Dumbened

We're getting stupider because of the books we read

A fact that perhaps not many of you know is that for a couple of hours every day, to take a break from energy rants, I translate fiction from English to Bulgarian.

It started about eight years ago when I was looking for additional sources of freelancing income. With time, it turned into a way for me to keep in shape linguistically and also keep an eye on fiction writing trends since I write fiction myself.

The first books I translated were young adult fiction — an area that the publisher I work with specialises in — and they were great. Translation was a pleasure that I got paid for.

Since then, I’ve started noticing things that have turned my work as a translator from pleasure to a challenge and this challenge has been growing. It grew to the point that I asked the publisher to move me from YA to adult books, citing a newly discovered inability for me to relate to characters.

I was being polite, of course, because I really like that lady and we work well together. What I would’ve said had we been closer, would have been the following: Look, these books are getting totally idiotic, the last one I did was little more than BLM propaganda and executed very poorly, at that, I just can’t take this any longer. That would’ve been harsh on the publisher, so I spared her.

The things I’ve been noticing in YA fiction amount to a trend towards simplification, semi-digestion, and overt Social Messaging. The reason I’m putting that in capitals is its overtness, to the point of I’ll just rub your face into this and you will take it.

Let me tell you abut the book I’m currently working on. It’s the fourth part in a series and although it’s YA and I wanted to swear off YA, I started the series so I had to finish it… Although the author’s working on book 5 already, so who knows where this will all end.

The series disease aside, the book is 480 pages long in total and it has 100+ chapters. Why? Because the longest chapter is about five pages. Some are just three. Basically, a scene = chapter. Because it’s easier than having to think about how to tie more than one scene into a single chapter. And authors are getting lazy these days, I know this for a fact.

As for the contents, the story features several superrich, supersmart, superdamaged (and superpretty, of course) characters that solve puzzles of various sorts. It’s not a bad story. It is, however, a badly written story.

As in other books I’ve translated recently, this, too, strives to leave as little to the imagination as possible. Every move, every look, every gesture is meticulously recorded as if it’s not a story we’re reading but a report of various events. The catch: it’s a report of events as seen by the author.

Of course, all fiction is, in a sense, an account of events as “seen” by the author. Good authors, however, leave things to the imagination. They leave things to the mind of the reader, allow us to make our own interpretations, inferences and conclusions.

This appears to no longer be the case with a growing amount of young adult literature. Authors now prioritise getting their own perception of the story and everyone involved in it across over just telling the story.

It’s not necessarily deliberate propaganda. On the contrary, most of the time it’s just lazy writing — it’s easier to say things bluntly than subtly, at least when you’re not saying them to anyone’s face. But there is also propaganda. With good intentions, no doubt, but still propaganda. Combined with lazy writing, it’s a mix as dangerous as sweet cocktails.

I got an especially acute sense of that in two previous books. This had never happened before. Ever. There have been books and characters I dislike, of course. There have been motivations I don’t fully understand but in these two books the messaging was blatant.

One of these was the book I referred to above as BLM propaganda. The author wanted to tell us something in the most uncertain way possible and to do that, she had gone miles over the top with a plot that only a 12-year-old that doesn’t read a lot would find believable. It could have been a good story. But it wasn’t because the author had focused all on getting one specific message across and had sacrificed everything else for it.

The author of the other book — essentially a love story with supernatural elements — at one point simply gave up and forgot he was writing a novel, so he just stated his talking points plainly, putting them in the mouths of his characters.

He didn’t even bother explaining the supernatural element and that’s a must for such novels. Here, it was just background for the propaganda. I regret to have to use that word again but there is no better for what that book was.

A growing number of writers targeting (not sorry) young people, then, are dispensing with the basic tents of fiction to send a social or political message. They are not telling stories with the message organically weaved into them.

They are telling readers, essentially, “This is what I think and you should think it, too, because it’s the only right thing to think.” With this, they are denying readers the right to judge for themselves.

In case any of you were wondering why I’m wasting your time with complaints about a job that I made a conscious choice to do, this is why: because this kind of fiction makes its readers stupid.

Of course, all fiction bears the signs of the author’s personality, complete with their tastes, political preferences, ideologies, stereotypes, and prejudices. But a good author would just tell a story and let the messaging happen naturally.

A bad author would force the message down the readers’ throat the way cat owners give their pets pills: hidden in a tasty morsel as an alternative to shoving it straight down. (As all cat owners know, the tasty morsel has never worked.)

This sort of writing makes people think less because you don’t need to think about what you read if the author has digested it for you by reporting every single detail of every interaction, explaining the motivation behind it and adding internal monologue to avoid any space for interpretation.

It makes them feel less and question less because if you’re not being told a story but are rather consuming a specific message, there is little if any space for investing your own emotions and drawing your own conclusions.

And when you get stupid enough from consuming this kind of writing, you get more likely to also consume other kinds of writing, the kind that tells you, for example, that the European Union can totally replace natural gas with wind, solar, and heat pumps AND save money from… lower gas consumption.

One of you just thought “You’re kidding” but we all know better. Kidding I am not and neither are the authors of this remarkable piece of… writing from the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group.

The thing is 29 pages long but the only piece that really matters — and the piece that 99% of readers will miss or take at face value — is this:

Third, there is no change to the capacity factors overtime. Finally, capital expenditure and operational costs are assumed to be constant at 2020 levels. The combination of the last two assumptions is likely to result in an overestimate of incremental capital expenditure, given the continuous decline of green technology costs (Way et al., 2022).

A lie as blatant as this must carry consequences but it won’t. Not from people who grow up consuming social and political messaging masked as fiction. Not from people who may not consume that messaging in that mask but who consume it even more directly, from the corporate media. And certainly not from people who have a vested interest in the former two groups being kept in as much dark as possible.

I’ve spent most of my life after the age of six, when I learned to read, reading. I’ve always read voraciously, insatiably, and greedily, even before I was taught how to read critically (and that adverbs should be used sparingly).

It is thanks to that that I have no truck with masked propaganda messaging. It’s easy to spot when you’ve consumed enough good writing. And it’s important to spot because if you can’t spot it in fiction, you won’t be able to spot the lies in non-fiction.

What’s good writing, then? Isn’t it subjective?

No. Tastes are subjective. Good writing is good storytelling that makes you use your brain, if only to revel in the magnificence of a genius’s turn of phrase. And being able to discern good storytelling from badly veiled propaganda enhances our critical thinking abilities. Because it teaches us what’s believable and what’s not. With propaganda, you can’t know. You are being told what’s believable and what’s not, even if it’s a lie.

Here’s some not simply good but brilliant — and totally random — writing for a dose of good mood:

“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”

“Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

“Many years ago someone told me something that I flatly refused to accept. And I still don't accept it now, despite all the times I've seen it proved right.
"The common good and the individual good rarely coincide..."
Sure, I know, it's true.
But some truths are probably worse than lies.” (That’s a hard one)

“People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.” (This one too)