You call this literature? Part 3

  While looking through the "Literature" section one would expect to find articles on Woolf and Morrison, Pound and Hazlitt, but instead there is Dan Brown littered all over the place like weeds in a garden. This is not to criticise Brown but what is truly appalling is how a bestseller, based on a juicy story everyone loves to believe, delineates what people talk about, and characterizes what is considered quality literature.

Yes, popular literature has hit an unsurpassed low, to the point that Chapters, "aiming to achieve Wal-Mart excellence" has candles and calendars at the front of the store. To the point that one must travel to the very back of the store to find what they have come to buy, books. Moreover, on the tables nearest the entrance are shiny, colourful, hard-covered beasts that are covered in bestseller stickers. These are the books that are written by Dan Brown and approved by Oprah Winfrey.  We read what Oprah tells us we should read, and are hardly able to find anything by an Oprah approved novelist other than what is the current bestselling novel. It seems all that people want is what someone thinks is "best." Rather, we gather bits and pieces, as if all works were separate, only caring to read the author that the New York Times deems "Brilliant" and "Dazzlingly unique" as if they weren't all written with the same formula.

Some of us have never even heard of any Canadian writers, or at the very least, Canadian writers who don't base their stories in the mid-western U.S. in order to sell more copies. Many of us have never read anything by Atwood or Munro, who are hardly ever considered in Chapters' as one of the "Best Selling Novels," while others like Henighan are being almost completely ignored. It seems everyone would rather read up on astrology and fashion, while picking up duck shaped soap. Everyone wants to "escape." Everyone wants to read for "enjoyment," to dissolve into a world where a beautiful young woman will fall in love with some man who has a dark and foreboding secret. Have we become so passive, so hopeless, that we feel we have to escape our lives and brainwash ourselves with predictable plots, and boring characters? Literature is what makes us human, and if what we're reading is mass-marketed, cliché-driven books, what does that say for humanity?