You call this literature?

You call this literature? Part 3
By Ashley Laframboise

Looking through the "Literature" section and expecting to find articles on Woolf and Morrison, Pound and Hazlitt, but all I see are Dan Brown novels all over the place and realized that this is in fact what we have come to. This is not to criticise Brown, although his plot is not even his own, and his writing is generally quite uninspired.
Yes, popular literature has hit an all-time low to the point that fine literature is being overlooked by so many of us, to the point that Chapters has candles, calendars, journals, pens at the front of the store now, and we have to go to the back to see what it says it's supposedly really selling. Moreover, on the tables nearest the entrance are shiny, colourful, hard-covered bestsellers things written by Dan Brown and anything with Oprah's Book Club's seal of approval sticker. In fact, it took William Faulkner almost an entire century to finally be recognized as a valuable writer by most of us when Oprah recommended a three-volume set of his "best" work, and probably even gave copies away to the audience. We read what Oprah tells us we should read, find it at the front of Chapters, and, for the select few of us who actually want to read more of an author's work, are hardly able to find anything else he wrote in the store. It seems we all want what someone thinks is "best," without having to do any research, without having to dig through piles of books, to find the overarching narrative of an author's career. Rather, we gather bits and pieces, as if all works were separate, only caring to read the author that the New York Times deems "Brilliant" and "Dazzlingly unique" as if they weren't all the same or something.
Listen when I say a very bad word: Canada. Did you cringe? Stop reading, maybe? Some of us haven't even heard of Canadian writers, or at the very least, Canadian writers who don't 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,hardly even being considered in Chapters' "Best Selling Novels," while others like Henighan are being almost completely ignored. It seems we'd all rather read up on astrology and Devils wearing Prada, while picking up mini Positive Thinking cards while we're at it. I figure that if there's really something positive going on, we wouldn't feel the need to try to "think positively,". It seems everyone wants to "escape." Everyone wants to read for "enjoyment,".It seems we don't want to look around us and don't want to read about things that matter.