Books are for worms

When are magazines better than books, asks Dr Saumya Balsari this week.

This week, Victoria Beckham apparently made a startling confession: "I've never read a book in my life," she is reported to have admitted to a Spanish magazine. If she had been a publisher, perhaps no-one would have paid much notice, but as she is the wife of an iconic footballer and role model to millions of young people around the world, everyone does.

But why all the fuss just because she is unlikely (you never know, though) to win a Booker Prize, join a knitting bookclub, or order bespoke teak bookcases for the wall-to-wall panelled library? Shall we regret that she will never be spotted curling up with a book in a nook by the brook? So what if she never visits a bookshop, but frequents Bond Street designer shops instead, is unlikely to collect £1 book tokens for her children on World Book Day, make friends with booksellers, or know to what end bookends are used?

Clearly, books are for the bookish. Bookmakers, for instance, do not read books for a living. Sportsmen and women know offences on the field are bookable, and play by the book. Some people even cook the books, and others are in good or bad ones, and the question is whether it is better to be an open or a closed book.

Ms Beckham is reported to have said of reading, "I don't have the time. I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines." Hilaire Belloc would have empathised with her, and wrote in 1853, "I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it." Leonard Louis Levinson, too, was firmly articulate on the definition of a book: "Book – what they make movie out of for television."

(Saumya Balsari is the author of the comic novel 'The Cambridge Curry Club', and wrote a play for Kali Theatre Company's Futures last year. She has worked as a freelance journalist in London, and is currently writing a second novel.)