Fifty Shades of Grey gets greyer

"I do think that if they’re going to write at all, they ought to sit down and learn about sentence structure and not punctuate with ludicrous phrases like, “Holy s***” and “Holy

crap”. You have to learn to write. You can’t just decide to be a writer, in the same way that I couldn’t suddenly decide to be Darcey Bussell and jump on to the stage and do ballet, could I? It takes practice. I don’t begrudge anyone making money, but it seems tragic that people are rushing to buy these books at the expense of a lot of very good writers who are really struggling."

 

This is from the excellent and lovely Jilly Cooper in The Times, about Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James. I think that says it all, really, doesn't it?

10 Most Difficult Books: Which ones have you read?

Djuna Barnes' Nightwood is on the list

The Millions have published a list of what they regard as the 10 Most Difficult Books of all time, based on a variety of factors including length, syntactical complexity and abstraction. You can look at the list here. I've read three - Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, which I have been re-reading intermittently this year; Jonathan Swift's A Tale of A Tub, although it was a fair while ago; and Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the inclusion of which has caused most commentators to raise an eyebrow. I really ought to have read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; as for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, I'm not sure I'm ever going to tackle it. Nightwood is another one I should have approached - it's mentioned in an Edward St Aubyn novel:  Patrick Melrose carries it around in his pocket, along with Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, which, in imitation, I carried around in my pocket, although I never got round to reading it.

I'm not sure I agree with posting lists based on difficulty - who can say with any certainty what is difficult or not? Some might say that reading the Bible is difficult; what about reading The Aeneid in Latin, or Lucretius' De Rerum Natura in English? It is, of course, entirely arbitrary, as it's only really based on what the choosers of the lists have themselves read. So is there any point in it at all? Some people find some things difficult; others don't. The point is that we should all challenge ourselves to read the unfamiliar, to grapple with things that are beyond our reach - until those things become in themselves easy. It's like being an athlete or a concert pianist. Some are content to paddle in the tepid waters of Harry Potter and E L James; I'd argue that we should all push ourselves further. Only in this way do we grow. Otherwise we just stare at shadows, flickering on the back of the cave, unaware of the beauties and joys that exist outside. If anything, this list should make us all look behind us and into the light: it may be blinding, but through it, beyond it, there are universes to explore and inhabit. Although maybe not Finnegans Wake.