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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

> [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.

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

s/Hard/Difficult/

Why is this on Hacker News?