Aside from a few John Grisham novels, and a few more Tom Clancys, I've never been much of a middlebrow fiction reader. It's not out of snobbery; I just figure, with so little reading time at my disposal, how can I justify a quickie beach read when the bookshelf groans with unread classics, not to mention contemporary literary fiction?

Compared to movie consumption, reading time is scarce. It takes a deliriously mindless two hours to catch the new "Die Hard." But, at least in my case, it takes a couple of days to get through even an airport paperback.

Then there's the near certainty that I'm not missing all that much. A friend who's in a creative-writing master's program and I were talking recently about the abortion that was Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code": careless nonsense such as, "Walking towards the faucet, he splashed his face with water." Er, not until you got to the faucet, could you have splashed your face.

After reading this, though, I might have to rethink my strategy. In his profile of thriller writer Harlan Coben, New York Times reporter Eric Konigsberg relates that he found himself in a state of "twitchy agony" whenever he was diverted from finishing a Coben novel.

Coben's might not be the most felicitously written stories, says Konigsberg, but a novelist who's that physically compelling must be doing something right.

Right?

(On a similar note, here's Ross Douthat on a certain "Harry's" literary reputation.)