What is There to Read?

When books become shallow and unworthy of time.

By: Gabriela Yareliz Gonzalez

      So I was reading in the October 19, 2009 New Yorker Magazine, the article/essay by Rebecca Mead about Alloy Entertainment books. Today I was at a bookstore browsing around. I sadly walked out with only a LSAT prep book but when I went to the young adult section there was nothing worth anyone’s time.

    I remember when the Gossip Girl series came out by von Ziegesar. I read the first 4 I think until I realized as Rebecca Mead states in the New Yorker  that it was life “seen through the lense of excessive wealth and absent morality” (65).

   Today I glanced at the Young Adult shelves and saw black covers, mostly with dead looking young women, pale people, and titles like “frost bite” (roll of the eyes). Since when has blood been so exciting, and vampires so adored? Since when are books about mean girls and cliques so cute? Are authors really honored when they receive mail from idiotic and hypnotised girls talking like shallow book characters they created? Don’t they realize they are helping create a generation of stupid girls that will be only interested in the frivolous and departing from anything seeming intelligent?

   Von Zeigesar herself stated she was concerned that her books were loved by girls who didn’t like to read, she stated she wanted girls who liked to read to like her books as well (70 The New Yorker). Of course girls who like to read won’t be ardent fans, not if they have taste- Girls who like to read, usually like to read because they like to learn, they like to see life reflected through different perspectives, and they don’t find that in fantasies and stories about shallow people.

   Perhaps this is just a super-vent of my part, but there is a true frustration in me.

   It’s frustrating that  in the young adult realm have people stopped thinking. Does no one care if the book carries a good message these days? Something constructive, enlightening and purposeful-looking at the shelves it seems no one cares.