[HN Gopher] How to Read a Novel
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How to Read a Novel
Author : ingve
Score : 27 points
Date : 2025-05-31 13:43 UTC (4 days ago)
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| jihadjihad wrote:
| > But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond
| their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their
| characters. [...] Both novels succeed at something else: they
| invite us to think across multiple scales of experience--and to
| make causal and associative connections between those different
| layers.
|
| To toss another into the ring, I can't think of any novel I've
| read that could rival The Brothers Karamazov in this regard.
| Possibly East of Eden, but as great as it is it plumbs nowhere
| near the moral and psychological depths of Dostoevsky.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Lol I always laugh when I see people talk up Dostoevsky and any
| 19th century writer. It's 2025 now and literature has improved
| in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Weird take - how exactly could literature improve "in depth
| and characterization"? What new "technology" has been made
| available to authors that enables them to create deeper
| characters?
| voisin wrote:
| Not OP, but breadth and depth of understanding about
| psychology have improved dramatically and exposure to
| diverse viewpoints thanks to hyper connectedness likely
| make it possible to go deeper.
| bowsamic wrote:
| In my opinion, all the best art expresses the "unknown
| knowns" of the human, i.e., the unconscious that has not
| been brought to light. Art is an expression of what is
| really true but not known. Knowing about it doesn't make
| it easier to express. To bring up the old trope, the
| curtains are never just blue, not in the sense that the
| artist is always putting in some conscious meaning, but
| that the choice of blue says something about the artist's
| human feeling even if they didn't intend it
| zabzonk wrote:
| > breadth and depth of understanding about psychology
| have improved dramatically
|
| Provide one tiny bit of evidence for this. Do you
| seriously think that Shakespeare (for e.g.) did not have
| a profound understanding of human psychology?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| If he did it's not shown in his writing, or really any
| pre-20th century writers really.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| this is bait
| zabzonk wrote:
| have you read any pre-20th C writers? Or any novels or
| plays at all?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| The conflicts in his plays just aren't that profound, you
| know? Compared to modern "psychological turmoil" it's
| relatively simplistic, something like Macbeth's "ambition
| vs morality".
|
| Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the
| ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through
| social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-
| deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters
| are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit
| tends not to be.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| there's a reason Harold Bloom titled his book about
| Shakespeare _The Invention of the Human_
| altruios wrote:
| not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was
| limited by the number of interactions he had with humans.
| He did not have the internet.
|
| We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one
| bit of evidence for the claim.
|
| Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of
| human nature. And of course he did not have the working
| vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which
| has been built up over time by many humans working
| together. Two things can be true.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Hard disagree. I made an analogy in another reply to
| Monet not knowing quantum physics. Lacking that
| information didn't deter his famous explorations of light
| effects.
|
| Humans are great at figuring out how things behave before
| we have a great model of why they do it. And by
| Shakespeare's time, we had a pretty good grasp on
| practical human psychology, even if we had less
| understanding of the mechanisms behind it.
| altruios wrote:
| We are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at
| it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.
|
| I agree that we are great at figuring out things before
| we have a model of why things work. And we have a
| mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare
| wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his
| 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people
| today(quotes because dubious terminology).
|
| Art is improving. Science is improving. human
| understanding, and communication of that understanding is
| improving too. That is my point.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I won't argue against that at all. Someday we're going to
| have someone with Shakespeare's brilliance _and_ modern
| foundations, and I can 't wait to see what that looks
| like.
|
| (And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully
| out of date with modern literature.)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of
| human nature. And of course he did not have the working
| vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which
| has been built up over time by many humans working
| together. Two things can be true.
|
| Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could
| produce a better text than a historically great author,
| which was the original line of thought. Or is there a
| specific modern text that you have in mind that proves
| the point?
| altruios wrote:
| Define 'better'...
|
| How about 'more accurate' as a measure...
|
| Then every text book is an example of this measure of
| better improving over time...
|
| How about 'more representative of the human
| experience'... (or enjoy/like more)
|
| Then we measure how well a human relates to a book: which
| is taste, a subjective quality that is notoriously hard
| to measure in any meaningful way. This measure becomes
| not a single measure, but a collective measure against
| the sum of humans who interact with it: an untenable
| standard - and biased towards the present anyway - which
| doesn't give charity to your position.
|
| ...So how do you measure a book to be 'better'? That's
| the neat part: you don't. You can measure what you 'like'
| more, you can measure 'features'... but we probably won't
| even agree on what makes a book 'better'. We like what we
| like, and most of us have a hard time even explaining why
| we like something.
