The worst excesses of the Saintly Reading Cult 

I read a lot of fiction. I always have. It’s not unusual for me to have three of four books on the go at the same time, which I read in rotation, a chapter at a time. I say this not as a brag. It just is. I do it because I really enjoy doing it. The fact that it might seem like a brag leads me to my point: there is nowadays an air of saintliness about reading, particularly reading fiction, that is very irritating. 

A publisher has just slapped a trigger warning on, of all things, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse – and not for any specific reason, but just because it’s old so there’s probably something ‘wrong’ in it, somewhere. This follows the recent tradition of warnings and rewrites by the hallowed class of sensitivity readers, the monks of the new intersectional religion. 

Yes, they will preserve culture, but there will be notes appended and bits removed, in much the same way as translators once left the supposedly shocking bits of ancient texts untouched in the original Ancient Greek or Latin.