Here is my video game analogy on why reading "hard" literature is beneficial:
When you are playing a video game on easy mode, once you know the most basic functions and controls, you are not really challenged, you can beat the game with relative ease. It was enjoyable, and stress free because it did not require your full capabilifies. You decide to play the game over again, and when it comes to choosing the difficulty, you can either choose the same difficulty, remaining unchallenged and now familiar with the mechanics to the degree you can beat it with muscle memory.
You decide to play the hard difficulty. Almost at once you are challenged like never before. The game seems different, you have to take extra care in the mechanics and control, you have to alter your tactics to suit the harder landscape. You find yourself exploring capabilities and modes of thought you didn't know you had. For every difficult passage that takes time and effort you get better.
You decide to go back to the easy difficult just for reminiscence's sake, and it feels boring; too easy, you are not challenged, it is boring.
You can't go back.
Luke Green
I agree, pretty well put.
I also think there's a concrete element to how it expands your mind. It's not just in the abstract and undetectable. I reflexively refer my real life experiences or attempts to understand phenomena to a storehouse of thousands of metaphors and analogies from literature, philosophy, history, etc., on a daily basis. Not just on a simple one-to-one heuristic level, but on a really deep level of knowing something is possible because someone else has thought it, and then being able to expand your own impulse to model reality in that way, more confidently and more fully, into the space created by the experience.
We express what is real through language, but "language" isn't just made up of words with direct reference to reality, it's made up of metaphors and "tagmemes" of all sorts and sizes that are irreducible and carry meaning in and of themselves.
When I imagine "Europe in the year 1300," my brain reflexively calls up an abstraction built instinctively from a bird's-eye map in a video game I played in my teens. When I think of "Ancient Rome," my brain reflexively builds from my geographical and cartographic knowledge of the plain of Latium, from when I was 20, got fed up with my shitty knowledge of geography in studying history, and decided to learn how to use maps and integrate them into my reading. Before I was 20, I can distinctly remember how much hazier my reflexive concept for "Rome" was - it was more like a general picture of Italy, with the vague location of Rome on the west-centre.
If having these concepts become reflexively sedimented in my brain from direct and obvious visual sources is obvious, what about all the concept accretion that ISN'T obvious, like the precise description of a phenomenon or feeling too complex to be summoned completely consciously or described in words, that you got from reading deeply into metaphysics for a decade?
Aaron Reed
Yes, but when you select the very highest difficulty setting it's usually stupidly hard. It's not more complex, it just takes longer to do anything. And so you drop down from extreme to hard and you realise the former was just made so people could say they soldiered through, not because its more enjoyable.
Caleb Kelly
what's the literary equivalent of when you get really good at guitar hero like expert level and you go back and play easy but it's so slow and easy that you actually underestimate it and fuck up
Juan Moore
What do people mean when they say a book is "hard"? Does it mean that it's long, or it's hard to figure out what's going on, or that the ideas are especially thought-provoking/complex? The books that I think of as being hard are Ulysses and Under the Volcano, because you constantly lose track of what the fuck is going on in them.
Mason Lewis
Difficult wording Complex metaphors
Liam Murphy
You didn't really make an argument as to why it's beneficial, /v/tard
Gavin Foster
Fag
Levi Parker
bump
Hunter Harris
>Here is my video game analogy Stopped reading.
Noah Stewart
What is some hard literature?
Thomas Jones
>Hard things are more challenging and more challenging things require more of you
STOP THE PRESSES
Caleb Torres
My dick.
Jackson Gray
A videogame on hard mode, silly.
Easton Martin
When you read a shitty book and begin looking into the author's particular choice of words and why such similes/metaphors have been used etc. then you realize it's just shit
Evan Barnes
This is idiotic. Being hard is integral to the quality of a videogame, since the player is the active agent in it's system. Same thing doesn't apply to literature. Back to /v/, faggot
Bentley Anderson
Yes it does
Bentley Thompson
I honestly cannot tell whether you are a child, have autism or this is bait, fair play for making me reply though.
Samuel Morgan
>i will blankly criticise something with no actial retort
You argue like a child
Austin Turner
user is right, you know.
Leo Gutierrez
>I will back up someone with no retort, with no retort of my own.
If you disagree, state why.
John Fisher
I'm not arguing. You haven't even posted anything for me to argue against, just the ramblings autistic ramblings of a teenage malcontent.
Brayden Rivera
see
Cooper Long
Yet again, no argument, nothing but blank criticisms and ad hominem.
Lucas Parker
>the reader is not the active agent in the book
I suppose books were written just to appear on a shelf, were they?
Landon Scott
You are confusing reading with playing videogames.
Aaron Martinez
I don't think you understand what active agency means. A book is exactly the same no matter who reads it. A game can unravels differently depending on who plays it.
Brayden Gomez
this
Justin Reyes
No it doesn't
Ian Allen
take the redpill
Gavin Sanchez
That's a really fucking bad analogy.
Here's a better one:
Some games are old. They're a pain in the arse to set up, and their UI is strange and confusing. But plenty of them are still fucking good, and to miss out on them because of their UI would be a shame.
Some other games aren't old, but they're experimental. Or they just focus on other things than (graphical) aesthetics and UI. But it'd be a shame to give Dwarf Fortress a miss just because of that.
Difficulty in a book is not some beneficial thing. It can be, yes, but not inherently. War and Peace is the easiest shit in the world to read. Is it bad? No!
However, I do think the "going back to an easier mode" analogy is spot-on.
David Jackson
Heroin
Christian Bell
Toughest book i've read was the metaphysics. Haven't read but philosophy since. (Save for the ramayana)
Now, i read the meditations and op's argument is kinda flawed
Isaiah Cook
Except I can enjoy both difficulties.
And your anology's biggest flaw is that the person is playing the same game. We read different books.
So it's more like reading easy books (games like Pokemon), and books that are difficult but still good (Super Meat Boy). There are most definitely books that are challenging but not good (I Wanna Be The Guy).
OP, you don't read challenging books just because they're challenging (if you are you're reading them for the wrong reason) you read good challenging books because they are good.
Brayden Long
This analogy doesn't work because difficulty settings don't really change the content of the game.
The equivalent to difficulty settings in literature would be to take a book and change common words into uncommon words of the same meaning. Now you would feel challenged while reading the book but there is no benefit to it. You get the same content only much slower and more painful, which will probably make the information stick much better in your head.
Juan Bennett
>when you select the very highest difficulty setting it's usually stupidly hard Hate to say it, but that's usually just because you're bad. It does depend on the game though just like some books can be overly complicated due to bad writing.
Nolan Jenkins
That's when you're arguing with some retard on the internet and have to reread his post ten times and double fact check everything because he surely can't be that retarded.
Tyler James
Ah yes Americans and their latent self-hate lol.
Daniel Ramirez
ad hominem is attacking a person instead of their argument, when I am presented with an argument, then you can accuse me of ad hominem.