For the past several days I've been engaged reading "Gone With The Wind", a novel I started reading a while ago (in 2012, I think - it was the first e-book I actually paid for), and since I've already achieved my 2015 Goodreads Challenge (I set myself the goal of rading 24 books in 2015, just as in the two previous years. Earlier I didn't made it, I was always a couple of books behind, but this year I reached the 24th book sometime in August, I think), I decided to go to the books I've started but never finished and so here I am, reading this lovely, interesting novel, which is quite different from the movie (as it usually is). Anyway, I must say I'm really liking it, and I really like Scarlett O'Hara-Hamilton-Kennedy, even though she's stupidly naïve at times, and other times plain mean, she's just bewitching.
In the past weeks, I had a been reading quite voraciously, and with a speed that's not my usual speed either. I think I'll never forget the week and half where I read eight books in nine days. Yes, curiously, most of those books were gay romance. A lot of them were really good and I enjoyed reading them so much I could hardly think of ever reading anything that wasn't gay romance. I did pull myself from it at one point and went back to read other types of books as well, but then I went back to a gay romance... and hated it. Not the gay romance itself, but the story I read.
Through my many forays into the fields of gay romance, I have noticed that there's a peculiar profusion of bad writing among the ranks of the writers. Those this happen in any other literary circles? From texts plaged with typos to grammar and spelling mistakes even I can pinpoint, many stories and novels pululate out there in this particular theme, that are in desperate need of an editor. The last such story I read, I actually erased from my Kindle. The writing was so poor, it was basically unreadable. There was this chunk of text with no visible plot, peppered with so many grammatical mistakes, typos and whatnots - even there seemed to be words loose over there, just there, without anything to do with the sentence of the paragraph at all - that made the reading even harder.
I don't get it, this was a Kindle book - for $0,00 mind you, but still a book sold through Amazon.com - shouldn't there be some sort of editing involved? Nobody is reviewing these texts? Or shall we all think that anything priced $0 is a surprise-bag, and you could get a serving of crap for your click? Not that paid books skip the craptacular circles, but still. Shouldn't there be a certain commitment with quality here?
Posts and articles are found by handfuls on the internet about how writing is being lost among today's youth, but I'd say the art of writing is also lost among today's adults as well, and the reasin for it is that nobody actually cares about reading. People can concentrate enough to type own a tweet, or comment in facebook, but nobody reads - really reads - anymore. Even in the case of books, each chapter needs to be cut up into smaller bites because people can't read a whole chapter anymore. People seek images and can't keep their attention on anything for more than a couple of seconds. Information must be absorbed in a glance, all pre-thought, pre-chewed, pre-analized, and pre-opinioned.
Poorly written books, poorly written articles, and everything terribly watered down is what people have for their eyes now. This is it and this is all there is. In a world like this, where no depth is sought, doesn't it makes sense that people seek instant gratification too? This is, after all, the only type of gratification their attention is capable of grasping.
Am I getting old and thinking that all was better when I was younger, or am I right? Really what has the modern times brought to mankind, other than further deterioration of the cognitive capabilities?
No comments:
Post a Comment