A friend of mine told me the other day that secondhand copies of The Da Vinci Code are now so numerous that charities are refusing to take them any more. This led me to wonder to what kinds of uses we might put the ever-increasing tonnage of this dreary piece of literary ephemera as it reaches the end of its far-too-extended lifespan.

Here are some possibilities that occurred to me. Further suggestions welcome:

⊕ Send them back to Dan Brown so that he might comprehend the true magnitude of the hell he has wrought upon the rest of us.

⊕ Build a new World Trade Center out of them, because, should it be bombed by terrorists again, who would care?

⊕ Save them to build levees against rising sea levels (caused by global warming, caused by lack of trees, caused by manufacture of copies of The Da Vinci Code…)

⊕ Send them to prisons and make inmates read them if solitary confinement doesn’t work.

⊕ Build churches out of them.*

⊕ Use them to lure termites away from endangered wooden buildings.

⊕ Build a huge Wickerman-style structure out of them, imprison Dan Brown inside and burn it.

OK, over to you guys.


*’Cause that would piss a lot of people off.