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.