WHAT THE OLD LADY DOESN"T READ

WHAT THE OLD LADY DOESN'T READ

By Elinore Standard

       For years, I've been helping to choose new books for the public library

in Pound Ridge, NY but I realize I should stop because I've developed prejudices and blind opposition to many contemporary publishing categories. This is getting worse, fast.

        * I won't have anything to do with vampires and that leaves out work by the popular Ann Rice, among (too many) others.

       * I've never read science fiction so I leave the science fiction choices to others at the library. More and more, as I go through "Publishers' Weekly," I notice sci-fi elements have crept into regular reading lists in the form of time travel, space travel, the paranormal and the supernatural.



      * I don't do revisionist history or literature. I never liked "Wild Sargasso Sea," the Jean Rhys retelling of "Jane Eyre." I said I would not read another remake of Jane Austen but I did. I couldn't resist P.D. James's "Death Comes to Pemberly," and I have to say, it is very good.

       * Spare me talking cats and narrating dogs.

       * No "cozies," those mystery stories where everybody knits and makes cupcakes. Give me Nordic Gloom and Celtic Angst.

        * No Comics. Someone else covers that category.

        * As- told- to biographies are hard to like. Although there are few actors and athletes who can actually write, now and then one of them will produce  good memoir (sorry, Andre, not you).

        * No talking ghosts or dead people. This includes "Lovely Bones," a novel I began but put aside.

        * No letters. "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" are written in this venerable style, but, still…

        * No dialect.  Bestselling "The Help" comes close to being OK, but it's not.

         I understand a responsible library must walk a line between what it knows its customers want to read and what its permanent collection should hold, so now and then a librarian must knuckle under and spend $26 for bestselling garbage.  Like it or not, Dan Brown and Rhonda Byrne are with us.
        As much as I treasure books and enjoy reading, I realize it's better not to have somebody like me behind the scenes of the library's book selection process. It's time for a less constricted sensibility. 

      

                                       

Elinore Standard is the co-editor of "Bookworms: Great Writers

And Readers Celebrate Reading,' (Carroll & Graf, 1997). She is a former Trustee of the Hiram Halle Memorial Library and a Friend of the Fletcher Free Library.