Quote:
Originally Posted by teadonkey
I would say the ones that are GOOD are the ones that engaged you without you needing to put forth any effort. If you read a book and felt emotion without needing to TRY to feel it, you've read a good book, regardless of how you felt about the subject matter/type of book.
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It's not always a bad thing to have to put in effort while reading a book. What if you're reading a mystery? You may have to put in effort to keep all the clues in mind and work out the different possibilities before the reveal. A lot of people enjoy this sort of effort.
If you're reading a science fiction book, you may be dumped into a strange, familiar world and have to work out, from whatever information woven in with the story, what the heck's going on. Sometimes it's not easy but it's still worth it--to fans of science fiction.
On the other hand, if the author has been unclear in her description, forcing you to struggle more than you should have to in order to get a picture of the scene and characters and what's going on, that's the author's failing. I find this with a lot of literary fiction. The author is too busy making everything sound poetic to be clear. This is something I find unbearable, and I wonder why literary fiction is supposed to be so great and a higher art form than genre fiction when most of it is so bad.