willies, magic amulets and blood-soaked corpses. I think it’s time to come out of the closet and admit the Kindle strain or Maintaining a double life. Time to upload venerable and worthy works on to our e-readers, place them care fully in a drawer and forget about them, then hit WH Smiths at Heathrow Terminal 5 and go crazy buying what we really want.

The fine literary novels can wait for our retirement years, When natural resources will be low and we can burn them for fuel. In the mean time, we need to liberate ourselves, reclaim the misery memoirs, overripe pseudo-medieval swords and sorcery bunk and PG-rated romantic fantasies, and flash That trash with pride.