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Why We Need Difficult Books
- djrobstep 8y agoAll of highbrow literature and art is a million emperor-has-no-clothes scenarios. Everybody is terrified to say that a book is drivel or a painting is just some random drips of paint, in case it burns bridges or makes them look unsophisticated.
- fmblwntr 8y agoEverybody says this all the time, to such an extent that an article was written to express the contrary view I'm also pretty sure that given a famous "highbrow" literature or art work, you could easily find plenty of respected critics who think it's shit, and vice versa for "lowbrow" works.
- djrobstep 8y agoThe article itself is an example of the same phenomenon! "Philistines say these unreadable books are garbage, but sophisticates like me say they have great merit."
- MisterTea 8y agoI think it goes both ways. You have wannabees and genuine craftsmen who really put a lot of effort into their work. Sometimes you have to really look at the artist, their past, their state of mind, etc. Emotion is a powerful brush when wielded by a craftsman. To a novice of a persons work, it might look like shit stains on toilet paper but behind the scene is the process of creation, what inspired them is just as important. Think more blacksmith, less jerk with a guitar trying to pick up chicks. Sometimes the jerk with the guitar makes it big. Such is life.
- thrower123 8y agoAt least with writing, you have to have gone through the effort to churn out the words and invested the time and energy to put together a story. But expending effort on it alone doesn't make it good... "Literary" fiction tends to fall into this trap a lot, and leans hard towards overwrought character studies of really awful, boring people and their sordid little lives. Every time I see a pickle dish, I have PTSD flashbacks to junior year English and beating Ethan Frome to death...
- dang 8y agoSure, except when it isn't. The opposite generalization contains no information either. (Speaking of which, please don't post low-information rants to HN.)
- apocalypstyx 8y agoI wonder if the more pertinent question might be: why are some people so seemingly afraid of random drips of paint? (And while I'm not claiming to know your own views on the subject) I interestingly find this most commonly expressed by people who also happen to be deep believers in free-market-solves-everything. And one of the biggest complaints so many people have is the money aspect, whether it be how much actors or sports players are paid or, in this case, artists. Ostensibly, that by definition, pay in a free market would flux, that is, that there would be no baseline. But that seems to be the problem. They, often, tend to also complain about things like popular music. Yet, popular music is directly the result of driving to produce more of what the listener wants (as dictated by actual buying patterns, and not people say they want)(we could talk about influencing of fads and the priming of consumers, but why shouldn't that just as easily have its place in the market?). But in returning to remuneration, isn't it possibly that the exact fear expressed here the fear of the very core of free market enterprise, that there is no standard value, and that by definition, my value (which is, obviously, probably what I'm most immediately concerned with, as it determines my very ability to survive in the modern world) can fluctuate from positive to zero to, even, negative. So the desire seems to be to have the free market aspect, and what ever is seemingly being gained from it, which is whole other problem, but import into it some sort of universal standard base value that exists out there as some sort of Platonic ideal, therefore to know the 'value' of anything requires only a conversion from this universal base value to any specific real-world exchange, more or less. But, obviously, this is in direct opposition to the core of free markets. So, then, is it merely an expression of anxiety related to relativism? Those arguing sometimes try to get around this by investing 'effort', that is, Caravaggio supposedly takes more effort than Pollock, say, to render a given painting, so therefore one is 'worth' more than the other. But, really, isn't this just the idea of a universal base value being snuck in under cover? After all, it does not depend on how much work is involved in anything, it only depends on what amount of value someone (and how many someones) is willing to offer in exchange for it. Indeed, isn't the desire always to spend less in development and deliver than theoretical competitors? Isn't that the core way in which the free market is supposed to deliver unto us everything we never knew we wanted? The problem is that, fundamentally, art is probably much like the law, is probably fundamentally tautological. That is, what is art, and what is great art, more exactly, is that which which we say is art and that which we say is great art.
- ebullientocelot 8y agoThis seems silly to me--if an idea or subject _is_ difficult, then so be it. If something difficult to read is worth it to somebody, then that person will read it. I don't understand the fascination with difficulty--whatever that means, as an independent metric. To me, the value of writing is the idea or set of ideas the writing expresses.
- fmblwntr 8y agoI think you're agreeing with the article if I understand your point correctly?
