blasphemy, I tell you. blasphemy...

So after a longish morning at the DMV (which resulted in no license at all... did you know you needed proof of your social security number?), I found myself at Barnes & Noble, hoping that the employees had changed up the tables in celebration of Memorial Day. I say this because 2 years ago, I spent the summer in New York writing for a travel guide (Let's Go: New York City 2007).

The job, while being an amazing opportunity to write, was pretty lonely at times. I logged anywhere from six to ten miles a day trekking around parts of Manhattan, the outer boroughs and taking day trips as far as Atlantic City. While a lot of my friends initially voiced their interest in joining me for a day on the job, they quickly realized that it wasn't just eating, drinking, and cavorting for pay. I'd hit 10 galleries in a day, 3 museums, 4 restaurants, make a pit stop back at my apartment for a few hours to rest up, then head back and hit up 7 bars in one night. The fatigue was ridiculous, and no one wanted to join in (not to mention the fact that people rarely agree to venture off the island of Manhattan).

So I quickly found myself flying solo all day everyday around the city. I spent a lot of time on the subway and sitting in restaurants being completely bored since I really could only take so many notes. I lived by Astor Place, down in the East Village where I was subletting an apartment from a friend. She had graduated from NYU that previous May and was traveling that summer, offering up her place (fully furnished) for a cool $975/month. (A note: I have yet to find a deal that good for a New York apartment ever again.) She left a box of books in the corner of her room(I assume, from school), and it was only a matter of days before I found myself digging through it.

One of the first books I read from that box has ended up as one of my favorites of all time: Fast Food Nation. I found it enthralling and I have since described it to my friends as the kind of book that I would want to write: compelling, fascinating, thoroughly researched. It really is an amazing read and makes you think more deeply about an institution in this country that is often taken at face value.

Anyway, Fast Food Nation ended all too quickly, so I continued looking through the pile. Most of the books were too dense for summertime, so I googled Barnes & Noble. Arriving there at 10pm one night, I encountered their "Summer Favorites" table, which was a cornucopia, if you will, of all kinds of books. Everything looked amazing to me, but, most of all, it was the fact that chicklit seemed to have been singled out of the rows of fiction and piled neatly, albeit separately, next to more respected literature. I had an amazing time digging through these piles, and since then, I've looked forward to those tables.

Today, I expected to see them. It's really difficult to find good chicklit on your own because there's so much crap chicklit out there. To be honest, this is a genre that flirts dangerously with mediocrity, and so often bestselling authors fail to recapture the romcom magic they created in their debut novel as they continuously pump out more colorful covers to their publisher's delight. I mean, I get it. It's hard to make chicklit magic without falling into formulaic, boring plotlines, bad writing and mundane characters. Having said that, it's even harder to a) find the good authors and b) select their best works. These tables at Barnes & Noble (or Borders) make this task so much easier, so I was really excited to find some good stuff today.

So, this is the longest setup to a story ever, but I'm plodding around the fiction area which happens to be adjacent to the teen section. A book catches my eye, somewhat because of its lime green cover, but mostly because of its title ttyl. (I am not hyperlinking this because I don't think it deserves any more attention than this.) I pick up the book and turn it over; the plot is something along the lines of "a year in the life of a middle school girl", and I begin to flip through the pages. To my complete and utter horror, this entire book, and its second and third installments were written in the style of instant message conversations. Usernames and different colored fonts were all over the pages and there were insipid abbreviations that I grimace when I use - "g2g" and of course "ttyl", as you would guess from the title.

Now, I get that books have always tried to be hip and I'm sure the Babysitter's Club was contemporary in its time, but should publishers really be scraping the bottom of the barrel this hard? There is no redeeming value in these books, save the fact that some parent can sigh and think to themselves, Well, at least she's reading. Yes, OK, I'll grant you that, but reading what? Reading what she reads everyday on the computer screen when she talks to her friends. How far are we stooping as a society to get kids to read? Are we that desperate? I was in such a
pissy mood that I stormed off to the adult section only to find Who Moved My Blackberry?, which is apparently a year in the life of a man told via email. It had rave reviews all over it. I harumphed to myself, grabbed Angela's Ashes, which somehow felt a little less respected by being on the same table, and moved quickly to the escalator.

I guess what I'm saying is that books are starting to be like movies. Good movies are growing more and more scarce while the blockbuster hits are often pandering to the lowest common denominator. And, to some extent, its the same way with books. Good books aren't nearly as hard to come by, though. It's just that they have to forfeit their table space. Blackberry books get table space while Harper Lee is relegated to the back. Go figure.