Yeah, I read it thirty years ago when I was in my twenties, knowing very little about it other than its Great Book status (I’m British so my ignorance of it could hardly have been purer) and I was taken aback at how readable and entertaining it was.

I felt the same way about Les Miserables.

My favourite version of the easily distracted boyfriend meme showed “Herman Melville” as the boyfriend, “the plot of Moby Dick” as the annoyed gf and “facts about whales” as the attractive mystery girl.

Early James Lee Burke.

Comparing yourself to a Yale professor doing a recorded presentation is unfair, it’s like comparing yourself to a professional musician playing a piano concerto.

That professor had a lot of help and tuition, and a lot of practice; also, he rehearsed and studied for the presentation. It may be designed to look spontaneous, like these are things he is thinking of for the first time. It’s not; it’s not intended to deceive if they do it that way, just to convey excitement, but it is an unintentionally misleading artifice.

I recommend that you read some introductory critical literature focusing on work that you really enjoy. Don’t view it as having to scale the heights of world literature, the Miltons and James Joyces etc. Nothing wrong with reading those books, but you risk turning what should be a pleasure into a chore. To discover the ones you do like, get yourself a decent anthology, but not one with condensed books.

I recommend the Norton Anthology of World Literature, it also has historical and literary essays. You can get it quite cheaply online, and it’s a great read.

What is this phenomenon whereby people feel entitled to give an author a hard time about whether he’s finished a book or not?

Does GRRM owe them money or something?

A strength in a character also being a flaw is a literary trope from way back.

One of the classic examples is in Sophocles. Oedipus is an aggressive and curious, highly intelligent man. His aggression and restless intelligence serve him well as he is not intimidated by the sphinx, easily guesses irs riddle and claims his prize (the hand of Jocasta). However it is also his aggression that caused him to not submit to the authority of the man who turns out to have been his father, and prompted Oedipus to kill him and his servants, and his relentless curiosity that uncovers the incest he himself is guilty of.

Shakespeare also dealt with the fatal flaw trope, Macbeth is a man of action who excels at making quick decisions. This quality is balanced by his loyalty and humanity. The tragedy is both his and his wife’s : she urges him to act in his own interest, and to hell with loyalty and humanity. As a result he dispenses with these qualities and his best quality turns into his worst as he turns into a ruthless tyrant, who massacres whole families on a whim and doesn’t even care when his wife dies. Her love and ambition for him, her own fatal flaw, turns him into a monster and she dies mourning the absence in her life of qualities she had previously scorned.

I think it was Coleridge who pointed out that if you had put Othello and Hamlet in each others’ play you would not have had a play. Each would have solved the other’s dilemma in five minutes. Othello would have walked straight up to Claudius and stabbed him, and Hamlet would have had one conversation with Iago and walked away saying “that guy is full of shit, and he fucking hates me”

These are all examples of tragedies, but heroic fiction (which is the genre that both HP and PJ belong to) is often basically tragedy with a happy ending. The fatal flaw/character strength which is also a weakness is also a trope in fiction largely because it’s a thing in real life : any strength carried to extremes becomes a weakness, and a strength is only a strength until it isn’t. People often excel at one area of life and so do that thing in preference to other activities, even when it isn’t appropriate. “If your hand is aa hammer, everything looks like a nail”

Superman, by contrast, has no real weakness, apart from the fact that he cares about other people. That’s partly why he is intrinsically a far more boring character than the troubled Batman, and the reason why an external weakness of kryptonite was retconned some time after his creation as a plot device. Stories need conflict and resolution, and a character that incorporates those qualities is just inherently better written and more interesting than one who has it as a clumsy add-on. FYI it was created not in the comics but in the subsequent radio series.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Crossover cyberpunk and Cold War spy novel genres. Like the Matrix written by a collaboration between AJP Taylor and John LeCarré.