Culturally Biased

It has been a week of ups and downs.
Pros:
Getting over the two intense weeks of exams.
Catching up on Sex and The City reruns.
Succesful results in my tutoring classes.
Cons:
Lack of sleep.
Not being able to find Jane Austen books in Panama.
And, shocking but true: Lack of sleep.

Today, while coming back from my tutoring classes, I decided to stop at an undisclosed bookstore to ask if they had a book I need to read for my Industrial and Organizational Psychology class. Not only was I very excited when they told me that they did sell it, but also when I spotted a Literature section in the bookstore. Unfortunately, that excitement soon vanished when they told me they were out of stock and when I came across the fact that the only authors they had under the section previously mentioned, were limitted to Ernest Hemingway, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Marquez. Don't get me wrong, all of those are wonderful writers but their books are all over Panama. My point is that that section had no Charles Dickens, no Virginia Woolf, no Oscar Wilde and DEFINITELY no Jane Austen. I was furious. I have been looking for Jane Austen books since I can remember, not only because I'm obsessed with Pride and Prejudice (movie) and The Jane Austen Book Club (movie), but because she seems like such a fine writer and books online just aren't enough.
How is it that in this huge, well renowned bookstore were no Jane Austen books?
How is it that they seem to get boxes and boxes about Kate Gosselin's autobiography and only one miserable copy of Sense and Sensibility?
Even more bizzare is, how is it that insead of having stocks of these historical authors they have stocks of he's-just-not-that-into-you type of books?
Though they are amusing, they just don't have that literate use of words that you could only find in magical novels that take you back to other centuries.
Quite frankly, I'm frightened. I'm scared about the kind of example we are trying to portray as a country. More importantly, as a society. Is it, then, that we have lost ourselves into ¨pop culture¨ or that the culture has been lost?

I remembered being in high school and reading about John Keats and also J.K Rowling (who is one of my favorite authors, by the way). What I'm trying to convey here is that there can be a balance between classical authors and new writers, but I feel that in Panama we always go to extremes. Another thing left to be thought of, will there come a time where Jane Austen readers and Lauren Conrad fans will be able to sit together as a big family in the great dinner table of literature in Panama? I sure hope so because if not, I'll be making Amazon very, very rich.