Earlier today as I was passing my time in town, on my own- I was browsing shops at random. Like an arrow, I shot to the nearest bookstore in sight. 
Even though I do 90% of my book-reading on my kindle nowadays, doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy the occasional bookshop browsing.

I was a little shocked when I stepped in.

There was one section of the store that set up different e-readers and sold iPhone and iPad-covers…..Why would a bookstore have iPhone and iPad-covers when they don’t even sell the iPhone and iPad…? How is an iPhone even relevant to the contents of a bookstore?

I don’t even know, but I decided I wouldn’t dwell on that or I’d just get annoyed for no reason [as I so often get over nothingness…], especially when I have this week’s goal to adhere to as well.

So I browsed the youth-book’s section. The disappointment I felt was beyond what I could’ve imagined.

I went there in hopes of finding some of the books I’d read as a child and was astonished when names like Maria Gripe, Kerstin Sundh, Michelle Magorian, Lene Kaaberbøl, Jostein Gaarder and so many others, weren’t there. They weren’t even in stock, they didn’t have them and some were apparently out of print…?!
Where I would usually have found a great variety of fiction, fantasy, crime novels, classics, and even religious stories, for youths- was now a tiny section bombarded with manga-books and vampire novels, shoved in between the odd Harry Potter book. And that was it. If you looked at the next shelf you’d find the odd ‘Sara the partygirl’, most likely the follow-up to ‘Sara the shopping-girl’. 

I was at a bookstore and the majority of the books there were now health/diet/exercise books. Boardgames, toys of fictional characters and moleskin journals were what took up the rest of the two-story bookstore, not to mention the iPad/iPhone-corner..[Drat, I wasn’t supposed to bring that up again… My bad!] 

What’s happening to the literary world as we know it? 

If this is what it looks like right now, what’s going to happen a few years from now? Are bookstores ever going to revert back to the spellbinding power they always had over me with their immense collection of books of both new and old? Or are they really just steadily declining into a spiral of crap as much of today has managed to prove…. I’m scared.

If shopping,party and vampire-books are all that remain at the youth section today….Well then, society has no right to judge the youthlings of today. They can’t help that they’ve been brainwashed by not having any other options to choose from. [Not in that particular store, anyway…] No wonder they aren’t acting sanely anymore. They have nothing to keep them sane. 

What happened to the great authors of my time and way back when? 
What happened to romance novels being something from an Austen book with realistic conflicts rather than the lives of an insensitive whiny teenage girl and a sadistic vampire?  
What happened to Sherlock Holmes, the famous five, and Nancy Drew? 
What happened to thought-provoking and educational books for pre-teens?

I’m so utterly disappointed and outraged over this.

The written word is amongst the most precious that humans have laid forth and expanded over the years. Literature is something we can all relate to, it is a part of our childhood, our adulthood and more. 

What happened to reading your child a goodnight story rather than letting them sit and drool in front of the TV? 

All around me these days, children, teenagers, adults- all sit with their pocketgames or phones, and nothing will divert their attention. 

I’m going to end the ranting here, because I just realised I actually had to scroll more than twice to get to the top of this post.

All I’m trying to get at is that I’m all for the wave of development and growth as such, I’m just scared that what we came to know of in our younger years is diminishing into nothingness. Will my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren even know who Harry Potter was? Will they even have heard any H.C. Andersen stories by then? 

At least there’s one place I know I can turn to in my hour of need.

The library. 

It won’t ever turn me down….

Or?