The reading lists that newspapers patch together each summer are a win-win-win. You, impressionable audience, get a sense of which of the year’s books to be seen with on the beach. Our downgraded profession gets a brief veneer of cultural leadership. Publishers, ever-alert to the sound of bailiffs, cherish the fractional sales boost. There is no loser.

Except, that is, common sense. Given our finite lives, and the centuries-deep canon of literature, what logic is there in reading something current? More than 120mn unique titles have been published since the dawn of the printing press. What are the odds that one written in 2024 deserves our limited time?

Setting aside “You just pretend to like Dubai, don’t you?”, the question I most often field now concerns the books I read. Well, instead of a list, here is a rule: avoid the contemporary. If a novel has worth, it will still have it in a decade or two. If not, the filtering effect of time — which is imperfect in its judgment, but still the best thing we have — will remove the book from consideration by then. (If you didn’t read Vernon God Little in 2003, how tempted are you now?). In either case, there is something rash, something of the royal food taster, in going first. Let others take the hit.