Everybody's Reading Zane

So what do you think of the urban books phenomenon? You know—those mostly paperback and softcover trade novels published by Zane and Triple Crown and the like—even Essence magazine is getting on that gravy train—that are written for and heavily marketed to young black readers? You’ve seen them by now I know, they are a huge publishing trend and tend to feature on their covers either sexed-up, uber-glam young black women, with titles like Whore, Bitch, Around the Way Girls, Gettin' Buck Wild and In Cahootz, or fierce, muscled, broody-looking young black men, with titles like Blow, The Ski Mask Way, Thugs And the Women Who Love Them and A Hustler's Son.

I don’t know quite what to make of this development and indeed there is some ongoing controversy within the library system nationwide about these books, with some librarians simply refusing to carry them and others doing so reluctantly, trying to decide how to classify them and whether to make them available to young readers. We carry a lot of these titles with more coming in every week, and they seem to vary in quality, with some written with some polish and verve, and some pretty raw and crude.

I’ve tried to read a few of them, curious to understand what they’re about and what their exploding popularity means. As a rule, they’re generally trashy, soft-core porn, an updated inner-city twist on the bodice-ripper romance novel, with characters—mostly women; most of these books seem to be aimed at young minority women—who live in a sex-and-violence universe of one kind or another. These books are VERY popular with girls and teen-to-twenty-something black women (and increasingly, the same age group of black males) who assert that they “tell it like it is” about life.

Well… yes, they do. If yours is a ghetto-underclass sort of life, that is. The books do reflect certain bleak realities, though I think more than that what they do, really, is exploit that world, in the way gangsta rap both glamorized and exploited a kind of black life experience, slickly packaging and marketing it back to both the black community and, especially, naïve suburban white kids attracted to an existence foreign to them and unnerving to their parents.

It makes me uneasy that even younger, middle-schoolers are now coming in looking for these books. These kids are always a little shy and embarrassed when asking for help in finding them, as though afraid we’re going to tell their mamas what they’re reading, and they usually don’t even know what specifically to ask for—they never have a title or author name in mind—it’s always just “Y’all got any Zane books?” Apparently one title serves as well as the next, and that alone worries me. There’s a mindlessness in this kind of reading. To me urban books are the literary equivalent of junk food—fast and tasty but not very healthy, especially as a mainstay.

Yet I wonder if I’m overreacting, or possibly missing something about the books’ appeal. What are young readers looking for in urban books? Are girls drawn to headstrong women characters who, against daunting odds, manage to make their own success in the world? I notice some of the books feature—mostly as a tease, admittedly—girl-on-girl attraction and I wonder if that is particularly significant to a young minority reader trying to sort out gender identity or sexual orientation issues without drawing too much attention to her (or him) self.

We carry both fiction and nonfiction titles designed to reach out to young LGBTQ readers and in my shelving duties I’ve observed that those books are frequently pulled from the shelves by young patrons but seldom actually checked out (I’m always finding them in the wrong place). My guess is those books, by their very titles and cover art, are considered likely to provoke storms of censure from all quarters; sadly, for minority readers especially, they are thus radioactive. On the other hand everybody’s reading Zane.