For Tai

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."



-Mark Twain

I started class (again) on Monday. I'm taking Young Adult Literature and for class, our teacher assigned everyone The Giver. It's a novel about a town that has evolved itself into a "utopia." The actually giver is a person in the town that holds all the memories that have ever existed. Sound familiar...? Anyone remember a certain man by the name of Socrates? He also believed that all memories live within us. However, I digress because this isn't what I want to write about...just yet. There was something else the teacher assigned. It was to look up Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory. I remember learning about Transactional Theory when I went to MSU. Basically it states that the value of a novel is in the reader, not in the text. If a book is never read then it doesn't contain value. Ergo, if a book is loved, even if it is the worst book in the world (cough, cough, Twilight)(yes Tai, I said Twilight) then it obviously has some kind of influence on its readers. Same scenario, different result; a book is written and it contains all of the world's answers, but nobody understands it (Finnegans Wake), this book, according to Rossenblatt, is worthless.

This is where I started thinking. And, just so everyone knows, this is what I'm thinking most of the time:

Anyways, I started thinking, "those bastards." Authors have been getting away with writing shit and selling it paperback because they know what the audience wants. The novel Moby Dick was hated, it was said to have had "bad English" when it was first written. Now it is one of the most important novels in the American cannon. I'm referencing Herman Melville because he is an example of an author who didn't write for the masses. Today, readers buy anything with fangs and boobs on the cover. Here's my example of a current novel's blurb:

"It wasn't exactly an ideal first day of college, Andrea had gotten lost on her walk to her first class. She tried a short cut, but found herself in a dark dank forest. Everywhere she looked there were golden cold eyes staring back at her. She thought it was her imagination, but when she started to run someone grabbed hard on her shoulder, swung her around, and bit into her neck. When she awoke she found herself in some sort of fantasy land where everyone was really really good looking. She came to find out that, even though they were evil, they were struggling to be good. Andrea, even with her better judgement, wanted to help the vampires on their quest for goodness. She chose the most attractive vampire and started a sexy, heated love affair. Even though he wanted to kill her, and he himself had been dead for hundreds of years, they found a way to live happily ever after. Then, she got her period......and she died."

I wouldn't be surprised if I just plagiarised a novel in the teen section of Barnes and Noble. If you're reading this and you don't agree with me that there is a lot of crap on the book shelves these days, I just wanted to say, don't hate the messenger, hate the author who convinced you their shitty book held anything valuable.