Can't put it down?

For those of us who suffer from the occasionally embarrassing condition almost certainly known as xenagorabibliomania - an obsessive curiosity about the books that strangers read in open spaces - then this summer's heatwave has been a disaster: we weren't able to walk five yards without seeing a head half-obscured by an intriguingly unlikely paperback. In the last month alone, I have spotted a beautiful young woman reading a copy of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida outside a Starbucks in Islington (I know, I know - what else could one expect, in a borough where you can always find an emergency semiologist but never an emergency plumber), and a man in a vest reading a battered history of English prisons at the Gospel Oak lido. Sometimes it's as much fun trying to fathom out a person's relationship with a book as it is to contemplate the mysteries of his or her marriage.

Nobody in the pictures we took is actually reading Chris Anderson's business book The Long Tail, which argued that in the internet age there is a lot of money to be made from selling single copies - one here, one there - of the books, albums and DVDs that never appear in any sales charts: 25% of Amazon's book sales, astonishingly, come from outside their top 100,000 bestsellers. But our readers certainly reinforce Anderson's point. Who'd have thought that in a random sample of a dozen or so people, there would be as many people reading Gogol in Italian translation as there would be reading Dan Brown - and that even the solitary Dan Brown reader (and we can only pray that he finds someone with whom he can share his enthusiasm) would be stuck into one of the earlier, funnier books in the Brown oeuvre? How many of us had heard of Debra White Smith, or Karen Brown, or the other Geoffrey Archer, all spotted, all being read? For the record, none of these books features in Amazon's top 100, and several - Smith, Karen Brown, Peter Alliss, Hilary Bonner - are indeed outside the top 100,000. On the day I looked, Smith was ranked at number 377,348. If you really have nothing much to do this weekend, try naming 300,000 books; it's not as easy as it sounds. Nobody could accuse these readers of following the herd.

Ah, but are these people reading Literature? One doesn't want to judge these books without having read them, but The Thorne Maze is apparently one of a series that reimagines Elizabeth I as a kind of regal Miss Marple, and Reason And Romance, inexplicably, features a leather-bound copy of Sense And Sensibility on the cover. (Reason And Romance is, Amazon explains helpfully, part of the author's "Austen" series.) So the answer to the big question has to be a resounding yes. Smith's novel is literature by association, and The Thorne Maze, with its ingenious historical reconstruction, possibly in, say, the I, Claudius mould. Nobody, surely, can have any complaints about Gogol, Hart Crane or Rushdie, all present; even the Rushdie reader's companions are contemplating, with their eyes closed, the wisdom of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novellas. Even Peter Alliss, if you think about it ... No. You're right. There is probably no case to be made for Peter Alliss, unless you wish to argue that he's really a sophisticated satirical creation. (Don't you love it, by the way, that Dave Pope, taking on Alliss, is the only reader who owns up to finding his book a bit of a struggle? Dave: what you read is entirely your own business, but I'm not sure how many eternal truths you're going to find in the autobiography of a golf commentator. So if you're not actually enjoying yourself, maybe you should think again about "ploughing on".)

It matters to some, of course, this business about whether people are wasting their time reading books that could be dismissed as mere entertainment. Harold Bloom famously declared he'd rather children read nothing at all than read Harry Potter, and only a few weeks ago, a columnist on this very newspaper "reluctantly" came round to this way of thinking, in a piece lamenting the "sub-literate drivel" of The Da Vinci Code. "It's not just that you read, it's what you read that counts," said another Guardian writer, lamenting the sub-literate drivel he saw being read everywhere.

One fears that these stern custodians of our intellectual health might be unimpressed with some of the reading matter on show, to which one can only reply: give us all a break. It was a summer in which reading was probably the only aerobic exercise most of us could contemplate; we wanted to leave our sweaty selves behind. And if the writers taking us there did so in prose that fell short of Jamesian standards, well, we could forgive them, in the unlikely event that Jamesian prose was what we were after in the first place. We read to learn, sometimes; but also to feel, or to kill long train journeys painlessly, or because we're waiting for someone, or because we want to lie in the shade on a sunny day and be absorbed by something other than the things that are troubling us, or because we're lonely and we want the company. There are, in fact, probably as many reasons for reading as there are books, which is why those who choose to concentrate on a novel's literary merits and demerits will always be mystified and occasionally enraged by the apparent perversity of the reading public.

The slow, sad death of the book has been talked about so many times that it still seems miraculous, our determination to read whatever we can get our hands on wherever we can. These last few months, readers have seemed less like some rare exotic flower that needs marvelling at and nurturing; rather, they have been everywhere, shooting up in every open space, like a tenacious, uncontrollable, but actually rather beautiful weed. So who's for digging them all up? Harold Bloom, maybe, but not me.