...and that's why I don't read contemporary literary fiction

"There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag."  Lev Grossman in the Wall Street Journal

I find that life is depressing and difficult enough these days without committing my limited reading time to slogging through some door-stopper filled with unlikeable people dragging through hundreds of pages of dull misery before petering out in irresolution.

So I want to add here that I just finished reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Elinor Lipman's The Family Man (previously mentioned in "books on my list"), which was not filled with unlikeable people dragging through hundreds of pages of dull misery, and about which the Washington Post noted, “Just because something is ‘light’ doesn’t mean it’s not masterful.”