A team of US academics has revealed that reading literary fiction improves our understanding of other people’s emotions but genre fiction does not. It’s a piece of research that seems to me to have more holes than the plot of Midsomer Murders.

First, they showed 1,000 people a list of names that included authors identified as literary, authors identified as genre, and random names of non-authors. In a subsequent test (I’ll come back to this in a moment) the ones who identified more literary writers scored better in the “reading the mind in the eyes test”, which correlates social intelligence with the ability to “read” closeups of people’s eyes.

Now, if you pay any attention to news items about books and writers, you’ll regularly see the names of high-profile literary writers. Even if you never read anything but Mills and Boon, you’d struggle to avoid stories about Salman Rushdie, Harper Lee and Jeanette Winterson. So inevitably, those are names people pick up on.

Right away, there’s a significant problem of bias in the sample. Recognition, in terms of this research, has nothing to do with what someone reads (or claims to read) – only that they remember names they’ve read or heard in the media.

I did the “reading the mind in the eyes” test (she said, rolling her eyes). I did very well at it. I scored 33 out of 36. That’s significantly better than average.

It’s not because I’m totally immersed in literary fiction and don’t waste my brain on genre. There are two reasons. One is that I’ve spent a lifetime in close observation of people so I can write convincing characters.

The second is that I’ve done a lot of quizzes over the years and I recognise the mechanics of a multiple choice that gives you four options, three of which are broadly similar and one of which is different. Whenever I was uncertain of the answer, I went down that route, and I hit the bullseye every time.

So it seems that this research demonstrates fairly conclusively that people who pay attention to what they read and hear are also pretty savvy when it comes to doing quizzes. Hold the front page.

I have been saving my spleen for last.

In recent years, most readers and critics have acknowledged the blurring of the outdated and misguided distinction between literary fiction and other genres.

There is no doubt that, historically, there was a valid distinction. Nobody would attempt to suggest that there is an equivalence between Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf. (Let’s face it, Woolf couldn’t plot for toffee.) Those days are long gone. Novels that undeniably have generic elements also often have powerful literary elements. They’re well-written, they have strongly-drawn characters and they deal with thought-provoking themes in challenging ways.

Kazuo Ishiguro is as much a sci-fi writer as China Miéville, Margaret Atwood as Ursula K Le Guin. Kate Atkinson and Marlon James are writing crime fiction that stands shoulder to shoulder with Laura Lippman and Malcolm Mackay. The much-missed Iain Banks and Booker winner John Banville demonstrate that it’s possible to write with equal style and depth on either side of the theoretical divide.

But these academics haven’t noticed that the world has moved on. Their study sets Toni Morrison against Danielle Steel, Salman Rushdie against Clive Cussler. There is no universe in which that is not comparing apples and onions.

To take the lowest common denominator genre fiction and set it against the very best of literary fiction is an entirely pointless opposition. I’d cite Sturgeon’s Law (Theodore, not Nicola) that “90% of everything is crap”. That’s as true of literary fiction as it is of any other genre. Ask a books page editor.

Most of us don’t read to improve ourselves. We read for pleasure. I love reading. In the past few months, I’ve read crime fiction, science fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction. The ones I enjoyed, regardless of genre, were the ones where I engaged most strongly with the characters.

Good books make us care. It really doesn’t matter whether they include murderers, aliens, philosophers or kings.