At an airport recently, I had some time to kill. So, naturally, I went into the largest bookseller I could find in the terminal and started browsing. What I came across left me feeling...underwhelmed.
For starters, a large number of the fiction works were this "woke" crap that tries to make some social justice statement and does nearly everything but tell a good story. Characters should move the plot along; they shouldn't be the plot. If they are, then your story is secondary to anything you're trying to say. More than that, most folks read books to escape rather than be preached at.
Then there were novels covering mundane stories that I really don't care about. Okay, maybe I'm a barbarian who doesn't know good literature, but I don't need slice-of-life tales - I want something to whisk me away to a place I can't find in the real world. Yes, it should be realistic within the story, but I can find folks having affairs and crying about their children going off to college by going outside; I can't find a 20,000 year old spacecraft buried in the Amazon forest that may have sparked life on our planet.
These bookstores will only carry traditionally published work, and their stock validated most of what I've said about the traditional publishing world. There was no risk, and there was nothing to make me think. Further, most of it seemed to be garbage that a nine year old could poop out during daily writing time in school. Needless to say, I walked away without buying a book.
It really is frustrating to see this kind of...I can't find another word to adequately describe it...shit being passed off as good books. In addition to the byzantine maze of idiocy folks have to pass through to publish traditionally, this kind of puke-inducing nonsense is another reason why traditional book stores are dying. Yes, that may be harsh, but it doesn't make it less true.
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