There are those who read for the actual contents the book, and there are those who want to see word games. Vast majority of non-fiction appeals to the former and thus there is no issue, if you read non-fiction, you know what you're getting yourself into. If an unexpecting reader picks up a non-fiction book and finds that it's of the word game kind, it'll simply be called either sophistry or nonsense.But if you pick up a work of fiction, there is no consensus on what it should be, nor what the reader can expect. Someone who read all Agatha Christy novels, by all means someone who reads and enjoys reading, can suddenly find themselves befuddled and unable to comprehend how anyone can find any enjoyment in Pynchon or Nabokov. The opposite is also true, someone who's favourite book is Inherent Vice might pick up a Sanderson novel and freak out because of all the effort involved in making the plot make sense and the fact that author doesn't go on for pages about details unless they're in some way relevant to the story. In a way these are two entirely different genres that have been forced under one umbrella for absolutely no reason other than the medium they use, words on a page. It's like lumping a sports broadcast with star trek as "television", it just doesn't make any sense to group these two together in any context other than the literal printing house. The sooner we can separate the two in public conciousness, the sooner we can stop having these "how is On The Niemen even a book, it's just descriptions of scenery for 8 pages straight" or "plotfags hate this classic author because they keep trying to understand the book instead of feeling it" threads.
Slop literature is cancer and there's a lot of slop "serious" literary fiction too, where the hard to parse prose exists solely as a flex, as a way to distinguish oneself from the masses. Ulysses couldn't have been written in a different way but that's one book.
There are two types of readers. There are those that never expect the unexpected.
>>25389503I don't disagree but my post doesn't have anything to do with "quality" of a work, a book could fall into either of the 2 camps and still be terrible, as judged by their respective audiences.
>>25389438If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re basically saying there’s YA womanslop and real literature, and that distinction needs to be more widely recognized. This will never, ever happen in any meaningful capacity. Women feel superior to men for reading more books, but it’s only marginally (debatably) better than reading nothing but social media, which most men under 40 probably read a Moby Dick’s worth of each month.Keep the fire alive, read real books, but don’t bother wearing it loud and proud because the Grug brains won’t care and the women will feel threatened and call you an incel litbro. People are collectively becoming stupider, from the laypeople on up to the gatekeeping intellectuals. Reminding them of this will only make them angry. Do your part and read, collect physical copies of great books as much as you can to help save real literature for the 75 IQ politeness police trying to save the modern audiences from themselves.
>>25389520>If I’m hearing you correctlyyou're not even close
>>25389503Ulysses stands out to me as one of the only, if not the only, noteworthy book to describe in great detail the experience of a mid-morning bowel movement, nonplussed reading material included.
