At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.

Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

Why Dune is still the greatest science fiction novel ever written

There are books you admire. There are books you enjoy. Then there are the handful that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Frank Herbert's Dune belongs firmly in that last category for me. I've lost count of how many times I've read it, and every return journey to Arrakis reveals something I missed before. It isn't simply one of my favourite science fiction novels. It is one of my favourite novels, full stop. There, I said it.

Beautiful sentences, difficult people: Can we separate a writer’s style from their reputation?

There are writers we admire without reservation. Then there are the others.

The writers whose sentences remain brilliant while their reputations grow increasingly uncomfortable. The writers whose private behaviour, political beliefs or public remarks alter the atmosphere around their books.

A novel or essay once encountered innocently can become harder to read after we learn more about the person who wrote it. The words have not changed, but the reader has.

Down a literary rabbit hole with Christopher Caudwell, Spain and the forgotten writers of the 1930s

Sometimes you pick up a book in a second-hand bookshop. You have never heard of the writer, but you like the cover, and that is all it takes to send you down a literary rabbit hole.

This is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I picked up three detective novels from the 1930s by Christopher St John Sprigg.

At first, Sprigg appears to belong comfortably to the world of Golden Age crime fiction. He wrote ingenious mysteries with titles such as Fatality in Fleet Street, The Perfect Alibi and Death of an Airman.

A hundred years of murder: reading Agatha Christie while writing crime

One hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published a novel that would change crime fiction.

First released in June 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was only Christie’s third Hercule Poirot novel. In 2013, members of the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the CWA Best Ever Novel, placing it above books by Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers and other giants of the genre.

That is quite a legacy for one murder in a small English village.

The return of the difficult woman in fiction

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane Eyre, and there is still something thrilling in the force of it. It is not merely a romantic declaration. It is a refusal to be made smaller, prettier or more convenient than the self demands. 

The difficult woman in fiction has many ancestors, and Jane is one of them. For a long time, women in fiction were allowed to be many things, provided they were legible.

Why we keep returning to campus novels

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope, and campus novels have been proving him right ever since. Not because education itself is dangerous, although anyone who has sat through a three-hour seminar on structuralism may disagree, but because knowledge can become tangled with vanity, desire and the desperate wish to be exceptional.

Campus novels are rarely about education.

This is odd, given the setting. There are lectures, libraries, tutorials, essays, departmental politics and people quoting dead Europeans with the confidence of those who have not yet had to assemble flat-pack furniture. But the real subject of the campus novel is almost never the syllabus. It is a desire. Reinvention. Exclusion. Ambition. The intoxicating belief that a life can be remade by proximity to books, clever people and old buildings.

Is the literary internet making us better readers?

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is a useful thing to remember in an age when reading can so easily become a performance metric. To read well is not simply to consume a book. It is to meet it, resist it, misunderstand it for a while, and perhaps find that it has been quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind.

There was once a pleasing simplicity to being a reader. You read a book. You liked it, hated it, abandoned it on page 47, pressed it upon a friend, or left it to gather dust with the quiet moral authority of something you still intended to finish.

Why the shrinking sentence might tell us more than we think

Every so often, someone announces that the novel is in decline. Usually, this is followed by a familiar roll call of suspects: phones, streaming, BookTok, schools, short attention spans, modern life, the algorithm, and the general moral decay of people who do not own enough bookmarks.

This time, though, the anxiety has a number attached.

A recent Economist piece argued that it is not only that people are reading less, but that “the texture of what is being read is changing,” noting that its analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers found that sentences in popular books have become almost a third shorter since the 1930s.

When a book becomes too heavy to hold: Reading A Little Life

Some books draw us in gently. Others demand something from us. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that does both. 

It's a book, which, for me, was packed with such overbearing emotional weight, emotion so densely packed like bodies pressed together on the tube, that it is a challenging read.

The comfort of unlikeable characters and why we do not need to like who we read about

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from spending time with characters you do not especially like. They make poor decisions. They frustrate. They resist redemption. They say the wrong thing, choose the wrong person, protect themselves when they should reach out, or pursue what they want with a moral flexibility that makes you shift slightly in your seat.

And yet, more often than we might admit, they are the ones who linger. I can think of so many books that are true of this, and we always reach for them.

Why it is time to go deeper into the big Russian novels

If White Nights was your way into Dostoevsky, and Notes from Underground was the book that made you realise Russian fiction could feel unnervingly alive, then this is the moment to go further in, not step back. 

White Nights became a genuine social media sensation in the UK, with the Penguin edition climbing to fourth among works in translation in 2024, and recent commentary has also noted a BookTok-era rise in interest around Notes from Underground. That feels like the perfect doorway into the larger Russian novels, the books where the scale grows, the stakes deepen, and the tradition fully opens out.

The return of the reader as tastemaker

For years, literary taste was often imagined as something that travelled downwards. Review sections, prize lists, critics, established media, and publishing gatekeepers shaped the conversation, and readers received it. That version was never entirely true, but it held enough power to feel convincing.

Now the flow looks messier, faster, and far more interesting.

Readers are not just participating in book culture. They are actively shaping it. In many cases, they are driving it.

