Why books can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t change your life. Alastair Harper is a little creeped out by the language of the cover blurb and what it implies for the browsing book shopper. I’ve often had a good chuckle at the back of books. It just gets more ridiculous every year.

There is something else, a phrase rather than a single word, that also makes me shudder. Unlike “unputdownable” it is often used in broadsheet reviews, perhaps even more often in the sniffy land of the dedicated literary publication. That is the countless variations on: “This book will change your life.”

This phrase is never used practically, as in: “Your life will have a new angle as you will now have a useful knowledge of agricultural practises in eastern Europe.” In serious reviews, it is certainly not applied to self-help books, even though life-changing is what those sordid publications set out to be. No, I’m thinking of when it is applied to literature – high fiction in particular. The way a great book has to be life-changing in order to have its greatness justified. Watchmen can change your life, says Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. Jane Austen changes women’s lives, says Professor Lisa Jardine. On the 1999 cover of Thomas M Disch’s classic Camp Concentration, there is a quote from Ursula K Le Guin that states, simply and irrefutably, “it is a work of art” – which may be true – and that “if you read it, you will be changed”. There is something unsettling in the “will be”. The reader has no conscious choice but to be muddled and messed around with as a direct result of reading the book.

The phrase implies some instant metamorphic shift in the essence of our character: not just a new opinion on whether something is right or wrong, but a shift in the very fundamentals of our being. The sort of change where you’re forced to admit at parties: “Well, before I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was just plain Steve. Afterwards I’m afraid I found myself to be Stevian, the Magician of the Night.”

Thankfully, this doesn’t happen.