Not if World Book Day has anything to do with it. Today sees the launch of a “spread the word” campaign. You can pick up a postcard in any bookshop and send a friend a recommendation of a favourite book. Choices can be as amusing as they are revealing. Michael Howard recently revealed that he had wooed his wife with Tender is the Night. Kimberley Quinn once declared her favourite novel to be Father and Son; and George Bush, apparently, has recourse to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But, more than that, personal recommendation is believed to be responsible for some 90 per cent of all purchases. It was word-of-mouth rumour which turned The Da Vinci Code into a runaway bestseller and which was responsible for the unexpectedly soaring sales of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. But are these wildfire book fads a good thing? People are interested in what other people are interested in. And soon, every Tube-train commuter is hidden behind an identical dust jacket.

If we are all reading the same thing, then we are all thinking the same thing. And the purpose of World Book Day — extending across some 30 countries — is surely to expand our horizons. So try not to pick up your postcard and scribble Harry Potter, or pretend, as almost a third of the nation in one poll once did, that Catch 22 is your favourite novel. And do not rely on the bookshop window to jog your memory. Such displays are aggressively commercialised territories.

Instead bear in mind the words of Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary is so praised for its formal perfection. You should read not merely to be amused or instructed, he said; you should read “in order to live”.

My recommendation on World Book Day is The Secret Agent. I reread it recently and was chilled by the prescience of literature’s first portrait of a suicide bomber, the anarchist “Professor” who wanders the city saddled up with explosives. This is a man whose power resides, Conrad says, in “the terrible simplicity of his idea”, in the fact that he depends upon nothing but death “which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked”. Alternatively pick up a copy of the literary quarterly Slightly Foxed. You can find it, like the sweeties in a supermarket, at the counter of the bookstore (or else take out a subscription: 0207-549 2121). Its recommendations are wide ranging, often quaintly intriguing, and they come in the form of little essays that can be delightful to read in their own right.

• BEFORE we were readers, we were listeners. Our earliest literature was taken in aural form. And many of today’s World Book Day events — from the knee-bouncing of babies to aboriginal storytelling — will be harking back to these roots. I went to the Barbican the other day to listen to two of Britain’s finest storytellers — Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden — recounting the Iliad, the tale of that great quarrel from which all Western literature springs. The seats were uncomfortable. The presentation was basic. But the hours flew by. These two men had to do no more than tap into the ancient power of the spoken word to hold an entire audience in their thrall. A veil of typescript fell from my eyes.

  I saw Helen in all her intoxicating beauty standing amid the bloody chunks of a slaughtered stallion. I saw Achilles aglitter in gold armour before his black ranks of myrmidons. I saw banquets and voyages, armies and oceans, battling heroes and ravening gods — all conjured out of thin air by a voice. Film is often thought to be a threat to literature. But the images that billowed and faded in that darkened auditorium were quite different from those that unspool across a screen.

  I could put my hands in front of my face and the pictures would not vanish. They were inside me. They belonged to me. They were part of the history of the whole of human life.

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