| internet_points wrote:
| or maybe hyper connectedness is just making writers more
| distracted, making it harder to see deeply into human
| relations, feelings and thoughts
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't like Dostoevsky but this is an insane take. Art
| doesn't just "get better" over time and depth and
| characterisation isn't everything either. Homer's Odyssey is
| still an incredible and fulfilling read. Literature is not
| some kind of engineering discipline though a lot of new
| writers seem to be almost like analytic philosophers in that
| they think newer = better while having some kind of sterile
| and formalistic understanding of art
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| depth and characterization isn't everything but it's the
| discussion chosen by the OP, he seemed to imply that
| Dostoevsky had the best psychological interiority and
| "multiple scales of experience".
| kstrauser wrote:
| You're nuts. I read "Crime and Punishment" a couple years
| ago, and went in knowing literally nothing about it except
| that it was famous.
|
| It was astonishingly good. It felt fresh, modern, and
| claustrophobically suspenseful in a way I wouldn't have
| believed possible for a book that age.
|
| If you don't like it, fine. Preferences are a thing and we
| don't all have to enjoy the same stuff. But to dismiss it as
| obsolete or out of touch is madness. It's a classic for a
| reason.
|
| Along those lines, I read "Moby Dick" last year for the first
| time. Now I'm annoyed with everyone who led me to imagine it
| as some dusty tome to slog through. It's _hilarious_.
| Ishmael's a sarcastic smartass with a lot to say.
|
| Some of the classic are classics for a reason, ya know?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I might've conveyed myself poorly. Never said Dostoevsky
| wasn't great or not a relevant read! I was just reacting to
| the OP who seemed to say it's still the best ever. But
| we've improved everything, art, kites, the wheel. It's the
| same for literature, but you do have to get pretty deep
| into lit to see though.
|
| The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's
| overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast
| improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of
| much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is
| simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his
| work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their
| struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A
| Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most
| people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing
| out", but via coping and rationalization and making the
| best of their situation, that's how you get consistent
| improvement and accrue generational uplift.
|
| Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better
| integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post
| modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone
| hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about
| the human condition ever written, which handles the drama,
| but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011.
| I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's
| widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the
| 21st century by the NYT.
| internet_points wrote:
| > Most people don't react to horrible situations by
| "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and
| making the best of their situation, that's how you get
| consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
|
| Most people I've known do not react rationally to
| horrible situations. Or even to good situations.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Alright, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the
| explanation! Whether or not I agree, that's a lot more
| nuanced than my earlier interpretation of your opinion.
|
| I like the religious lens of his work, though. I don't
| personally identify with it, especially his particular
| brand of it, but that's part of the work's appeal to me.
| Similarly, I'm not an existentialist but it was neat to
| see the world that way through "L'Etranger" (even though
| Camus rejected the label).
|
| But I do want to push back against the idea that we know
| vastly more about human nature today than in the 1800s.
| We've been formally studying western philosophy, intently
| and seriously, for at least 2,500 years. On a timeline
| between Plato and today, "C&P" was written 94% of the way
| to the finish line. We might have better models of some
| details now, but we've had a pretty solid knowledge of
| the fundamentals for an awfully long time. By analogy,
| Monet didn't know jack about quantum physics, but he
| famously explored the subtleties of the appearance of
| light in nature.
|
| I surely don't want to take the position that older =
| better, either. You're right: we're still learning,
| practicing, and getting better! There's still an awful
| lot of gold to be found in earlier works, though.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| I think what is easy to overlook with Dostoevsky is that
| although he is arguably the inventor of the psychological
| novel, the characters in his novels are largely
| representatives of the impact of ideologies on the lives
| and psyches of real people or the impact of the psyches
| (as impacted themselves by their life experiences) on
| their choice of ideology. The taking of ideologies to
| their logical conclusion in his character's lives is what
| results in "hysterical characters".
|
| I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best
| psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what
| he was trying to achieve.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| You're right. I think it's extremely cultural to
| Christianity. The notion of suffering for your sins, and
| when bad things happen you ought to try to feel it as
| much as possible instead of working on pain mitigation.
| This is definitely how a lot of people approach life and
| it makes sense for his characters. But IMO coping and
| rationalization strategies are built into every human, a
| lot of angst is performative and communicative rather
| than "soulful". They do it because they want to be a good
| religious boy and communicate devoutness. I honestly
| don't think he gets that. When his characters perform
| pain he treats it as evidence of the soul's torment which
| doesn't resonate with me since I don't believe in the
| soul.
