[altmanaltman]

I think a lot of what "universal praise" means is just peer pressure and people making their Identity fully around the art they consume. A lot of it is also marketing and pushing tastes into culture.

A key part of how to see if someone is just parotting acceptable opinions vrs is actually having an opinion, is to make them explain it. If its a generic "oh you need to read it, its great" or parotting of popular talking points, that person is not serious about their taste. They use the art as an ornament to make their personalities more interesting than actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way.

The only reaction that matters should be your personal one and what resonates with you.

[jnovek]

This might be survivorship bias, the people who read and enjoy a difficult book for the sake of it probably don’t need social media validation to do so.

[altmanaltman]

or it might be marketing and sales trying to push that book, right? I am not sure what you mean by social media validation though. Telling people what they should like and what they shouldn't like with an external motive to make them like things you sell, is much much older than social media. Blindly engaging with that and basing your views on it is not optimal was my point.

[iammjm]

I think if someone read a book this dense, they earned their keep.

Also, what is our "Identity" if not the sum of all our influences?

[altmanaltman]

Exactly, our identity is the sum of our influences and I also agree if someone actually engages with the art and has their own views on it, that is a good thing.

My comment spoke more about how society just drip feeds us influences via marketing and with an external motivation. That means they are screwing with our very identity itself. My point is that curating those influences is important and shaping your own identity instead of basing it on universal acclaim, reviews, "what does the world think/what must be the right way to think".