Serious vs. breezy ...

Maxine Clarke considers Reading "serious" books. I suspect there really are only books that grab you and books that don't. The Magic Mountain, I presume, is serious enough, but I read it as if it had been a thriller. On the other hand, Sartre's Nausea annoyed me from first page to last - I only finished because I had to. The same with The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield just struck me a s whiny little creep. What is called serious is often pretentious and unpretentious books often turn out to be quite serious in their way - Jean Giono's the Man Who Planted Trees, for instance.