Help a Sister Out

emmissary, violence, profanity, sex, classics, books, everyone poops
Emissary has made a most shocking admission: she only reads children's novels because grownup novels are too dirty! (And then she found out that children's novels have nice gay people in them, and that's dirty too!)

I am both shocked and appalled at the thought of a grown woman limiting herself to children's novels*, so I would like your help in compiling a reading list for Emissary.

Here are Emissary's requirements:

Well, first of all, I got the book from the children's section (instead of the teen or adult). I tend to read books from there because "adult" material usually means a lot of sex, violence, and profanity.

So, no sex, no violence, no profanity. I presume she doesn't read any religious literature, such as the bible, the book of mormon or the q'ran, because those requirements would certainly exclude those books, but be that as it may, I've tried to help her out.

Sense and Sensibility/Pride_and_Prejudice by Jane Austen. No, wait, sex and violence.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. No, wait, violence.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. No, certainly not.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Is she offended by criminals/criminal activity?

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, right, no sex. Well, you don't actually read about the sex, so maybe that's okay.

Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It's filled with the "n" word, but that wasn't really regarded as a bad word by the establishment (you know, white people) at the time . . . we'll put this one in the "maybe" column.

No Hemingway, Faulkner, Flaubert, Fitzgerald and certainly no Lawrence, Hugo or Hardy.

JRR Tolkein? Nope, his tales of the triumph of good over evil through sacrifice and love are entirely out. There's violence, you see.

It's sad, really. Emmissary has made every novel worth reading in the last, well, ever, unreadable, and must resort to books like Everyone Poops, because she's decided that every depiction of sex, violence or profanity is offensive, regardless of the context. It doesn't matter that sex and violence are part of the human condition, and that any book that attempts to explore the human condition must necessarily explore them. It doesn't matter that some people talk like truckers on meth, and any honest portrayal of them cannot scrub that clean. It doesn't matter to her the beauty and truth she is missing, as long as her bookshelf remains pure.

I really can't think of anything sadder.

*I read a lot of children's novels because my 10 year old niece has recently discovered the world of books, and I like to know what she's into. Horrifying. Not due to content, I couldn't care less which characters are gay, but the writing tends toward the barely literate, if not the outright dull.

**Hat tip to my friends, who shamed me with their memories of the classics.