If you watch The Big Read on BBC2 on Saturday nights, you may still be smarting from "an hour and a half of unrelieved torture" (David Sexton in the London Evening Standard). After all, do you really want to spend your weekends listening to a gaggle of minor celebs attempt to persuade you that their top title is the best book ever?

The Big Read, the public's chance to vote for its favourite book, is "the biggest insult to readers for years", you cry and "a howling embarrassment to any real lover of literature" (Evening Standard). Lift from Roy Hattersley in the Daily Mail and point out that some of the novels chosen "give fiction a bad name. Little Women and Gone With the Wind are the pulp equivalents of television soap operas... hardly the stuff of which Nobel prizes are made."

Take the cultural high ground and proclaim that "reading is a solitary activity... The business of reading does not lend itself to the mini attention span, perpetual gesticulation and sensationalism of television" (Philip Howard in the Times).

Admit also to being confused by the concept. "Is it just another Top 100 Greatest Ever list, a nostalgia-quickie, in which we can recall favourite moments between the covers?" you ask, nicking from Paul Hoggart in the Times. "Is it a genuine competition to establish which is the Biggest, Baddest Read of them all? Or is it really meant to be virtuously educational, encouraging us all to turn off that box and get Big Reading?"

You suspect the whole thing is just a marketing ploy. You read in the Daily Express that the choice of William Hague, Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, has seen its sales rise by 382%. He's not as popular as the comedian Meera Syal, however. Her endorsement of Pride and Prejudice has boosted its sales by 700%.

Caution your friends against placing bets on the outcome of the poll. After glancing at Boyd Tonkin in the Independent, you say that they might love Pride and Prejudice today, but by tomorrow they will be preaching War and Peace. "In culture, as increasingly in politics, allegiances may be fervent but shallow. Debate can swiftly redirect our not-so-enduring loves."

Anyway, you conclude, The Big Read - which ends on Saturday - tells us nothing about which book the nation loves the best. Better to look at the bestseller lists, as Jim White did in the Daily Telegraph. The bestselling book of the 551,175 that went on sale in Britain's bookshops last year was Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella. "It sold more than a million copies. Yet appeared nowhere on The Big Read list. Which tells you... [that] when it comes to contributing to lists of top reading matter, we appear to be no more truthful in our responses than when we tell opinion pollsters that we would cheerfully pay more tax."