sometimes books are hard to read

and that is fun

While conducting my little check-ins on “what Taylor Swift stans are up to” on X¹ I ended up noticing a very stupid piece of book drama. The short of it is that somebody posted about how they were reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved and how it was hard. A lot of people weighed in to say if you think Beloved is a difficult book that’s a sign of declining literacy. As far as the conversation about Morrison’s work goes, I thought Namwali Serpell’s² posts on the subject said what needed to be said. I don’t have a lot to add; I read Beloved when I was a teenager so I can’t really comment on its difficulty or complexity except to say that a lot of it went over my head at the time.³

There is certainly a… comment dit-on… eau de racisme…? about people acting as if it’s completely and utterly ridiculous to say Toni Morrison wrote books that are challenging to read. But that’s not what I’m here to complain about. I am here to complain about different problem, which I would put like so: some books are c…