From Shaman’s Rock
by Jim Poling Sr.
I thought it was just me complaining that more and more mediocre – or just plain bad – books are being published.
A search of the Internet tells me I am not alone. Reading and writing sites are filled with complaints from writers and readers about books that just aren’t worth reading.
Good books are great teaching tools that help us learn about life from real characters living in well-crafted stories. Bad books are simply clumps of words tossed together without enough thought.
The problem seems to be that publishers have become more interested in sales than good literature. They now rely on marketing hype and gimmicks to promote their new titles.
Over the past couple of months I have borrowed three books from libraries. I returned all three before reaching Page 100. They were just not worth reading through to the end.
Two others, novels that I bought, were nearly as disappointing. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (2016) is a weird story about a teenage boy who disappears at a landmark known to teens as Devil’s Rock.
It received the 2017 British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. Why, I don’t know. It’s grossly overwritten, too long and I can’t recall a single scene from it, let alone a horror scene.
As some other reviewers have said of other novels: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
The other disappointing novel was Birnam Wood, another prize winner much acclaimed by readers, booksellers and reviewers. It isn’t badly written but meanders and I have no idea of exactly what happened at the end.
Many loved it as their favourite book of 2023. I guess I’m just out of touch.
I favor the old classics that are like listening to a powerful storyteller quietly telling a tale that you never forget. One of the greatest of these is Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which is thoughtfully written in telling how perseverance and dignity help one stand up against life’s struggles.
Another is A Passage to India, a compelling novel that shows the fate of friendships caught in the modern world’s cultural and political conflicts.
One reason for the growing number of poorly crafted books is self-publishing. There were 2.3 million books self-published in the U.S. during 2021. That’s roughly two to three times the estimated 500,000 to one million new books published through traditional publishers.
Authors, especially new authors, are lured by self-publishing because they do exactly what they want to do with their book. But most lack any professional editing, which is critical to determining if a book will be good, mediocre or just plain bad.
Self-publishing is cutting into the revenues of traditional publishers. As they see their revenues drop they publish more light-weight books they figure they can sell with gimmicky marketing. Revenues become more important than literary art.
The Association of American Publishers reported this spring that book industry revenue declined 2.6 per cent in 2022, down three-quarters of a billion dollars from 2021. The 2022 figure, however, was 8.6 per cent higher than the $25.87 billion recorded in 2019.
People are different with varying likes and dislikes so there will always be a market for stories that are poorly put together and poorly written. The positive in all of this is that people are reading books, although less than in the past.
A fairly recent Gallup poll shows that American adults are reading two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.
The good news is that our kids are reading. The 2022 Canadian Book Consumer Study found that 27 per cent of books bought by Canadians were juvenile or young adult titles. And, the 2022 Canadian Book Market annual report said that 41 per cent of book sales and 52 per cent of library loans in 2022 were juvenile and young adult titles.
That’s especially thankful news because reading helps children build language skills. It allows them to learn about the world and things they will be exposed to in their future.
Psychologists say reading is important to early brain development. They also say that parental reading to children gives them a head start in life.
