Done with all the fuck fuck fuckin around

Having read the wikipedia entry for the House of Leaves (note: lots o' spoilers), I feel better about stopping. One of the main games is the narrator game. Just WHO is narrating this? And he is he/she/it reliable? I find the unreliable narrator thing to be a bit tiresome, although I liked it in When We Were Orphans. Also, while I found a number of passages to be quite chilling or moving, I had to slog through thirty uninteresting pages to get to them. That is just not a sustainable ratio.

I must admit to a particular reading bias, which grad school only reinforced. I like clarity and simplicity. Just tell or clearly evoke the idea or feeling you are trying to communicate. I, like most readers, don't have the time to mull over and chew on each and every passage. Sure, it is great to reflect on the book and its ideas, but the experience of reading it should not be difficult. This is a fine balance. Gravity's Rainbow can be infuriating when it is pbtuse, but it is also fascinating and at turns hilarious. Who can ever forget the English candy torture scene? Then again it leads to the creations of articles like this one. Every field of study has a jargon (what better way to keep out the uninitiated?). While much of the argument in an international relations paper is obvious to me, it would be confusing to someone unused to the language. There is a school in the literary world that seems to take particular pleasure in obfuscation and confusion. It's just so much navel gazing. You know what? Fuck that noise.

One of the reasons I enjoy good science fiction and mysteries is that they often have something to say about society. These books are much more socially engaged, often with direct or indirect criticism of what's wrong with national or global society. I'm not taking the Socialist Realist line that art should support politics, but some involvement is a good thing. It's also good for books to point out what is right with society as well. Although this tends to be boring, so people will gravitate to what is wrong over what is right.

Science fiction and mystery books are generally more welcoming than literary fiction. Franzen's shock and horror at being named an Oprah book club is anindicator of the elitism of the literary world. What's wrong with being (small d) democratic? You sell more books and more people are exposed to your ideas, assuming you have some.