What is up with so much bad fiction (and bad writing) on the shelves of Barnes and Noble nowadays?
I mean every time I go to a bookstore looking for a novel that’s going to leave me with that larger-than-life feeling of wanting to go summit a mountain and stab it with a butterknife or at the very least a new outlook on life, I’m met with a bunch of space marines that are all about the size of a refrigerator and seem to be written by X, my point being that I graduated the sixth grade in the sixth grade and now get flashbacks of Sister Patricia (my sixth grade teacher) every time I take a few steps toward the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section.
I read novels to enrich my soul, but it seems like most people read them for a break from real life, hence “escapist” literature. Dragon Lance novels do not enrich my soul, therefore I am inclined to use them as clay pigeons when I go shooting (really cool fluttery effect when a shotgun meets paper). I would have no problem with them existing if they didn’t take up space on the bookstore shelf for the good novels. I’m looking for long novels that I can do bicep curls with, written with literary eloquence that most people would dismiss as “prosey” (because most people are sixth graders according to the publishing industry I guess), and teach me something about the meaning of life that I didn’t already learn in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I’m interested in things like Pychon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” William Gibson before he lost his touch, “The Worm Ouroboros” has absolutely blown me away, but all bookstore clerks do is take me to the Lord of the Rings section (right next to the Twilight section nowadays).
Another thing, Lord of the Rings. Why is everyone so hung up on Lord of the Rings? No one read Lord of the Rings before the movies, at least no one who didn’t also play Magic the Gathering and LARP in the woods with full costumes and foam swords. Instead of an epic unrivaled high fantasy novel it just feels too reeling like a Middle Earth thesaurus, I have a greater depiction of what it’s like crawling through bramble than why I shouldn’t just bury the damn ring and go home.
But, I digress. Am I frustrated? Perhaps a tad. Apparently it’s not enough that young readers have an entire section devoted solely to them that they have to absorb every other genre under the sun, makes me want to jump on their sandcastles at the beach and watch the tears stream down their faces while they tell me to pick on someone my own size. I’m just wondering who bought all the good novels off the shelves of Barnes and Noble because I’ll give whoever it was twice what they paid for them there.
I mean every time I go to a bookstore looking for a novel that’s going to leave me with that larger-than-life feeling of wanting to go summit a mountain and stab it with a butterknife or at the very least a new outlook on life, I’m met with a bunch of space marines that are all about the size of a refrigerator and seem to be written by X, my point being that I graduated the sixth grade in the sixth grade and now get flashbacks of Sister Patricia (my sixth grade teacher) every time I take a few steps toward the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section.
I read novels to enrich my soul, but it seems like most people read them for a break from real life, hence “escapist” literature. Dragon Lance novels do not enrich my soul, therefore I am inclined to use them as clay pigeons when I go shooting (really cool fluttery effect when a shotgun meets paper). I would have no problem with them existing if they didn’t take up space on the bookstore shelf for the good novels. I’m looking for long novels that I can do bicep curls with, written with literary eloquence that most people would dismiss as “prosey” (because most people are sixth graders according to the publishing industry I guess), and teach me something about the meaning of life that I didn’t already learn in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I’m interested in things like Pychon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” William Gibson before he lost his touch, “The Worm Ouroboros” has absolutely blown me away, but all bookstore clerks do is take me to the Lord of the Rings section (right next to the Twilight section nowadays).
Another thing, Lord of the Rings. Why is everyone so hung up on Lord of the Rings? No one read Lord of the Rings before the movies, at least no one who didn’t also play Magic the Gathering and LARP in the woods with full costumes and foam swords. Instead of an epic unrivaled high fantasy novel it just feels too reeling like a Middle Earth thesaurus, I have a greater depiction of what it’s like crawling through bramble than why I shouldn’t just bury the damn ring and go home.
But, I digress. Am I frustrated? Perhaps a tad. Apparently it’s not enough that young readers have an entire section devoted solely to them that they have to absorb every other genre under the sun, makes me want to jump on their sandcastles at the beach and watch the tears stream down their faces while they tell me to pick on someone my own size. I’m just wondering who bought all the good novels off the shelves of Barnes and Noble because I’ll give whoever it was twice what they paid for them there.
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