- ebullientocelot 8y agoIn a way--my question boils down to why this was written in the first place. Engaging with literary criticism is an invitation to perpetuate literary criticism :P
- aaronmcs 8y agoI think it is important not to boil fiction down into the 'idea or set of ideas the writing expresses' because if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative? Instead, I think the fascination with difficulty is exactly this -- the idea that some ideas are amorphous and difficult to express directly, and that authors have tried (successfully and less so) drastic measures to try and, in their own way, do exactly what you said in your comment. And there is something, for some, inherently interesting in the different contortions of text that experimental writers have come up with.
- alwaysreading 8y agoArticle is mainly about a book that hasn’t been released to the general public yet... Milkman by Anna Burns - https://amzn.to/2FmziiX https://amzn.to/2FmziiX
- dang 8y agoThere was a recent post about a difficult book I'd never heard of, and probably won't read, but the article was fascinating. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18052562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18052562
- crimsonalucard 8y agoImpenetrability creates an illusion of truth. The act of deciphering meaning produces the same endorphins as solving a puzzle. The end result of reading such a text is that you see something new from a different angle but that thing may not be real. It is the catharsis one feels at the end of the journey of decoding an impenetrable text that may mask the fact that the core message is a lie. The bible is a good example of this.
- booleandilemma 8y agoI felt this way when reading Karl Popper’s book “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”. I feel as if he went out of his way to be hard to understand.
- commandlinefan 8y agoPeople get down on Knuth for the same reason (the author of, by far, the hardest books I’ve ever read), but in Knuth’s case it’s actually just that he’s being absolutely concise.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Koshkin 8y agoThe most difficult books I have read were just bad translations.
- tabtab 8y agoSomebody once said, "Bad teachers prepare kids for bad bosses, which they are likely to encounter." While I agree with that to some extent based on actual experience, taken too far it can hamper education. If you flunk math or English because of a bad teacher, it can set your entire education behind schedule. Perhaps make sure the difficult teachers are not in key subjects that have course path dependencies. Similar for books. (You will encounter poorly-written instructions in the work-place, which difficult books prepare you for.)
- mikekchar 8y agoRandom anecdote. I once had a terrible English teacher. I was transferred into the class midstream (for unrelated reasons). After my first class I went to my new teacher and said, "I really love writing. In the previous class the teacher was planning on having a creative writing section. Will we have one in this class?" At which point the English teacher replied, "Writing has nothing to do with English and only one teacher in this school thinks otherwise". I was a bit disheartened, but as English was my favourite class, I decided to just enjoy the other aspects of the class. We had a midterm exam for which half of the grade was an essay question on a novel we had been reading. I admit that I wanted to impress my teacher, so I read the book over and over again, practically memorising it. When I wrote my essay, I was able to quote passages of it. I was reasonably proud of my effort. Imagine my shock when my paper was returned and I received a 0 for the essay! The only comment on the paper was "Terrible". In tears, I went to my teacher and asked, "What's wrong with the essay? I studied really hard and even added a lot of quotes". The teacher seemed surprised. "Oh. You actually care about this. Well, your essay was badly written. The quotes were nice, but everything else was terrible. I couldn't give you any marks". Very frustrated, I went back to my parents and complained. They read my paper and to their credit they said, "Well, I wouldn't have given this a zero, but it could use some improvement". Then they taught me how to write. I spent the next 3-4 months writing essays every day because I was so frustrated. Fast forward a few decades and I still love writing, thanks to my parents. I have mixed feelings about that teacher. Truly, she was messed up in serious ways. She tended to give high marks to cute boys that she tried to chat up after class. She would also randomly form some kind of hatred for individual students and would do her best to crush them under her heel. However, she was the first teacher who ever told me that my writing sucked. All my other teachers were so focused on my enthusiasm that they forgot to give me criticism. Without my terrible teacher, my parents wouldn't have intervened and I think I never would have learned to write. It's a weird world.
- LarryMade2 8y agoYears ago I talked to the local head librarian about donating some programming books and stuff. She had requested that they can't be difficult or hard... Part of the reason I patronize my library is because to me it is like a mental gymnasium, where all this great equipment there to test my intellectual flexibility and endurance, too tough? I go for easier, but I appreciate the hard stuff because at some point, I, or someone else will find them useful. Yes, we all NEED access to difficult books (and old books before they refined the such subjects and made them so difficult), don't make our libraries and book shops into mere mental playgrounds.
