The end-of-year list of bestsellers published in the Guardian Review makes depressing reading. As John Dugdale's accompanying commentary shows, only four or five serious novelists make the top 100. Ian McEwan's 2001 Atonement makes number 13, with 376,697 copies sold, presumably on the back of the success of the film adaptation. There is only one serious work of non-fiction - Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion at number 15. As Dugdale notes, "The earnest offerings feted in broadsheet books sections are simply invisible - no biographies, no science, no general history."

I am reading Doris Lessing's Nobel-winning speech, contrasting the desperation for books in Africa, where schools barely have enough equipment to get by, and her experiences speaking at "a [boys'] school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know". After the talk ("I do my best. They are polite.") she asks the teachers about the library. "You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."

"Yes, we indeed do know how it is," she continues. "All of us." I wonder if it is the same North London school that I went to, with a well-stocked library in a pristine modern building; a library I sadly barely used. Lessing argues that cultural illiteracy is rife, and that the internet is to blame: "How are we, are minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc."

The backlash to these comments was predictable, especially from public intellectuals whose primary medium is the internet. What does this old woman know about the internet, they asked? Blugging indeed. There was also the argument that it has always been thus. To this Lessing responds: "It is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education."

Touching on this topic in previous articles, I've often been accused of snobbery. To run the risk of being accused of the same again, it is clear that the end-of-year bestsellers list is yet another sign of the dumbing-down of public culture, the consequences of which may yet prove to be catastrophic. What else can be said of a list in which one author's sales (we don't need to name her) do better than the rest of the top 10 combined? Where a new novel will get on to the list if it has received the endorsement of the Richard & Judy book club? A list with barely an entry from a small, independent publisher. A list with only one serious work of non-fiction.

The real snobs are those who think it's deluded to dream of change. Dugdale notes that winning the Booker Prize wasn't enough to get Anne Enright's The Gathering into the top 100. For some reason people think winning a prize devoted to serious modern literature is shorthand for "poncy". But The Gathering, which is an absolutely first-rate novel, isn't particularly difficult. OK, it's not the most happy of reads, but its 261 pages contain more wisdom about life and relationships than every single Harry Potter book.

It's one thing to diagnose the problem, quite another to solve it. And I don't know the answer. Even so, we would be wrong to dismiss Lessing for pointing an accusatory finger at the internet. There is no doubting that the rise of the internet has brought numerous advances in the field of communication and knowledge. But it's also been a double-edged sword. It has encouraged superficiality and inanity. The noble sentiment embodied in Comment is free, for example, shouldn't mean "comment on everything". Reading and knowledge are humble, quietist activities, ones that do not need to be constantly shared. Serious reading is good for us. It can even - as Blake Morrison writes this week - literally save us. With a New Year, maybe we can all resolve to read more seriously, and to encourage others to do the same.