[Kiro]

I'm pretty sure most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning. You make it sound like everything out there is some deep philosophical hard sci-fi. I would never want to read something where I spend the whole night just to make it through 20 pages. Sounds exhausting and not enjoyable at all.

[jimhefferon]

> most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning

That's fine; keep doing what you enjoy. But there is life-changing fiction, so it is not as though there is nothing a person could choose to read that would be great.

[Kiro]

Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.

[Veen]

Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.

They can be good or great entertainment, but that's not what is generally meant when educated people say that a book is great literature. The artistic value of a book is almost independent of how entertaining it might be.

(I say "almost independent" because people who care about the "deeper meaning" get great pleasure from taking their time to discover it.)

[nostalgk]

This is not what I meant to imply. While I prefer heavier reads, my point was that a cursory reading of any piece of literature pretty rarely results in a full consumption of it. The Great Gatsby is a pretty easy read, too, but it is steeped in symbolism that would be tough to fully interpret in a cursory read. Complexity != Quality

[jimhefferon]

I think that the best books, including fiction, are ones that I find myself reflecting on later. Sometimes years later. I don't find that airport mysteries do that for me.

Although, sometimes I read those and enjoy them, mostly in an airport. No harm done.

[richardthered]

I think what you get out of a book is more about the person reading it, and what they are looking for, than it is about the story itself.

Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" could be read by one person as just a whimsical children's tale. Someone else, though, might see it as an interesting allegory on the journeys that a person might face in their own life.

Likewise, I might look at a squirrel burying nuts in the ground, and see just a squirrel. But a buddhist monk might derive some great wisdom from watching the very same thing.