- kopo 8y agoAnd difficult newspapers! And difficult news! Our journalist class has somehow got into this ELI5 routine, where they feel obligated to turn every complex subject into something a fifth grader can debate about.
- gmueckl 8y agoI kind of miss the articles that span 10 pages and really dive into a subject matter. Modern long form articles seem unnecessarily padded with personal stories to me. The actual information content is not that much in the end.
- probably_wrong 8y agoFor a good example of long form journalism done right, I heartily recommend The Guardian's article about what will happen when the Queen of England dies [1]. I never thought there would be that much protocol to it, but clearly I was wrong. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
- CM30 8y agoYou can probably blame readability tests, SEO and other related stuff for that. There's a lot of advice online saying that simply written, clearly broken up articles divided into small sections/lists and aimed at a fifth grader's reading level are the way to attract more traffic/readers. Well maybe that and lowest common denominator marketing. Or the need to pander to social media users, most of whom have at best about five minutes to read an article and not much knowledge of its background.
- seibelj 8y agoThe best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning. Literature may be different, but I still prefer fiction that tells its story without me having to scratch my head for hours.
- JadeNB 8y ago> The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. I agree with this, except that I think that it is important to understand the caveat "as possible". It may be (I assert, though some argue) that the absolute clearest possible way to express something is not very clear. > This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning. I take issue with the idea that evidence for the best kind of writing is adduced from the popularity of that writing; I think that popular writing can be bad, and (perhaps less commonly) good writing can be unpopular. Nonetheless I think that the end of your sentence expresses the important idea very well: "… without losing their meaning." I think that there is too much of a trend in modern expositions to achieve the appearance of clarity and accessibility by dumbing down subjects enough to give readers only the feeling of understanding—which is not only probably bad on its own, but can also make the same readers resistant to later learning the subtleties, because discussing them sacrifices what they see as the clarity and accessibility of their preferred (incomplete) exposition.
- madhadron 8y agoConveying meaning as clearly as possible implies direct, simple prose when you assume the reader shares a language game (per Wittgenstein) with you. Thus a theoretical physicist can communicate a fact about field theories to a colleague very directly, but that communication is hardly clear to a layman. What do you do if what you are working on is meaning that doesn't fit the usual language game, and part of the work is seeing what varying the language game can do to meaning? Then there is no direct prose. There is a fabrication of an artifact that leads the reader experientially to this new language game in all its nuance.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 8y agoAs is often the case, the word "Books" is used when they apparently just mean "Novels". Tristram Shandy difficult?! Strange. Would you call Monty Python 'difficult'? It is, however, hilarious, and still seems very modern, despite the first part dating from 1759. The humour is quite Pythonish, but goes further in every direction. Including mocking 'difficult' scientific and philosophical writers, real and imagined, on (probably) most of its pages. Very highly recommended. As is Sterne's second (and last) novel A Sentimental Journey, much shorter and less crazy than Tristram. The less that happens, the better it gets.
- avinium 8y agoPlowing my way through Tristram Shandy at the moment, and I would definitely agree that it's "difficult". Not so much the contemporary vernacular (though that doesn't help), but rather the discontinuous hyperactivity with which the author jumps back and forth between time periods and characters. It's also pretty long-winded and Sterne takes his time to labor his point. It's definitely enjoyable, but it's not an "easy" read.
- yesenadam 8y agoAh ok. Well, if it feels like 'plowing', read something else. If it seems too long, read something else. If you don't think it's super-funny, read something else. Life's too short. I was going to suggest A Sentimental Journey, which is more like a....continuous narrative, but maybe you'd think that long-winded too. But like I said, the less that happens, the funnier it gets. And people who like a movie don't complain about it being too long! I can understand someone not liking/appreciating the humour, which is craziness on a grand scale, but to hear anyone (much less someone who writes for the Guardian) found it difficult is a surprise.
- yesenadam 8y agoGee, downvoted for that. Also a surprise. Would downvoters care to explain why?
