You Call This Literature?

By Ashley Laframboise

Looking through the "Literature" section, I expected to find articles on Woolf and Morrison, Pound and Hazlitt, but instead I found that the name "Dan Brown" appeared as frequently as candy in a sweet shop. Brown’s earth-shattering theory is not even his own, and his writing is generally quite uninspired. I find it appalling that we let a best seller based on a juicy plot characterize the literature we believe we should to read.

Yes, popular literature has hit an unparalleled low. Fine literature, like the books in the back of Chapters, is being overlooked while we focus on the flashy pens and calendars at the front of the store. On the tables nearest the entrance are shiny pop fiction bestsellers, or anything with the Oprah Book Club approval sticker. It took almost a century before William Faulkner, only when Oprah recommended a three-volume set of his “best work”, was recognized as a valuable writer. We tend to read what Oprah recommends, or what we find at the front of Chapters, and the few of us who covet further work of an author are scarcely able to find any in the store. We all seem to crave what someone else feels is "best," because we don’t want to do the digging and thinking for ourselves. Instead, we gather bits and pieces, only caring to read the literature that the New York Times deems "Brilliant" and "Dazzlingly unique", as if they aren’t all developed using the same recipe.

Though some people are unaware, Canadian writers are out there. The most recognized of them being the ones who 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 unsurprisingly not even being considered in Chapters' "Best Selling Novels," while others like Henighan are vastly disregarded. It seems we would all prefer to read up on astrology and fashion, picking up fuzzy pens while we're at it. We attempt to escape our busy lives by numbing our brains with the unoriginal world where a beautiful young woman falls head-over-heels for some man who has some dark and foreboding secret. People crave predictable plots with happy endings, instead of reading about things that really matter. Literature is what makes us human, but if all we read is mass-market, bestselling, clichéd plot-driven books, I'm concerned about what that says for humanity.