Salon.com Technology | The bull in Martha Stewart's china shop

Martha Stewart's an extraordinary businesswoman, she has no private life and her husband ran out on her. And those are the facts, ma'am, case closed.

This divide in the reading public is also a place where the submerged class anxieties of American life flare up. Conversations about books are often rife with silly agendas, each speaker intent on indicating just how high (or, in the case of contrarians, low) his or her brow can go.... Such nastiness is stupid and pointless. Film buffs got over this stuff years ago; thanks to critics like Pauline Kael, it's possible to like Bergman without having to badmouth the Farrelly brothers. In fact, it's entirely possible to enjoy both.

I'm not... convinced that sophisticated readers -- the ones who can recognize and savor the formal and technical achievements of a great writer -- have more significant encounters with the books they read than the often naive readers drawn to Winfrey's club -- the ones who care most about identifying with a book's characters and their experiences. Plenty of the "professional readers" (critics, writing teachers and scholars) I know mourn the days when they plunged into books with all their hearts, rather than at a critical remove.