Reading is So Last Year

By Marwa Aboubaker, Staff Writer

Have you ever read a book and thought “This sounds familiar“? Chances are you\’re actually right. So many teen books nowadays tend to copy each other\’s story lines “coincidently”. It all started off half a decade ago with Twilight, or so everyone thought. Until the Age of Romantic Books came and flooded our libraries with authors like Meg Cabot, Simone Elkeles, and Nicholas Sparks (whose books have gotten so popular over the past years) it\’s become a nightmare. Now teens everywhere can\’t seem to let go; it\’s as if their lives depended on that mere book. I often think of ways to save them from this misery, but it\’s just too late. If you\’ve ever read a romantic book like Twilight for instance, you\’ll understand when I say books can get addicting.

Addiction doesn\’t even cover it; you start reading without even thinking for a second how terrible the plot actually is. An average girl with no personality going to school with average friends until a guy comes into her life. And not just any guy, a tall dark and handsome guy who drives an expensive car. So they dramatically fall in love and even though things may get bad, nevertheless they end up living happily ever after. You might be thinking, “That sounds like a normal storyline.” But in reality, authors like the ones I\’ve mentioned above follow a strict “Story Formula” that leads their success till this day. The reason why the main character (often a girl) has no personality is so that the reader injects their personality while reading the book. This makes it easier for the reader to imagine being in the protagonist\’s shoes and wanting to find out what happens next. The male lead in the story must also be good looking for many obvious reasons. And as for the ending, unless there is a simply spectacular, thought out tragic ending, the ending is almost inevitably happy to avoid hate mail from fans. The formula is so genius that anybody can do it.

Since we are youth and we are the voices of all generations to come, I say we protest. If we don\’t put a stop to this never ending cycle of story writing, the future of writing will just be replicas of what has been done before. If authors can\’t come up with interesting and creative stories then they should not have been authors in the first place, maybe movie directing might be a better road for them. [Seeing as the movie industry is a failure and can no longer be saved.] You might think I am just a crazed paranoid teen who might think books are going to take over the world with mind control, but if you\’ve read as many books as I have, you would understand. If you\’ve read fourteen different books all from different authors and they all have the same plot, you know something has gone wrong. So I say, put down that book or write a better one.