Salman Rushdie out, Dan Brown in: why it's time to detoxify our middle-class bookshelves

Drop the pretence: instead of parading a love of highbrow literature, just enjoy the books you want to read

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Toughen up. It's the end of the line for soft, middle-class authors. Lefty-baiting headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh has declared that "gentle parenting" advice books by middle-class writers are sabotaging families by insisting adults become friends with their children.

She's probably got a point - most mums and dads have watched with a cocked eyebrow as a Boden-clad parent has tranquilly informed little Johnny that punching another child in the face while playing in the sandpit "might not be what they like" - but I say Birbalsingh is not going far enough. Why stop with the parenting books? Why not fillet the whole damn bookcase of toxically middle-class ideas? Visionaries such as Chairman Mao have tried it before - with, admittedly, mixed results - but this time we'll do it right.

Let's face it, the bookshelf in every Victorian terrace house with a side return extension isn't there to be read, it's there to be seen. Your copy of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens has been avidly absorbed right up to the second chapter; the Jilly Cooper hidden in your bedside cabinet, on the other hand, is so well used that some of those pages have been torn to shreds. Why the disparity? Crippling middle-class literary competitiveness.

It's hard to say why books ever became objects of show, rather than functional items, though we can probably blame the monks who spent their years copying out and beautifying volumes for nothing more than the aggrandisement of their order and the prospect of centuries-later inclusion in Umberto Eco mysteries. The Reformation thankfully put paid to that game. So now a domestic Reformation may be called for.