I like a bit of banter. In life it's enjoyable, particularly over a pint or two. In print it can make a page fly.

And you know what? We're not bad at banter on the books blog.

This weekend I managed to pull my finger out and catch up with a backlog of books blog reading. To state the bleeding obvious, I was struck by one thing: the comment boards seem to have taken on a life of their own. Now in all honesty this could have turned out to be a good thing or bad thing. I had a brief foray into Comment is Free territory a while back and let's just say that those guys like their bloggers somewhere between lightly flambéed and burnt to a crisp.

The books blog isn't immune to robust, rebarbative moments and we've all taken a drubbing or two on the boards. But on the whole I enjoy reading the informed banter on the books blogs in a way I seldom do the Cif slanging matches. Take the unashamed pedantic nerd fest, the sheer delight in language, that accompanied Chris Power's etymythology blog. A discussion about Greeks and Goths in Montaigne's Of Pedantisme brought forth this cherry from misharialadwani: "Beware Greeks boring Goths." That still makes me chuckle. It's on a par with my pal Sandy's quip during a discussion about language and structuralism: "I used to be a structuralist but now I'm not so sure" (think about it).

This isn't about bigging up the books blog (oh okay then, it is a little bit) and slagging off politics blogs. In all seriousness, there is something far more important at stake here. I care about politics as much as I love books. Politics should really matter to us: our political, public lives are not hermetically sealed off from our private lives of reading and thinking. There is something unsettling - just plain wrong in fact - when I am more intellectually engaged by the comments on Nicholas Lezard's blog on Moxton Garbutt "the silent writer" than I am by umpteen discussions about issues making and shaping our world (I was just about to whip off a stern comment about Garbuttianism being the sort of nonsense that gives the humanities a bad name when I noticed the date - but then I had spent half the morning asking "Penguins can't really fly?... Can they?").

Crudely put, I get a better level of conversation on the books blog. While this is good news for books, it's bad news for politics. I have always liked Michael Oakeshott's definition of conversation as "an unrehearsed intellectual adventure". Conversation for Oakeshott is an intellectual gamble: "With conversation as with gambling, [the] significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering."

Great banter is about playing your hand well and literature often deals its characters a great hand in dialogue. Marlowe's table-turning banter in Lady in the Lake is so dry you're surprised the page doesn't crackle at the corners: "'I don't like your manner,' Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on. 'That's all right,' I said. 'I'm not selling it.'" Those laconic aces allow Chandler's noir hero to come up trumps in the conversation.

Literary banter is indeed a bit like playing poker: characters and readers have to be acutely alive to the real game being played out underneath the dialogue, an acuteness that shapes and shifts our perceptions, that shakes out a new truth in the process. This is as true for Pride and Prejudice as it is for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Is this acuteness and attentiveness to conversation perhaps why bookish bloggers can sustain the intellectual pulse of banter far better than the politicos of CiF?

Sorry guys, but no. That's way too easy and self-congratulatory. Isn't it equally true that bookish bloggers can afford to indulge in intellectual wagers and witty repartee because, to paraphrase Auden, "literature makes nothing happen"? We don't need to have it out in the same way because what happens on the page of fiction is not the same as what happens in life. There is a pleasure in discussing books that is an end in itself. Such conversation for conversation's sake smacks of self-indulgence where politics is concerned.

Socrates, however, would disagree with me. In Phaedo the godfather of intellectual banter is unequivocal that we should see each and every argumentative conversation through to its end: "If you think that anything I say is true, you must agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument you have. You must not allow me, in my enthusiasm, to deceive both myself and you, and, like a bee, to leave my sting behind when I fly away".

I think that holds true for both literary and political conversations. We need to argue more and sting less.