If the poll is, indeed, accurate, though I hesitate to take phone-in and internet polls seriously, then we have clearly missed a trick. And the stories we have been told about people’s reading habits (that serious writing is in trouble, people read only pulp, and the younger generation takes fright at the sight of anything more serious than Da Vinci Code, etc.) are a lot of nonsense. In which case we owe readers an apology; and should salute the under-35s who voted for Midnight’s Children.
For a book that doesn’t tick any of the right boxes in terms of popular taste to have won such an overwhelming mandate from the public flies in the face of all our assumptions about what people like to read. Indeed, Rushdie himself was surprised to hear the news of his win. He said he was “astonished” that Midnight’s Children was still “interesting and relevant to people who were not even born when it was written.”
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3:45 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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