The Books Reading - Essay Example

Chapter 3: BooksBooks have great impact on the social conscience of a nation. They have the capability to change the way groups of people think about an issue. Throughout history, books have affected the attitudes of a society and have always been a source of gauging the trends of a society. Books are also a great source in helping to measure and improve the literacy of any society; throughout the world, it can be observed that the more literate a nation is, the more its people write, publish and read books.

Books can effectively change the way a person views his or her world. Such a book for me would be The Alchemist, by Paulo Coehlo. It enabled me to think beyond the mundane pursuits of life and made me believe that I can be happy in this world by pursuing my wishes and desires and by searching for my “treasure.” This book changed my view about how to live my life; it has taught me to be happy and to believe in the power of love, whether it is the love that God has bestowed on me, or the love that I have for my fellow human beings.

Books that are beautiful and touch people greatly automatically do good business. However, lately there is a trend to treat the publishing industry as a business and not as a way to touch and/or improve the conscience of the reader. Publishing houses do not accept manuscripts which they feel will not fetch them enough money; on the same note they are attracted to manuscripts that in their opinion would be “bestsellers” and fetch them business. This leads to the problem of various publishing houses churning out formula books; in other words, books written in a similar genre and pattern.

The nineties obsession with thrillers is an example of this, when almost every publishing house turned out similarly patterned books that seemed like renditions of Hollywood flicks; albeit some writers were actually writing great books in the genre, most of these books just seemed like cheap versions of the real thing. Lately, there is a trend of publishing religious oriented books; according to the Book Industry Survey Group, in 2004; there was an 11 percent increase in the gains of such books, reaching almost 2 billion in sales.

With such large amounts of money involved, the publishers, of course, follow the trend and do not publish books that are not “trendy” so to speak.It may be agreed upon that sometimes this censorship and/or banning takes place as the theme of the book is such that it might offend a certain group of people or the whole nation; however, ultimately, this choice should not be made by someone else but should be left to the reader as to what sort of book s/he reads. Moreover, what is offensive to one reader may not be so to the other; the book “Satanic Verses” by U.K. writer Salman Rushdie was extremely offensive to the Muslims (fatwas or religious rulings were given against the writer, with some going as far as to announcing rewards for the writer’s murder), however, for the other readers, it was just a work of fiction.

However, now the trend of reading books is slowly coming to a close, as people are more interested in seeing the “Hollywood version” of the book, with a friend of mine going so far as to say “if the book is worth reading, a movie would come out based on it, and I can watch it then”, when I offered him a book to read. It is not only the writers who are to blame for this trend, who do not cater to the general public and write books in language not easily understood by laymen, but also the present day we live in, where people are mostly alliterates, with the bibliophiles a dying breed.

Paulo Coehlo, in this regard is an extremely talented author, as his books involve difficult themes but are written for the general public in the sense that even a child can read them and walk away from them feeling that s/he has learned something.