The Patterson Problem

I have been aggressively weeding the adult fiction collection at Walker Library. Weeding is one of the more misunderstood tasks of my profession. It involves removing perfectly good books from our collection, which causes book lovers to squeal in horror. I do it to make space for new books, and in this case, to make space to move our young adult collection out of the children's room where it is withering. Young adults do not consider themselves children, and spend a lot of time trying to convince us of that. Entering the children's room to retrieve a copy of Twilight is capitulation, and they prefer not to do it.

Anyways, I have a few criteria for what books I will remove. If it has been checked out in the past year, it gets to stay. Today I did the M-P shelves, which unfortunately put me face to face with James Patterson. I probably spend 1/10 of my book budget on this man. He writes at least a book a month, and they all make it to the bestseller list. I quail to think of what will happen when he decides to write kid's picture books as well. We'll have to rename it James Patterson library.  Needless to say, Mr. Patterson has a couple of shelves to himself.  When I got to his section, I got a little excited about how many books I would be able to remove, but to my dismay, almost every Patterson book has been checked out in the past year!!

I strongly believe that "whatever gets you through the night, it's alright" (thanks, John Lennon). I have learned that people believe all sorts of things, and that there's not really one way to think about anything. I especially believe this about reading. If you read, you're cool to me. I don't care if it's Danielle Steele or Thomas Pynchon. That being said, come on! I can't believe this guy can crank out books like a factory and people devour them!  And now the Walker collection will be an even bigger percent Patterson because, while other authors who perhaps don't use ghostwriters are banished from the shelves, Jamie moneybags keeps his shelf space. Sometimes life isn't fair.