Because life is not all housework and academic study, although there must be frazzled lecturer women who think so. Life is also about the books we read.

And thereby hangs a tale.

I've made a programme, about popular women's fiction - known to just about everybody as 'chick lit'. Never a chick lit reader, this was a journey of discovery for me. The first thing I discovered was that some people - particularly, though not at all exclusively, its authors - find the term 'chick lit' offensive. To me the term sounds sassy and sharp. To them, it sounds dismissive.

But what it's called is a lot less controversial than defining what it is.

Some people assume that any book written by a woman can be swept into the warm embrace of chick lit (cue women authors of other types of books going absolutely ballistic).

Its defenders claim that chick lit is despised because it deals with traditionally female concerns - love and relationships, to give just the starkest examples. Its attackers say that it is despised because so much of it is badly written.

For me, the most convincing of any of the groups who spoke in the debate in our programme were the readers, amongst them a group of young women in a Dublin book club and a woman in her 50s who read her daughter's cast off books (the sheer number of readers of each book with a pink cover would make any magazine editor blush).

These readers called it chick lit, had read it and loved it by the barrow-load and saw its shortcomings. They also - and this is the crucial bit - read a lot of other books too, thanks very much.

It is this sort of reader who is so despised and patronised by the larger, snottier reading population.

Perhaps it is our increasingly lightweight culture, perhaps it is because we are more worn out, perhaps it is because we've all read enough damn books, but it does seem to me that reading - like sex and decorating - has become something that you have to do right.

This annoys the hell out of me.

Because what nobody ever, ever says is that so many of the culturally approved books are, to be kind about it, mind-bogglingly boring, if not just plain bad. But it is beyond the remit of the reviewing mafia to say so. When John Banville criticised Ian McEwan's Saturday as just plain awful - which I think it was, although I've had a few rows about that - it was as if the sky had fallen. Ian McEwan is culturally approved, which means he is a serious writer who can do no wrong.

This is most unfair - not least on the author. Even a genius has books that don't work. And, away from the realm where authors have a fighting chance of being considered geniuses, there is a whole world of pain for the book buyer. Most books are not good: that's what makes a good book so exciting.

When did the world of books become so po-faced and so selfregarding? No wonder fiction is in trouble and only brave Booker judges such as David Baddiel have the courage to say so (Baddiel's argument: "More jokes, please"). It is indeed a strange situation when the books world is dominated by fear.

Good writers emerge from every genre. Raymond Chandler is now taught in universities - or if he isn't, then he should be. But a good chick-lit author, no matter how talented, does need a pick-axe to fight her way out of her particular ghetto. Chick lit has its faults - its conservatism, its obsession with the self (which is the new romance) and, often, its glibness. But writing off its readership is madness, when instead the literary establishment should be learning from it.

'Arts Lives: Pop Fiction' is on RT�1 thisTuesday at 10.15pm