- coldtea 8y ago
- BLKNSLVR 8y agoThe most interesting quote in the article: ‘Are you trying to reward the book that pushes literature forward the most; or are you wanting to select the book that you most want to push into the hands of people all round the world?’ That's a darn conundrum. An interesting problem. It's almost having to corrupt the purpose of the award in order to maintain its value. If an amazing work of literature requires a university education in languages just to understand, it'd be self-defeating to award it the prize because the prize then becomes of interest only to those with a university education in languages. For the article overall, I feel like it can relate to any form of art by replacing specific books and authors with their analogies in other artistic fields. But then it occurred to me that literature / books / novels are adjudicated differently to music and film for example. Literature awards are much less a popularity contest than music and film (movie) awards. Higher-brow by the fact that there's a higher barrier to entry (ie. reading). Fundamentally, however: We need difficult music. We need difficult movies. We need difficult personalities. We need difficult engineering. Because easy is for the birds. Easy isn't progress.
- MattyRad 8y agoI agree that film is a different beast than literature, but if anyone is looking for mentally and artistically challenging films, I recommend anything by A24 Studios (https://a24films.com/films https://a24films.com/films). I would argue that we're seeing a small/low-budget film renaissance, A24 is evidence of that.
- Klover 8y agoAre those movies good or “good”? A book I can go to the library for and judge for myself, those movies require me to change iTunes Store, set up payment methods, keep an evening clear, before I can judge what might be a pretentious story with painful actors.
- johnchristopher 8y agoThere are no movies with pretentious story and painful actors in the iTunes Store ?
- hodgesrm 8y agoYes! Thomas Mann was in the list of difficult books. I remember marveling how he set up a joke in Buddenbrooks 50 pages before springing the punchline. He's an incredibly disciplined and patient storyteller. Who is your favorite 'difficult' author?
- bshimmin 8y agoI've been very gently dipping into Proust for the last year or so: I find it hard to read more than a few pages of À la recherche... at a time (mostly due to the exhaustions of work and children), but when I do, I always enjoy it. Just the other day I realised I'd read a number of pages which did nothing more than describe a man waking up and getting out of bed; when I realised this, I laughed out loud at the preposterousness of it.
- hodgesrm 8y agoThis. That's exactly how some of Mann's jokes work. I've had the same experience with A la recherche. After a while you realize the author is kind of having you on. (Not always of course but there's definitely satirical humor in these accounts.)
- taejo 8y agoI've had Buddenbrooks on my Kindle for ages and I was just starting to think my German had improved enough to give it another attempt, but I struggle with that kind of thing even in my native language.
- briandear 8y agoThe real important question: is it a good story? Booker winners, in my experience have been often pretentious garbage masquerading as high art. Examples: Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) While the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy.
- EliRivers 8y agoWhile the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy. Now that is an interesting thing for someone to say. Are you American, or do you live in America? Where that question is leading is that I wonder if you find American fiction more accessible because it's written by and for Americans, and thus you already have the context to understand and appreciate it.
- LandR 8y agoI had a conversation once with a friend about a book I was reading. She asked what it was about, and I told her. She said, and I quote, "that sounds like one of those thinking books. I don't like them." I miss her.
- looper-life 8y agoIt is a point of view of every individual which book is difficult and which not. For some The Little Prince can be difficult, for other War and Peace is an easy breezy book to understand. We percept thing s differently and I think that is the beauty of reading a book, everyone can interpret it in his own way.
- nickdothutton 8y agoWriting is an art, even non-fiction writing, and it is the art part that I work-on and worry most about in my own writing (all of which is non-fiction). Difficult books, yes. That doesn't mean books without stylistic beauty or felicity. It doesn't mean books that have been poorly edited (IMO the largest failing in many books, which could easily be 25% shorter with better editing).
- netcan 8y agoI think the goodness or badness of hardness hinges on the reason for the difficulty. Sure, doing hard things is a good thing for satisfaction and character building. That doesn't mean a math book that's harder to understand is better than one that's easy. I think Finnegan's Wake (mentioned in the article) is a good example. It's difficult and good, but for different reasons. Joyce was being expiremental. He wrote from inside a characters head, a POV style that's very common in modern novels. So, the expirement worked. So, in a sense, it's hard in the way driving an early, expiremental car is probably hard. Trying to read Joyce for entertainment is like trying to learn physics from "Principia." Cute, but probably a terrible idea. Reading either to engage with the history of novels or physics... this is why people still read these today. People might get a sense of satisfaction frim the difficulty, but this does not mean we need people to write like Joyce or Newton. There needs to be an honest reason for difficulty, and the problem with most difficult writing is bad reasons. Poor technique. Partially formed thoughts. Intentional obscurity. Orwellian use of jargonized dialect... Finnegan's wake would have been a better work if it was written easier. The difficulty is a flaw.
