Blogger: Wendy Lawton
Location: Books & Such Central Valley Office
I’ve had my say. I’ve mourned the changes I sense in the publishing industry. Now it’s your turn. What unfortunate trends have you spotted? What changes are you mourning? What are you worried about? You identify the issue in your comments and we’ll all chime in.
Have a great weekend.
Bill Giovannetti
I mourn the slump in critical thinking that anyone in education has experienced first-hand. As a society, we now get our truth in sound-bytes and above-the-fold Internet pages and have little patience for an extended argument or story.
For many, reading has become scanning. Carefully crafted logic has devolved to bullet-points. We’re becoming a Cliff Notes culture and the biggest casualty has been our in-depth knowledge of God’s Word.
Or maybe I’m just an old fart.
Melissa K Norris
One thing I remember is that things will change. Nine years ago I was writing historical and was told sorry, chic lit is what we want. Guess what, historical is now back in.
I do wish the funds were dispersed more evenly between all authors, not just best sellers. I have found some recent releases of best sellers have left me wanting…. But I do love finding a new author I love. I really like Gina Holmes. Crossing Oceans was excellent. I actually blogged about it. The first time I’ve reviewed a book on a post titled Mortality.
I have yet to read an e-book, but figure I will probably get a Kindle within the next five years. Can’t fight progress, I guess.
Thanks for this week’s great posts as always.
Unnamed Blogger
I’m anonymous for a reason–thanks B&S staff–and I’m going to tell you why I fear for the Christian publishing world.
You mentioned You’ve Got Mail earlier in the week and the experience of meeting a clerk who doesn’t know the thing about books has been my problem locally. It’s disheartening to have to pray and confess sin after every visit to the bookstore. That’s why I seldom go anymore–I get too angry and I don’t need to have to deal with anger while transacting business.
I know many Christian book stores are a ministry–and I applaud them. I know there are great ones out there–and we had one in our community, but fiscal mismanagement killed it. That’s another story.
But, when I enter the store and give the clerk the name and publisher of a book and it doesn’t register on her face, I feel I have cause for alarm. Case in point:
I heard Joseph Nicoli on Focus on the Family discussing a fascinating book contrasting Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. It met the need of someone in my family and I was so excited about the book, I turned my car around and drove directly to the book store.
I asked for the book and the young clerk started typing. “How do you spell that?”
I worked through Nicolosi–or whatever his name is, “He was on Focus on the Family today,” only to be stopped by, “No, Lewis.”
I was incredulous. “C.S. Lewis?”
“Yeah. Is that Louis?”
“Chronicles of Narnia, that C.S. Lewis.”
Relief floods her face. “Oh, back here in Children’s.”
“No, it’s about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, that’s not a children’s book.”
“How do you spell that?”
I spell out Freud . . . and eventually she determined she could order the book.
Perhaps a solution is for them to listen to Focus on the Family every day, or the other Christian talk shows instead of the same CMA music over and over again, but I was disgusted. I didn’t return to the store until the next Christmas when I needed Christmas cards.
It’s not just Christian book stores–and why are they open on Sundays?–it’s the whole business world. And I appreciate she wanted to order the book, but I can get it faster through Amazon. Or, in that case, walk across the street to Border’s.
Tragic. And I’m so very sorry.
Wendy Lawton
Bill and Unnamed, you hit on such a troubling trend– the illiteracy of way too many Christians. And I shouldn’t specifically target Christians because it is in every walk of life. Does no care about the holes in his education any more?
Several years back I found I had huge holes in the area of the Christian classics. I set out on a quest to mend those holes. I spent almost ten years catching up. Not for a class but for me.
I still have major holes in my knowledge base but the good thing is, they worry me.
Where is the hunger for knowledge? People used to be proud of being “well-rounded.” When’s the last time you heard that compliment?
Bill Giovannetti
Wow, that’s a depressing story, and I can see why you’d avoid that bookstore. Booksellers should be “sherpas” thru the world of literature.
Yes, now that I think of it, I am an old fart.
