For a few months now, I've felt that I need to be more careful when choosing reading material. I am very much saddened by the amount of profanity, casual sex, violence and overall moral decay in most of today's literature. Recently, I was reading In the Woods by Tana French. By most standards it is a pretty tame murder mystery, but every time I picked it up I felt sick to my stomach and just KNEW I shouldn't be reading it. I finally decided to stop after I was about half-way through. The level of profanity in the novel was unacceptable and unnecessary.
A few days ago I watched a talk on the BYU channel given by the Young Women General Presidency at this year's Women's Conference. Titled "A Return to Virtue", Sister Dalton, Sister Dibb and Sister Cook presented a powerful case for LDS women to be examples of virtue to the world. Sister Dalton's talk, especially, really made me think about the movies, tv shows, music and books that I ingest. For the most part, I avoid movies and tv shows that are not virtuous, but since I live for books, I do end up reading far too many novels that don't meet my standards. I usually justify this as necessary for my job, but I don't really need to read all of the most popular novels. Just to know what they're about is enough, I believe.
This is all a round about way of saying that I am going to raise my standards for reading material from now on. I know I will miss out on a lot of "trendy" novels and, to be honest, it will be a sacrifice for me. Most of my life, I've read whatever I wanted. Now, I feel I must read books that will help me, or at least won't damage, my goal of being a virtuous woman. Will you join me in this endeavor?
You can do it! I know exactly how you feel! I decided to stop watching 'R' rated movies while working at Blockbuster. It is hard. People told me how great these movies were and it stunk, but after a while it stopped bothering me. I will join you, but I must say, I have one more book to read in the Grave series. The books weren't that bad, only the 3rd one was really graphic, but I just skip over those parts. If I miss something, I miss something, but I just won't even read it. Let me know about any good clean books you find! I wish they had a rating system just like movies!
ReplyDeleteI'm already finding it quite difficult! Not so much in the reading area, but with music. I've been listening to NPR and KBAQ. Those are the only stations I can count on to meet my standards. I do like to listen to the Top 40 stations, so it has been hard to abstain!
ReplyDelete