Seven Joan Didion quotes that reveal what made her writing so singular

Joan Didion is one of those writers whose lines seem to follow you around. There are lines I have read, then underlined, then found again years later in someone else’s essay, in the margins of a notebook, in the kind of conversation that starts with books and ends somewhere closer to confession.

The danger, of course, is that Didion can become over-quoted and under-read. Her sentences are so clean, so sharp, and so immediately recognisable that they sometimes get flattened into aesthetic objects: elegant, detached, devastating. But the best Joan Didion quotes do much more than sound good. They point to something essential in her work: how she thought about writing, selfhood, memory, control, and the stories people tell in order to survive.

Are readers craving seriousness again?

For a while, it seemed as if everything in reading culture had to arrive pre-translated into momentum. The hook had to be immediate. The concept had to be clear. The emotional register had to be instantly legible. Even literary fiction often had to explain itself in marketable terms.

And yet lately I keep noticing a quiet countercurrent. Readers seem increasingly drawn to books that ask more of them, not in a punishing or self-important way, but in a deeper one. Books that move slowly. Books that leave gaps. Books that are willing to be difficult in the most useful sense of the word.

It makes me wonder whether readers are craving seriousness again.

It's about books that demand attention 

By seriousness, I do not mean solemnity. I do not mean books that are humourless, inaccessible, or determined to make the reader feel inadequate. I mean fiction that treats thought, feeling, and form as matters of consequence. Books that are not afraid of ambiguity. Books that take language seriously. Books that expect attention rather than chasing approval.

Spare and elegant books

There are plenty of recent examples. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is spare, elegant, and morally alert. Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is intense, formally controlled, and deeply unsettling. Jon Fosse’s septology novels ask for patience and surrender rather than speed. Even books like Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck or Orbital by Samantha Harvey suggest an appetite for fiction that is contemplative, unusual, and not overly eager to smooth itself out for the reader.

This shift may partly be a reaction to the conditions around us. So much contemporary life is built on interruption, compression, and performance. We are always skimming something, reacting to something, moving on to the next thing. In that context, a serious novel can feel less like a challenge than a relief. It
offers duration. It asks for sustained attention. It assumes that not everything important can be absorbed at speed.

Readers want something more

I do not think this means lighter or more obviously entertaining fiction is on the way out. Nor should it be. Reading is too varied for that kind of false choice. But I do think the old assumption that readers only want pace, relatability, and instant access has started to look a bit flimsy.

There is evidence everywhere, if you look closely. The steady love for authors like Elizabeth Strout, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, and Marilynne Robinson. The enthusiasm around short novels that are dense rather than slight. The way readers keep returning to writers such as Toni Morrison, Annie Ernaux, and Virginia Woolf, not as homework but as living presences in their reading lives.

Even online, where speed tends to dominate, you can see readers making room for richer conversations. Not always, of course. But enough to matter. People are still seeking books that feel intellectually alive, emotionally exact, and resistant to simplification.

Perhaps the word seriousness is slightly misleading. What readers may actually be craving is not seriousness for its own sake, but substance. A sense that the book believes something is at stake. A sense that language matters. A sense that reading can still be transformative rather than merely consumable.

I find that encouraging

Because serious fiction, at its best, does not shut readers out. It invites them in more fully. It asks them to bring more of themselves to the act of reading. And when that invitation lands, it can create the kind of encounter no algorithm can really flatten into a trend.

Maybe that is what I keep noticing now. Not a grand return to seriousness in some tidy cultural sense, but a renewed hunger for books that trust readers to think, feel, and stay with complexity.

Which, in its own quiet way, feels hopeful.

Suggested reads

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Recommended for its seriousness of theme, moral clarity, and elegant restraint.

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Recommended for its intensity and for the way it refuses to dilute political and emotional pressure.

• Septology by Jon Fosse. Recommended for readers who want fiction that demands patience and rewards deep immersion.

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Recommended for its contemplative structure and its refusal to chase conventional momentum.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Recommended because it shows how serious fiction can be tender, lucid, and profoundly humane.

What makes a distinctive sentence?

There are some writers I can recognise within a paragraph. Occasionally within a line.

Not because they repeat themselves, and not because they are full of obvious flourishes, but because their sentences carry a particular pressure, rhythm, and intelligence. A distinctive sentence is not just decorative. It reveals how a writer sees.

The comfort reread, and what it says about your life right now

I have a small, slightly embarrassing ritual. When I can’t decide what to read next, I reread something I already know. Sometimes it is one chapter. Sometimes it is the whole book, like slipping into a familiar coat that still fits even if I have changed shape in the meantime.

This is the point where the productive part of my brain tries to intervene. You could be reading something new, it hisses. You could be expanding your horizons. You could be… achieving.

Why the literary middle is disappearing, and what it means for readers

There is a particular kind of book I worry about more and more. It is not the huge publishing event novel with a six-figure campaign and a table display in every bookshop.

 It is not the aggressively marketable thriller, nor the prestige title already carrying prize buzz before most readers have turned page one. It is the intelligent, well-written, emotionally exact novel that sits somewhere in between.