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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Admittedly The Brothers Karamazov has a lot of characters, but, it does run linearly! And it's not so hard to refer to the Wikipedia article for a character list as necessary.

I think the problem is some people expect to not have to do any work when reading literary novels.

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The Penguin Classics edition of TBK contains a character guide which is indispensable for western readers.

I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition or a sense of wonder (or whichever benchmark you choose) than simpler and more accessible works. If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve? I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal.

I just wanted to point out the logical gymnastics you just performed here: I find it true, thus it is true universally.

Your initial premise: "I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition..."

Your conclusion from this premise: "If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve?"

And you answer your own question with a cynical take: "I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal."

This makes me want to kick myself for reading Hacker News to be illuminated about the arts.

Still, I love user lermontov!

I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.

Okay, I got that.

The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.

Since that is the entirely conventional take on literature I couldn’t possibly be missing that.

(Edit: re-reading what I wrote earlier I can see how it can be read that way. My bad. )

For me it's not even that, it's simply that The Brothers Karamazov and other novels like it have historicity and depth to them in a way that modern-style light popcorn novels never do. The hardness therefore is more incidental than the means to an end in itself.

And for what it's worth, there's plenty of modern-style "hard" novels that I've enjoyed immensely as well, including House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth, and [pick any Neal Stephenson novel published this millennium].

Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and specifically the death marches, as well as the actual full biography of the author (the novel is an autobiography but it only covers one early part of his life).

Exactly - if a work really was so simple that it required no work to understand it, what insight could it possibly give into the human condition? Plenty of "simple" works are reliant on the reader already having done work to grasp it, from growing up in the right country/culture/subculture to learning the right things in school.

That’s why I talked about unnecessary complexity. Of course many hard things in life are worthwhile. I don’t think anybody would argue otherwise.

Well, yes, unnecessary complexity is unnecessary by definition. The argument is over which complexity is unnecessary.

What are some examples of complex works? What are some examples of simpler, more accessible works?

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