The Book Shop For the Rest of Us

While idling away a few minutes at the huge and largely horrid -- but twenty-four hour -- supercenter at the Foothills Mall tonight, I perused the book section. The Left Behind series had far less shelf space than the last time I went. All of the Spanish-language literature, from Cervantes to Marquez, had been replaced by Spanish-language romance novels with Fabio-like figures on the cover. And I discovered that there is a burgeoning subgenre of women-centered fiction that focuses on -- wait for it -- Amish and Mennonite people in crisis. To be sure, none of the ones I paged through read like Last Exit To Brooklyn. But there seemed to be a goodly dose of dilemmas in each one.