Chapter 7. -An Unusual Process-

Trigger warnings for this chapter: Suicide, autopsy-like activities, a great many dead bodies being described

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I prefer shopping for books in person. I like going to a bookstore and holding a potential purchase in my hands and feeling the weight of it. I like being able to flip it open to see what the paper quality is like and what the font is as well as its size and spacing. I like to be able to touch the covers and see if they have that weird 'soapy' feeling. I like being able to tell if a book will fit in my purse before bringing it home. Shopping for books online is convenient in the way of availability but it gives me none of these other things.

My local bookstore is a small Coles/Indigo location in a mall. Just yesterday I went in to find that "as per corporate orders" the YA section had been increased from eight shelf units to fourteen, and that the SF/F book section (which includes all the graphic novels in this particular store) had been reduced to two shelf units. Last year, the YA section was increased from two shelf units to eight, and the SF/F section reduced from eight to five. I'm seeing a pattern, and it's not one I like.

Now, I am primarily a reader of the SF/F genre when I'm reading fiction. I do also happily read Contemporary and Thrillers, but the books in those genres are far outnumbered by the SF/F.

And I do know that there is plenty of SF/F in YA. I have read some of it, and enjoyed some of what I've read.

But here's the thing. YA SF/F is like potato chips, and non-YA SF/F is like french fries. French fries and potato chips bear definite similarities, certainly. They are both made from fried or baked cut-up potato and tend to be salted. There are good potato chips, bad potato chips, and meh potato chips, just as there are good, bad, and meh french fries.

But they are not the same thing. And while YA SF/F and non-YA SF/F are both sci-fi/fantasy books, they are not the same thing either. They offer different things to the reader, obviously. If YA didn't offer something different to the reader it wouldn't actually exist as a genre. And that is not a bad thing! Sometimes people want fries, and sometimes they want potato chips. Some people have a preference between the two, and that's not a bad thing either.

But when I go to a store looking for french fries and all I can find is a handful of fries in an out-of-the-way corner, I don't really care about the entire aisle of potato chips up by the entrance, even if the day before I was totally stuffing my face with them. Because today I want fries.

Just because SF/F is available in YA is no reason to shove the SF/F section out of the store, even if YA is experiencing a boom right now. And I don't want to ride the bus for forty minutes to get to the nearest 'big' bookstore that still has an almost half-decent SF/F section, or a few hours to get to the specialty SF/F bookstore in the city. I want to walk to my local bookstore.

And when I complain about how meagre the french fry selection is at a store, stop saying "But there are lots of potato chips!".