and Other Book-Rental Woes

Genre: Fantasy

I was at the Library today. I must confess that I now find the library a tad depressing. For one thing, it never is open the day I would like and on the days that it is the hours never seem to be sensible.

Why have a Library if it is never open?

Years ago, when I was not yet in High School let alone College, I would enter the Library with the general happiness of a child ready to throw themselves at the ice-cream bar, cookie-dough included. Despite my best attempts to waylay the incessant chatting of exited voices in my head, Pick me! Pick me!, I would nevertheless waltz out of the constantly malfunctioning checkout detectors with too many books and not enough common sense to knowingly pace myself.

One summer I had read though fourteen books in a month and a half. That was the month in which I started a book list. Every book from then on, which my eye has run cover to cover, had its name scrawled next to a forever increasing number.

There was only one rule: no school books unless they were absolutely adored.

Now, when I say that I read a lot of books, let it also be said that very rarely are these books not Young Adult. Mostly fantasy Young Adult. To me, is category is an art form.

Why? Well, fantasy in it’s own right is just that. Fantasy. Why read Gossip Girl when you go to school? Kind of redundant. Same goes for mystery. I could watch the news and get a full 360-degree view of any mystery novel.

Fantasy is otherworldly. A place where few have gone and even fewer can correctly articulate their travels there. But when it is done correctly, it can be amazing.

But why Young Adult? Simplicity by nature. Nowhere in a Young Adult section of a Library or at your local Barns n Noble will you see a Fabio look alike towering over a degradingly busty blond haired female. It just does not happen.

Sure, plenty of award winning and award worthy YA novels have romance in them. Sex. But there is something different with the way an adult author and a youth author weaves the sex into the book.

In the realm of adult literature SEX is what drives most of the plot. A lusting after B’s brother while C get’s jealous and D is having an affair.

Yet I digress.

Let me work back to the other reason why the Library holds so little magic for me now.
It seems like our Libraries are shrinking. More and more, Fabio and his unending battalion of twin brothers are sneaking more shelf space. More and more teen High School angst worship-series bulge the shelves while the quality Young Adult books get older and older without fresh blood to replenish their stock. The books’ covers become crinkly and yellow; the tacky, stringy tape which once held the jackets to the covers are all but crumbling away.

Some times I wish I had never read fourteen books in a month and a half.

Perhaps then there would be something worthwhile left.

I went to the Library today and spend a good hour and a half looking for books in the four rows of the Young Adult section and the even more sparse two-row Adult Fantasy section.

I came away with two books. One YA and one not, and neither fantasy.

Perhaps the Libraries are being murdered; slowly being bled dry with the constant self-gratification T.V and the like thereof provides. Or maybe that form of anti-technocrat hippy-speak is an excuse to shun the idea that technology might be a teensy bit necessary.  

I prefer both, sautéed and smothered with a smoky go-fuck-yourself sauce.

Maybe there are just no good authors left. Or maybe we’re just in a bad spot. A lull. You know, where there’s not a single good song on the radio and all the commercials on T.V are abhoridly stupid, only to spring back into a three to four month period where everything’s a hit single and you’ve got Morgan Freeman voicing a sepia colored heart wrencher.

I’ve digressed again, haven’t I?

Anyway, if there are any more good books to be found, I have extreme confidence that I’ll find them. I’ve been very fortunate in that field when applying a system, which I developed at a surprisingly young age, and have been using ever sense.

I share it now in the hopes that, once again, we’ll be able to find the good books .

1. Look at the cover color. No good YA fantasy book will have, say, a neon pink cover. Not the kind you’ll want to read anyway.

2. Stay away from the brothers Fabio and the legions of she-whores.

3. FONT. A fantasy will never have blocky lettering. It’ll either be flowery script or scratchy carvings or scrawled handwriting.

4. Title is important. Clichés are a no go ( “Summer’s Fate” “Winds of Chance”) I made those up, by the way.

5. If the main character has a name which you can neither pronounce or distinguish what possible race they are, put it back.

6. Read the first page, if you want to keep reading, check it out. Never get a book on a ‘maybe it will get better’ pretence.

7. On that first page, if most of it is taken up by the main character’s appearance, chuck the book as far away from you as possible.

Well, I'll keep trying; keep sitting outside the Library forty minutes before they open because, damnit, they should be open. Maybe they'll be others waiting there with me, and well exchange trade secrets. How do you find what you love in a vast sea of never ending social dribble?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Happy hunting.