And anyway, reading bad writing was like playing against a bad opponent — your game suffered as well. Every duff sentence Cal read convinced him that he himself would never write another good one; every feeble plot he speedily unraveled hammered home the fact the he himself would never contrive another interesting one; and every wooden character’s piece of leaden dialogue left him with the chilling intimation that he lacked any human sympathy himself.   – From Will Self’s The Nonce Prize

Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry.   – From Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Reward

As eschatological moments go, it ranked relatively low, but the signs were there, literally hanging in the window at my local Borders, and they were cause for concern. The banners read: “Unlock History,” “Decode the Mystery,” and “Reveal the Beauty.”

Let’s start with the most awkward verbs first. Dan Brown would.

The recent — and quite accessible — history needing to be unlocked is that many, many people have bought a copy of The Da Vinci Code in either hardback, paperback, audiobook, or special illustrated edition. There is also an illustrated screenplay, which troubled me slightly because I felt that it would make the film itself more than a little redundant, and yet it is clearly marketed as a tie-in with that other poorly reviewed yet high-grossing product. The list of related works is literally too long to print here but splits into either the supplementary nature of Fodor’s travel guide or the response model, with sample titles like Cracking Da Vinci’s Code: You’ve Read the Fiction, Now Read the Facts.

Um, perhaps the authors of this last book didn’t see the page marked “Fact” at the beginning of the book in question. I did; in fact, I saw this very page torn out and thrown away, to great dramatic effect, by a preacher during a sermon on the subject. I would have been more impressed if he had made the sacrifice of ripping it from a hardcover rather than his paperback of the Code, but it was the opening weekend of the film, and I was a guest at the service in question.

As for the mystery, well, that gets a bit tougher, doesn’t it? I’ll limit myself to the marketing campaign. The visuals for one of the posters included a line drawing of a goateed man in a skullcap posed in front of what appears to be old parchment texts. The poster mentioning beauty shows the face of a young girl in profile; it has the weathered look of a crumbling fresco painting. Why no pictures of Mary, Mona, or Leo himself? This guy looks like Nostradamus or Chaucer (sadly, my only two immediate visual referents for representations of a certain class of males throughout centuries of history) and the woman is third-rate Botticelli at best — aren’t the images in question public domain? I can only guess that the generic yet familiar quality of all this is designed to praise the growing demographic already aware of the novel and attempt to convince some of these converts to actually go out and enact some of these verbs on another text. I was assured, however, that we are in fact decoding things worth our while when I spotted the name of “Langdon” as one of the only legible words in the overlapping and incomplete sentences.

Compelled by these images and words, are we to rush in and pile our arms high with the coffee table books of the world’s greatest golf courses or memoirs of the latest celebrity CEO as Father’s Day gifts? What does one get a graduate these days? Angels and Demons is the prequel to the Code — will it do? Perhaps, but for me it depends on if Tom Hanks reprises his role or if they choose to go with a younger and cheaper star. But the real mystery is how this one book has become an appropriate stand-in for not only its endless related titles but also, seemingly, for what books themselves offer the purchasing public at Borders. Do I want to unlock, decode, or reveal? Is it hard? Will it be fun? Sounds slightly threatening but the images on the cover look edifying; I feel slightly flattered that I have heard of so many of the characters in such a big popular book, and Ron Howard hasn’t let me down since How the Grinch Stole Christmas. OK, count me in. How do I start?

And if I do where might I finish?

Here is where the subject of aesthetic judgment comes into play, but for now I will cheat and briefly defer to Bentham as quoted above. But then again, he requested that his stuffed body sit in a wooden box as an “Auto-Icon” at University College London, so maybe he should be considered an unreliable narrator of sorts.

Is the act of reading in and of itself an intrinsic good, or is any value dependent upon the text in question?

If “more people read more,” would this nation be a more enlightened one?

Questions aside of how to and who would get to measure this good or that value, is a book like the Code a “phenomenon” (according to the movie ads), an embarrassment, an innocuous cash register, or an opportunity?

Can the Code be a gateway drug? Yeah, I started with Dan Brown but then I moved on to the stronger stuff.

The concept of a guilty pleasure is all too familiar when it comes to discussing film or television. For example, the second season of Temptation Island is one of — strike that — is the single greatest thing that has ever been broadcast on television. I do have guilty pleasures as well, though; does anyone else remember Hyperion Bay?

Are we as lenient with books? Ought we to be? Besides making some allowances for genre fiction and praising our own (endless?) capacity for irony, don’t we sneer more at “bad” writing than movies or other cultural products that we find wanting?

I admit to being admiring and amused when Franzen told Oprah that she could keep her approbation and accompanying sales to herself, but wasn’t this simply because of my condescension toward what I feel to be her relentlessly middlebrow tastes? Full disclosure: I have read The Da Vinci Code but have not yet got around to The Corrections. Isn’t it a good thing that more people will read a decent book or two amidst the chaff? Is there something to be said for writing a book that people so actively want to keep turning the pages of? Dan Brown, we speak your name?

What if it came out tomorrow that The Da Vinci Code has been one big Sokal hoax? If McSweeney’s owned up to being behind the whole thing as some kind of PoMo joke, if Amis, Banville, Barth, DeLillo, Eggers, Ellis, Foer, Morrison, Pynchon, Smith, Vollmann and Wallace all were found to have written two chapters apiece, what then? Would the book still be jawdroppingly bad or would it suddenly become clever and knowing, a thumb in the eye to philistines and literalists everywhere?

Barring this unlikely event, we are left with my original problem: How good is it if the activity is the right one, but the chosen vessel is lacking in my estimation? Are there appropriate compromises that we should be prepared, willing, or even eager to accept? Presuming there is a good to be discerned in all of this, is the fervor with which a great many people are reading this book a cause for consternation or celebration? Is it just a matter of nudging my newfound reading devotees towards something even slightly more interesting?

How will beauty be revealed?

What are the limits of this renaissance of reading? Is there a point at which I should be careful what I wish for? I read the Star every chance I get and my prejudices are still pretty much intact. At what point do we lose more than we gain? I don’t know if the success of the Left Behind books has engendered a more contemplative and aware electorate in this country, do you? Let me assume for a moment that the audience for both Brown and LaHaye may in fact be the same despite (because of?) the degrees of blasphemy inherent in both works. Might fewer readers be better than more in this instance? Can we afford many more victories of this kind?

For those with an appreciation of portentous subtitles or (dare we say a lüv?) of potential heavy metal titles, here is the entire series: Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days; Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: the Rise of the Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides; Apollyon: The Destroyer is Unleashed; Assassins, Assignment, Jerusalem, Assignment, Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days.

A final note: when you are inevitably called upon to pronounce Pyrrhic … it’s /pir-ik-/.

Trust me.