What of Joyce's Ulysses?
The thing is, most authors do put considerable effort into readability, because it helps you get read, published and paid. There's an interesting parallel with this article - writer:programmer :: critique group:code review.
> Programmers, prone to investing their ego in their code, worry about criticism from a lot of people they don’t know. Slurs about competency abound in programmer forums. Code samples out of context get critiqued and subjected to stylistic nit-picking. That process can prove helpful for programmers with thick skins who can interpret criticism as either useful mentoring or useless insults. Less experienced programmers can get misled and brow-beaten. Public code reviews create a kind of programmer performance art, when programmers write code to impress other programmers, or to avoid withering criticism from self-appointed experts
s/programmer/author and it still holds. As does much of the rest of the article.
I would say that programmer education really does underplay reading code. Students are taught to write small pieces and may never be shown a large novel-sized lump of code unless they go looking for it.