

Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard  - mapleoin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574377163804387216.html

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hristov
I don't know, I have read some very good and critically acclaimed books from
the so called modernist period and I never thought they were particularly
boring or lacking of plot. That includes the Great Gatsby which has a pretty
good plot, and some hemingway books.

Also my favorite authors like Nabakov, Heller, Vonnegut, PKD, Chandler,
Hammet, etc. always had pretty interesting plots. They were not idiotic "made
for tv plots" where every single conflict had to be neatly resolved by the end
of the book, but they were interesting and absorbing. They were also very
critically acclaimed.

I think really the problem is that there is a subjanre of novels that emerged
that is intended exclusively to be read as assignments in college classes.
These tend to be incredibly boring, so that literature professors so that lit
profs can justify their existence and because most readers are essentially
forced to read them. If those types of books are dead, good riddance.

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thunk
_The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old
hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of
power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the
public taste are being struck all over the place._

About damn time if you ask me. Maybe I can finally emerge from my genre
fiction bunker. The world is confusing enough without novelists "vaguing it
up" for the critics. Perhaps not all difficult novels have nothing to say
(beyond "Look how _stylish_ I am"), but most do. That particular emperor's in
his birthday suit.

~~~
jseliger
It already has woken up, even in literary terms, if you know where to look, as
Grossman says -- he cites Chabon, Donna Tart, and others. And although I love
the way he expresses himself in this manifesto, he's hardly alone: Tom Wolfe
wrote Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast in the 1980s, which has some not
dissimilar themes, and B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto came out more
recently; see more about it here: <http://jseliger.com/2007/11/12/a-readers-
manifesto/> .

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lionhearted
I loved this part:

> The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was
> just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have
> trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with
> supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the
> coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're
> having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

I'm currently reading Arabian Nights. It's a really, really wonderful book.
There's some great lessons in there and it's hilarious. When I read it in a
cafe, sometimes I wind up laughing loudly out loud and people look over.

But the book was poorly translated for a long time. I'm reading Husain
Haddawy's translation, and his introduction talks about translating a classic.
Apparently some of the translators of the past thought the dirty, rough,
common language of Arabian Nights wasn't fitting enough, so they took a lot of
liberties to make the language more difficult to read so it would appeal to
more educated people. Haddawy's version feels like a friend is a telling you a
story: No fancy language. The sex and violence are crass. Things are described
in simple ways.

And it's really, really good, and highly recommended. I like books I can learn
from, where reading the writing isn't made an extra intellectual puzzle and
challenge to get satisfaction from the book. A basic swashbuckling type story
like Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa or The Three Muskateers by Dumas is really
good. They're fun, readable, intelligent books that aren't difficult. And
despite not being difficult, you still learn a lot of lessons from them. Good
for relaxation time, for those of riding our minds pretty hard at work. I can
understand how there's a pleasure in conquering a difficult book, but I
personally prefer to get all the enjoyment and lessons out of a book with
simple writing and interesting themes and characters.

~~~
qohen
Speaking of the Arabian Nights, coincidentally (or not), the WSJ also had this
today, in its Masterpiece column, about that work:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020488630457430...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204886304574308744212027048.html)

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jwesley
Good novels don't have to be hard to read, but they can be, and some of them
should be. This either/or argument is pointless. Of course extremely difficult
(and rewarding) novels like Infinite Jest and Ulysses will not be for
everyone. But saying the opposite, that the mark of a great work of fiction is
an easy to follow plot, is just ridiculous. Sometimes it's worth it to read
something very difficult.

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billswift
Our preference for a story line is known as the narrative fallacy; it's
perfectly okay for entertainment (and there is nothing wrong with
entertainment), but importing it into other things is a recipe for error. The
article doesn't talk about nonfiction though - the title was changed for HN
from "Good Novels" to "Good Books".

~~~
mapleoin
Sorry, it's easier to copy&paste the <h1> than the actual <title>

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DannoHung
Fiction books have gotten sort of boring for me in the last few years. I used
to read 20 or 30 fiction books a year, but lately, if I read 5 or 6, that's
probably a lot.

On the other hand, I've been reading a lot more technical books.

I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to
find in fiction anymore. I suppose I could read non-fiction as well, but the
Internet has made me sort of wary of any non-fiction that's not peer reviewed.
With a technical manual at least, the worst that can happen is that
something's out of date or poorly worded.

~~~
jsm386
When you say 'I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new
ideas for me to find in fiction anymore' you're on to something.

From [http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-
been-w...](http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-written-
before/)

The last script writer/novelist on Earth committed suicide. Every conceivable
plot had already been conceived, written and published. Every story remade
twice over, rebooted, adapted, re-imagined, reinterpreted, stolen, sequeled or
turned into trilogies, double trilogies or franchises that kept going where
they had gone before. Every cartoon and comic book hero had his/her own movie
trilogy.

The chain of suicides, however, had not started until the advent of the
Internet Plot Database. AJAX programmer and Star Trek fan Ziek Omeldoff in
writing what appeared to him at the time as an innocuous little web
application, did not know he was in fact heralding the end of literature,
especially the genre of science fiction that he so loved.

The IPDB rivaled the famed Wackypidea in its community driven model and Goggle
in its search capability. Every conceivable plot was indexed, cross referenced
and searchable by idea, time, setting and a myriad of other simultaneous
parameters.

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asdlfj2sd33
This has always been pretty obvious to be. What has also been obvious is that
writing well is a hard and rare skill which is quite distinct from other
skills, skills like dancing, welding, math, physics, etc.

You can be a great physicist and a great writer, or mediocre writer, or
terrible writer.

Some times you may have to put up with hard writing because the subject is
very hard, and you're just not going to find an easier to read explanation.

Just about the only subjects that can't get away with that, are frivolity and
pure entertainment, they HAVE to be written well.

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shadytrees
> _[Writers] ... are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware
> literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre
> fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance._

And _McSweeney's_ (quarterly concern and, less so, internet tendency)! Hit and
miss, but they have such a cheerfully aggressive attitude about pollinating
literary fiction with genre fiction with a complete disdain for works of
literature-for-literature's-sake.

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z8000
No, that's why paperbacks exist I suppose ;)

s/Hard/Difficult/