- vixen99 8y ago'written easier'?
- netcan 8y agoSorry, I meant gooder.
- beaconstudios 8y agoit sounds like a parallel with the paradigm of essential vs accidental complexity in software design. A good book is one that minimises accidental complexity, a good+hard book is one that also has high essential complexity.
- netcan 8y agoYep. Sounds like another case of the same thing.
- 8y ago
- tw1010 8y agoReally getting sick of using the internet with all these cookie, gdpr, paywall, newsletter, and ad popups. Starting to feel much more drawn to getting most of my knowledge from (pop-up free) books.
- ilamont 8y ago“I see fiction as being divided into two categories. Work that confirms and celebrates and panders and work that confounds and perplexes and challenges." This type of thinking is toxic, akin the bullshit aphorisms spouted by politicians ("you're either with us or against us") or smug VCs ("if you're not working 14 hours per day, you're not an entrepreneur"). It forces authors and audiences to contort themselves into this black/white view of literature that tosses anything that's not "difficult" into a pile that's not worth creating or reading.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- netcan 8y agoEven worse, it encourages cargo cults. Conspicuous busy-ness. Jargonized writing styles. Watches that are expensive because no one wants a cheap watch. The writer is observing something, but the causality is wrong. People read hard to read stuff because it's good. It's not good because it's hard.
- slededit 8y agoDo you not see the irony in calling something toxic? Your not saying its merely wrong - but that its on par with poison.
- theoh 8y agoIt's OK to distinguish between healthy and diseased specimens of any organic phenomenon, thinking included. e.g. Trump is a toxic narcissist, etc. I can't really take this article seriously as a comment on literature because it uses ugly language like "attitudinal" and "outright funny". Articles in The Guardian usually reflect a particular part of English society that is highly privileged, politically centrist and conformist, and not as smart as it thinks it is. Those attributes probably also characterize the UK audience for literary fiction. It's annoying and smug, and I guess maybe saying that is ugly itself. Surely we should sometimes try to diagnose in good faith where thinking goes wrong. Most people have encountered toxic personalities who they have needed to exclude from their life, for example. You might claim that toxicity is always relational, that it takes two. But there is such a thing as pathology when it comes to personality and mental health. To call something toxic is to call out a pathology for having a seriously negative impact on other people, whether those other people are themselves healthy or not.
- aldanor 8y agoThe username matches.
- yters 8y agoEasy to read does not mean easy to write. I submit the best literature is a fairly easy read, but the construction is quite laborious.
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoThis discussion has already been had and will continue to be had forever. See Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it[1] on this discussion since 2005, which is no doubt just a continuation of existing conflicts in the discussion of "what is literature vs what should literature be". 1. https://harpers.org/archive/2005/10/why-experimental-fiction-threatens-to-destroy-publishing-jonathan-franzen-and-life-as-we-know-it/ https://harpers.org/archive/2005/10/why-experimental-fiction...
- miobrien 8y agoI think "difficult" is the wrong word. I think "challenging" is a better one. In many cases, books (and other forms of expression/art) are acclaimed for being difficult -- but they're difficult for the sake of being difficult. There's difficulty but no reward. After having read some of these books (or attempted to), I think they're pointless. However, we do need challenging books/art. Challenges are how we grow, develop, improve, etc. Something can be challenging without being difficult/impenetrable. Also, challenges come in various forms: they can be stylistic (difficult prose) as well as moral or intellectual or political. (One common complaint I hear about fiction is: "I don't like the characters." Well, yeah, that's sort of the point: you probably wouldn't like a lot of people if you knew them.) Some concrete examples: Novels: Joyce's Ulysses: I actually really like Ulysses. As a whole, it's a slog. But there are wonderful passages throughout. It's also very funny. Wallace's Infinite Jest: same as above, often even funnier as the humor is more contemporary. Films: Malick's The Tree of Life: a wonderful, slow, all-encompassing film that doesn't rely on the conventional approach to narrative