Goosebumps, as some of you may know, is a series of chidren's horror-lite novels by R.L. Stine. It spawned many spin-offs and imitators: Give Yourself Goosebumps, Ghosts of Fear Street, Goosebumps 2000, and so forth. They, too, are not high literature. I managed to read one once, just to see what the deal was. Bleah. I couldn't keep them on the shelves for, oh, two or three years.

We dust them now. I won't get rid of them, because every so often, everything old is new again. (Witness the return of gold and avocado, those breakout colors of the 1970s, in women's clothing.) But I don't need to immediately replace the one left at the beach anymore, because they just aren't in as high a demand as they once were.

Fiction reading goes in trends. This trend, too, will pass. What will not pass is that the children who learned to read yukking it up over the adventures of Super Diaper Baby will come in later looking for Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter, The Fellowship of the Ring, Sense and Sensibility, Ender's Game, The Sword and the Circle (stories of Arthur and the Round Table), and Red Mars. Count on it. The legion of Goosebumps alumni are there now.