In the Guardian Book Blog section of their website, the newspaper has just published an article concerning the ‘69’ theory, (no, not the one half of you are now imagining), the OTHER theory, created by Marshall McLuhan (the Canadian academic).

He said, the way to decide if a novel is any good and worth reading, is to read the 69th page. The Guardian author of this article set out to test this theory, reading books like Don Quixote and The Da Vinci Code. Their findings were varying with each text.

So, as a dedicated first page reader, this new concept intrigued me, and in the next few weeks I will be investigating this concept myself. I will read the 69th page of a variety of novels and report back whether, based on this one page, I would buy or bin this book (ok, not bin in, place it safely back on the self for someone else to purchase).

Let’s see if 69 will be my magic number!