The cheeseman
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The job I currently have involves me washing dishes for six hours at a time. It's not the best, and I don't really like it, but they pay me 14 an hour. I've been thinking about quiting and getting a new job at somewhere like Barnes and Noble.
I should've known better than to tell my mom that, as every time we walk into a Barnes and Noble she talks about how terrible and dark and evil all those new books are. Because once I told her that, she said that she doesn't want me working there because she doesn't like some of the books that they have there. Every time we go in together (which, since I got my driver's license, isn't that often) she looks at the SINGLE section that has LGBTQ+ books (the ones that are specifically marketed as such) and tells me I'm never going to get published unless I have gay cover characters.
Sorry, what?
There are publishers (lookin at you, Tor and Orbit) who will publish anything of even middling quality.
Seriously, I just wanna work at a frickin bookstore.
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Exactly! She'll say something like "why can't authors now be more like they were X amount of years ago?"
Ma'am.
Have you read Dune? Or The Silmarillion? Or The Children of Húrin? None of those are pure in any sense of the word.
Dune is horrific in a multitude of ways, The Silmarillion has multiple genocides, and one of the protagonists of The Children of Húrin is tortured by the devil for thirty years!
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I think the problem they see is that older books seem to teach things from it? Like in Les Miserables, you see Fantine has that whole rough section where she’s a whore. But in modern literature where there are graphic scenes like that every chapter and no reason for them I can see why they’d be so defensive.
But there are some incredible modern books, and it isn’t right to judge all books and all bookstores because authors have the freedom to write what they want, how they want. It’s our choice to read it, and if we do so what? Different people are affected differently by the same things.
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