Brand new blogger's literary rant!

Hello Cyber-World!  I'm taking the plunge!  Not the Nestea plunge as so many of my peers will recall, but the plunge into the world of everything bloggish!  I'm so new at this, I figure I will do SOMETHING wrong, crass or against the Cardinal Rules of Blogging and receive a virtual slap on the wrist, but I'm going for it anyway!

Below are my thoughts from a recent visit to my local bookstore {omitting name of bookstore for fear of being accused of product placement, name-dropping, gerrymandering or other fancy named terms.}

After this trip, I am not a happy camper right now about the trend of literary entertainment.  It's certainly not the fault of the bookstores, as they are a business out to make money like any other business and would sell books about blisters caused by subway platforms if they would sell.  The bookstores are simply answering the call and demand of our society and that's where my issue begins.  The world.  (nice to start small, isn't it?)

Although I read a variety of books, my favorites fall in the genre of Christian fiction - namely Christian suspense and thrillers.  I love writers like Steven James, Ted Dekker, Frank Peretti, Tim Downs and Mike Delosso.  I love the concept of murder mysteries, good vs evil, crime doesn't pay - all without having to have the F-bomb dropped on me on every page or hearing the intimate details of who's sleeping with whom and how!  These authors have had me laughing, crying, and most of all - in utter fear more often than not.  Love 'em!

So....I went to the Christian fiction section of The Large Bookstore and saw the "newly revamped Christian fiction section."  The books were all facing forward, not spines out, so there were less than HALF of the normal number of  titles.  It had been shrunk down to one section, not even both sides.  I was so disappointed, I decided just to go home and look online.  As I started to walk out of the store, I passed by the "Teen" section.  Wow.  I was reminded again of how different today's world has become.

If you haven't looked in the "teen" section lately, it is just down-right depressing.  It is dark, dreary, macabre and WAYYYY too grown-up.  We've gone from a time where people were shocked and in an uproar at Charlie's pants being undone in Flowers for Algernon, to a world where our teens - I won't even say "young adults" because I don't believe that 13-16 year olds are close to being young adults - are reading things about flesh-eating zombies, vampires who drink blood, drug addicts, rape, and more.

I realize that our kids today aren't always as enthralled by some of the classics that we might have been, but WHY NOT?  Because we have allowed our kids to become so desensitized to so many things that they seem to crave the macabre, shocking and utterly dark topics and concepts that would've straightened my 1986 hair perm!

I passed one end cap (not actually in the teen section, but the main aisle) where they had seven different volumes of the Walking Dead series (Flesh-eating zombies if you're new to this lovely title).  SEVEN volumes.  On a special end cap display.

This is, of course, just another example of the change in our society over the years.  We are throwing around "freedom of press" (something I celebrate and support happily right now!) as an excuse for shock value.  Unfortunately, it's NOT shocking a lot of people.  They like it and buy it.  If people buy it, it sells, and here we are in a continual loop that's like a snowball rolling down a hill.  It gets harder to shock people, so the writers get grosser, gorier, and WAY more away from what we USED to think of as a societal "norm."

I realize that adults have EVERY RIGHT to choose what they want to read and we all have different tastes.   I do support that.  But are there really that many more people out there that would like to read about flesh-eating zombies than a good "whodunnit" with an FBI environmental criminologist or a forensic anthropologist?  And even some of these books push the limit occasionally in the graphic depictions of some topics, perhaps to "stay with the times."

Our hunger for shock value has not only grown, but it takes much more to shock us.  Food for thought.

The desensitization of America is evident just by walking through the teen book section. The whole store, really.  Try it.  See what you think.

Amy

Note:  If you are interested in any of the books/authors I have mentioned above, I will include them below....minus the flesh-eating ones.

Steven James  www.stevenjames.net   (Start with the Patrick Bowers' series.  Book 1 is 'Pawn.') Note about his Bowers' series -  Language is fine, but depiction of murders can be very graphic.
Tim Downs  www.timdowns.net (Love the Nick Polchak series.)
Ted Dekker  www.teddekker.com (He has quite a variety.  Ask me for my favs!)  A few of his murder depictions can be graphic as well.
Frank Peretti  www.frankperetti.com (He has lots of books on spiritual warfare.  Loved 'Monster' - very different!
Mike Delosso www.mikedelosso.com (Intense and challenges your mind)