Buzz
by John Wolf
I was looking at Publishing Newswire last week and noted that the titles of the recommended books to read was odd. Here's the list:
1. Radical Challenges Set for Questing Spiritualists
2. VHL Handbook for Kids
3. Fractopia
4. New Mystery Examines Women's Oppression in Saudi Arabia
5. The Iron Dragon Book Series Returns
6. Abducted Dreams (about kidnapped children)
7. From Your Wallets to Their Pockets
8. The Charles, A River For All Seasons
9. Under Nuclear Attack
10. How to Protect Your Family's Assets from Devastating Nursing Home Costs: Medicaid Secrets
11. It is never too late for a second chance at love
12. Wham Bang Comics Debuts The Legend of Night Owl
If these topics are what publicist think are going to be hot sellers, call me groaning with belly-laughs. Am I suppose to know what a VHL is? Is that a new venereal disease? Turns out that stands for Von Hippel-Lindau tumor suppressor protein. It's a protein that causes cancers. Yummy reading. Shouldn't that be VHLTSP? We are now contracting contractions.
Fractopia sounds like a type on Mexican food, but turns out to be a book of pictures featuring fractal art. Not exactly reading, just images.
A big book on the wonders of the Charles River is not in good taste. Taste and the Charles river should even be in the same sentence. That poisonous body of water is the only one in the world I think you could actually walk on, it's so polluted.
Is it me or are these titles anything but depressing. I don't think these titles reflect anything the public wants to read, at least I hope not. Where's the dramas, the love stories, the uplifting stories about good triumphing over evil?
Okay, I'll give you credit for the Wham Bang comic book. That, at least, is a success story of boy starting his own comic book company, and his stories are loved by thousands, and who knows, millions tomorrow. But, even his title is missing a word to make it grammatically correct.
None of these titles say literature to me. This is the newswire's books to bookmark, run out and see if you can get a copy before they are swept off the shelves by eager buyers. Here's some more winners:
1. New Book Exonerates Jefferson in DNA Controversy
2. The Unbearable Sadness of Zilch
3. Defense of Free Speech and International Rights
4. Living in Style in Spite of Needing Long Term Care
5. Thirty Minutes or Less on How to Accomplish Everything One Desires
Please—how can you take this seriously? We have books that counter-attack books sold last year. We have endless books ragging on the ills of society, misery of the elderly, and how to get everything you always wanted that your neighbors always get and never you do, gimme, gimme, gimme.
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This is a sad testimony to how desperately our nation needs the independent author to step in and fill this gap of literary tripe with actual literature. The craft of writing deserves better than this. Libraries will be filled with this junk, because it will be in the Bowker catalog, coming from major publishers. Wow, there has never been a better time for good self-published authors to make a difference.
Of course, there are other lists of book recommendations that include all your favorite commercialized, serialized, series of stories from authors (and their many co-writers) that sell millions of the same story packaged differently for next months sales expectations that target the weary traveler that grabs a book to melt away the hours on long airplane trips.
I can't wait to watch a frustrated techno-nerd business elite on my next trip juggle between an iPhone, iPod, mini-computer, Kindle reader, cell phone, and one of a dozen headsets, ear-speakers, or bugs to decide on how to read an ebook.
No, it's high time we get back to basics and provide the public with fun to read stories that improve the readers outlook on life and come in a traditional paper binding, something that smells like a book, feels like a book, and has worthwhile prose, so that the tome will adorn a bookshelf in a home and not end up in a recycling plant.
Surely there is air time for information and stories that inspire, develop the mind to think, not drool. Our hip-hop, zip-top, plastic world of humming, buzzing, electronic blasting has turned our gray matter to white paste. We may have to start with the Peace Corps to come into American cities and rebuild the broken down schools, place a real book into the hands of pie-eyed children, desperate to learn the truth. We need to slap the crack-smoking moron's weed out of their hand and lay a book in it's place.
Maybe it's time for the orator to make a comeback. It may be people don't read, because they can't read. For the kind of stuff that is being peddled by major publishers, it screams out—save us!
We don't have to go very far to be in a ghetto state of mind, depressed, and wanting for a stimulating and interesting read, if these lists keep appearing as must-have books of the month.
You go, indie writer! In fact, the writing is on the wall. Put it on the page and let's take back the readers from these demented sellers of snake-oil treatises of human misery. We can do better one syllable at a time.
No time for the passive voice, be grammatical and express yourself.
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John keeps the kennels clean at the Fox&Quill Hunting Club. Move along. There nothing to see here. |
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John Wolf |
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