May 2006 is National 'run over a hulking albino monk' month. Now a major motion picture ...

3. Stupid about pictures

Dude ... that picture of the Last Supper where disciple John is supposed to look like a woman because he has long blonde hair? I have shortish dark brown hair, I suppose that makes me a fella now. Has Dan Brown even heard of Peter Frampton?

4. Ecological desertification in the bookshops

I have made a controlled double blind (blind with hatred) study of this. The average Australian bookshop has on hand two or three copies each of a few hundred novels, and between 50 and 300 copies of the DVC, plus tall piles of a dozen or so associated "Cracking the DVC" type publications.

The DVC deprives hundreds of other books of space and resources. It kills and murders other books before they have a chance to grow. And because books beget other books, the rampant unchecked spreading of this worthless parasite means that book diversity in the future is already seriously compromised.

It should be stamped out. I wouldn't even care what books replaced it, as long as there were many of them. Can you picture how depressingly uniformly yellowy-brownish the op-shop book shelves of tomorrow are going to look?

5. It's crap and will rot your brain!

The DVC represents, to my mind, definitive proof that all arguments in favour of books-at-all-costs are dangerous and sophistical. To say, when your loved one picks up the DVC, "well at least little Roger is reading" is to commit a very dreadful mistake. Roger would be far, far better off watching Big Brother, or even appearing in it.

To adapt a “funny” about the novels of Jane Austen which Mark Twain was overly fond of trotting out whenever he could: The Da Vinci Code? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a copy of The Da Vinci Code. Even if it contains no other book.