A friend and her 10-year-old daughter were telling me recently they’d begun to watch The Baby-Sitters Club, the short-lived Netflix adaptation of Ann M Martin’s books. Eager to show I had something to contribute to the conversation, I told them I’d read the first 52 books in Baby-Sitters Little Sister series this year. After a brief interlude, in which we established for the 10-year-old’s benefit that this was a spin-off which centred on BSC president Kristy Thomas’s seven-year-old stepsister Karen Brewer, the 10-year-old looked at me suspiciously and said: “Yeah, there’s something pretty wrong with that.”

Many people would instinctively agree with her. Here I am, a man in my 40s who has for no discernible reason delved deep into a literature that was supposed to be the preserve of girls. I don’t have a daughter. My two-year-old son hasn’t yet expressed any interest in Karen Brewer and her antics. I’m not reading them for a satirical book club or for a piss-take podcast, as do Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring for their amusing exchanges on Strange Bedfellows. Other than them, I don’t know any other man who has read these books.

Let me explain. For decades now I’ve outsourced my reading choices to an Excel spreadsheet and its random number function. Last year it........

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