Don’t get me wrong. I love bookshops but with more than 100 books published in Australia every week, it’s hard not to get the impression that books are to be sold rather than read.

The publishing industry submits literature to the same market forces and homogenising values as movies, TV, streaming platforms and video games.

I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘literature’ anymore.

Literature these days is often middlebrow, realistic, sexy, pretentious, explicitly or explicitly didactic and flogged to a mass audience.

It’s sold as being ‘good for you’ because it’s culture. But is it really? I mean, really?

I’ve read cook books with more plot and stylistic appeal than a truck load of middle of the road politically correct fiction, written by creative writing students in the inner suburbs, who have jumped on the currency bandwagon.

Won’t someone think about the domestic violence perpetrated against the environment?

The surf calls.

Goodbye to all that.