Lunchbox/Soapbox: Toni Jordan - In Defence of Trash Fiction

Who decides that some books are more worthy than others? Why do 65% of people lie about reading the classics? Does a Booker Prize sticker guarantee better quality or just a good snooze? And who did buy those 80 million copies of the Da Vinci Code? Enough of dismissing romps as rubbish, this is a full-throated defence of the popular novel. After all, if nobody’s watching, will you have McDonalds or boiled lentils for dinner?

Lunchbox/Soapbox is a simple idea; an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day.

At the Wheeler Centre we’re keen to showcase our writers as thinkers and as artists, as people with passions and peccadilloes. So we’ve come up with Lunchbox/Soapbox: a weekly space for them to sound off on a topic of their choice. Think of it as a 20-minute piece of polemic to give lunching CBD folk something to chew on.

The themes will be idiosyncratic: from pop-cultural analysis to high cultural criticism; from political grandstanding to personal mischief-making. But they’ll all be thought-provoking. Bring your lunch along to this bite-sized session.