D. Ann Graham
I mourn that so much of the delight of childhood has been drowned in a sea of dark jouvenile literature. That ninety percent of what a child has to pick from is either scary or depressing these days. Wholesome (such an old-fashioned word!) has had to scoot over so far for tolerance, that it has become lost in a crowd that is almost impossible for children to see over. Unless they have some knoledgable adult who can introduce them to the few bright treasures of ordinary living, their chances of accidently stumbling onto something like “Nate the Great” in the book isle of a local department store — or even most bookstores — are pretty slim.
The problem seems compounded by a trend for parents not to feel as much need to explain things as they used to. Multiplied by the fact that it is the nature of children to content themselves with whatever is set before them, we’re coming up on some second and third generation thinking disorders. I saw a good example of this recently when a mother who was constantly telling her child that nothing on TV was real (her effort to calm fears), was shocked to hear the response, “But, Mom, he’s not real,” when that same child overheard her discussing something the President had said on the news that day.
Oh, dear — oh, dear! And in the meantime, the children tumble along their brief one through ten years, “believing all things, hoping all things, and enduring all things” as best they can. Then the tables are turned. Now, I feel sorry for the parents who can’t understand why their twelve-year-old daughter wants so desperately to go to school with lips painted black and an earring pierced through her tongue. How horrifying to discover too late that — for a child — EVERYTHING is real.
I miss the majority of happy in children’s literature.
Christine Lindsay
I have to agree with all that’s said. It’s a sad world that now all people want to do is watch a story. Now I love a good movie, especially if it flows like a book. I can always tell when it is. But it’s sad that so many people just don’t read anymore. And if they do, it’s as is it’s got to be made in pablum–no hard words, nothing to make them question anything. And there’s so much more than fiction, what about a good non-fictional account of a historical event. Now there’s some meat for the plate, or a nice thick book chock full of historical truth.
Laurie
I literally mourned while looking through an online list of “spiritual” books. I found teen vampires, child wizardry, and pubescent sexual exploits. I was searching in YA!
I mourn when books offer excuses why some children have two dads or two moms.
Vampire stories are big business. America wants blood. They just don’t want the blood of Jesus Christ.
As far as Christian bookstores, they don’t offer any grand replacement. Hasn’t anyone read the Bible? Don’t Christian writers realize sin has been done away with? Why do so many Christian writers push sin? Our children need stories of power and authority over the dark side.
No wonder the world runs after vampires. Who wants to read about being a sinner? Now there is the real hole in education. For this, I mourn.
Grace and Peace
Jenny
I know Wendy asked for negative, but it’s depressing reading through all of your comments. Yes, it is hard to imagine a book store employee who doesn’t know C.S. Lewis, but how does it help to not go back to that store for a year? And wasn’t it the pharisees who complained that Jesus worked on the Sabbath? Why wouldn’t a book store be open on Sundays?
I think the reason teenagers and young adults may not be interested in knowledge is because they’ve seen too many hypocritical Christian adults who have a lot of knowledge and don’t care for the poor. My daughter dyes her hair black and hangs out with kids with pierced lips and we go to stores where the employees are covered in tattoos. I’ll be the first to admit I immediately judged them, but after getting to know these kids, I realized they are all in honors classes and they are so much kinder than her “normal” looking friends. My daughter’s favorite thing is inner city mission work with kids and the homeless. I think this generation is about showing God’s love instead of just talking about it. If they had some examples of “well rounded” people acting like Jesus, it might cause them to want to be well rounded.
Young people are growing up in a different world than we grew up in. There have been 5 or 6 teen suicides this past year in our wealthy suburban community. There are drugs readily available at school and girls wear different colored wrist bands to show how much sex they are willing to give out. I asked my son if he wanted to go to the local Christian school this past year and he told me the Christian school doesn’t need his witness for Jesus, the public school does.
And I don’t believe that kids think the movie is better than the book. Thousands of kids have read thousands of pages about Harry Potter. Rather than being angry at J.K. Rowling, it motivates me to write a Christian series as well as she has written about magic.
Things will always be changing with every generation. I’ve learned I can either mourn the changes or be part of changing things for the better.