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 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.

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 two Kate Atkinson books we should talk about much more

There are books that arrive with a chorus of approval already attached to them. You can hear the noise before you even turn the first page: prize longlists, ecstatic reviews, the familiar phrases about brilliance and urgency and importance. 

Then there are books that are quietly absorbed into the background of contemporary fiction, admired, recommended now and then, occasionally pressed into a friend’s hands, but rarely given the full, sustained conversation they deserve.

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins belong to the second category, which feels faintly absurd when you consider what they actually do, and how good they are. 

Julian Barnes: The six essential reads

A Sense of an Ending had been on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I can’t believe I put it off for so long.

 It is such a wonderful book, and told in just 150 pages. It has the feel of a much longer novel because it packs so much in. Such a worthy Booker Prize winner.

The waiting game: Why Donna Tartt’s silence is part of the myth

Some authors tour, tweet, podcast, publish—and then there is Donna Tartt. Three novels in more than three decades, no confirmed interviews since 2016, and not a whisper of what she might be writing now. And yet, her presence is everywhere. On BookTok, in dark academia mood boards, in conversations about obsessive friendships and beautiful prose and the kind of writing that insists you slow down and read every word.

It is a peculiar kind of fame: literary, elusive, enduring. And it begs the question—how has Tartt managed to become one of the most recognisable cult authors of our time by doing, ostensibly, so little?

Beyond genre: experimental and alt-lit’s bold new directions

Genres are meant to be helpful. They signpost where to look on the shelves in bookshops and libraries, offering a comforting sense of what to expect. But what happens when a book won’t stay put? 

When its narrative is fragmented, its form elastic, and its voice deliberately hard to pin down?

The quiet power of slow books

Some novels refuse to be hurried. They ask for patience, not because they’re difficult, but because they move differently. You don’t tear through them. You live in them.

I was thinking about this as I slowly make my way through Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. It’s that kind of book. There are, of course, plenty of others.

Why the Classics still cast a spell: reading backwards in the age of the algorithm

Browse through the bookish corners of Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll encounter a familiar pattern: glossy covers, rapid emotional claims, and an endless stream of “must-reads” that promise devastation, catharsis, or shocking twists. 

It sometimes feels that the language of the algorithm values sensation over subtlety. Amid this noisy chorus, the quiet, deliberate appeal of the classics becomes harder to hear, yet more essential than ever. It is the reason that we return to them. And while some say it's about nostalgia. It isn't that at all.