| antithesizer wrote:
| To be fair you have to be very deep into literature to
| criticize dostoevsky as "overdramatic"
| rererereferred wrote:
| What's a good novel from the last 20 years? Genuine question.
| Looking back at everything I've read, it all has been older
| than that. I don't really pay attention to novel news so it's
| more like I only read stuff I've heard about in the past.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I recommended a book in my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44181274
| CesareBorgia wrote:
| This is a great list: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comm
| ents/1fwciah/truelits_1...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I am absolutely not trying to sustain the other commenter's
| claim that modern fiction is better lol. I also don't tend
| to stay on top of contemporary fiction, a lot of stuff gets
| hyped and well reviewed but just isn't that great. Or it
| had a lot of resonance for the specific time it was written
| that lessens as time passes. And of course the extreme
| selection bias, not all good books "survive" but most of
| the ones that do _are_ good on at least some qualities.
|
| But there is definitely still excellent fiction being
| written now. The last sumurai by helen dewitt, or the gray
| house by mariam petrosyan I would place with the likes of
| middlemarch and anna karenina.
| _m_p wrote:
| The Garden of Seven Twilights:
| https://dalkeyarchive.store/products/the-garden-of-seven-
| twi...
|
| In Memory of Memory: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/in-
| memory-of-memory/
|
| Solenoid: https://store.deepvellum.org/products/solenoid
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >literature has improved in depth and characterization as
| much as any other field.
|
| It hasn't.
|
| 1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century
| or two are _much_ newer than literature, which might as well
| be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer
| fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth
| phase.
|
| 2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields",
| so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather
| than that it has improved.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| I agree that Dostoyevsky's psychological insights were
| profound. Maybe it doesn't exhibit the same psychological
| depths, but morally and philosophically I would also recommend
| Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. It is still
| psychologically profound (although perhaps not at Dostoyevsky's
| level) and it provides a very detailed picture of society in
| turn-of-the-century (20th century) Austria. It's one of the
| greatest novels about ideas I've come across.
| pickledoyster wrote:
| the single takeaway from this book ad of a post: the CEO of
| Stripe claims to have read 10 novels/yr. Which is either a boast
| of how much free time he has or how he skimmed through some major
| novels. Third option: a lie.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I did 30 novels a year in highschool, it's nothing crazy.
| Though tbf kids do have more free time than working adults, I
| think it would really only drop if you become parents though.
| veridies wrote:
| If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of
| thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading
| ten of those takes you 100 hours. That's reading for roughly 20
| minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most
| common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy
| person.
| patrickmay wrote:
| That's one every five weeks. Middlemarch is roughly 900 pages.
| Assuming one reads five evenings a week, that's 36 pages per
| sitting. Each page is roughly 300 words. An average reading
| speed is about 250 words per minute; let's knock that down to
| 200 for denser works like those discussed. That's 54 minutes of
| reading per day.
|
| Hardly a huge time commitment, especially as a way to
| decompress from the day.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Are we really in an age where reading 10 novels a year is
| considered unbelievable?
| zabzonk wrote:
| Probably yes - according to some estimates the average person
| may only read one, or less.
| lapcat wrote:
| That's by choice, not by impossibility. How many hours per
| year do they spend scrolling through social media?
|
| (I ask ironically on social media. But in my defense, I'm
| currently reading two novels.)
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't not believe it, but some may. I suspect the average
| person doesn't read. (I'm even thinking just of British
| people, if you think that claim globally is easy due to whole
| countries with lower literacy/readership.)
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Even if we assume a 12 hour average workday for a CEO (I
| wouldn't, but let's be generous) and 8 hours for sleep, that
| gives him 4 hours of time to do whatever he wants with. If his
| main hobby is reading, 10 novels a year would be easy in that
| time.
|
| Also, everybody knows CEOs have a lot of free time. They don't
| have real jobs.
| desas wrote:
| This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read
| three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I
| read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading
| is also far from my only hobby.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.
|
| However.
|
| There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single
| person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of
| whether it's their "only hobby".
|
| Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM
| measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are
| irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for
| processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of
| course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of
| free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically
| impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to
| categorize people by how much they are _trying_ to read. Some
| people are only a little interested, some not at all.
| Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans
| aren 't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the
| average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all
| people reading _half a book_ per year (made up numbers).
|
| Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most
| culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected"
| value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say
| things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know",
| and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of
| appearing _stupid_.
|
| Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying
| "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a
| week," as if that means it _must_ be easy to accomplish in
| Western work and life culture. We 're drunk on the ease of
| implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as
| simply dumb modern westerners.
|
| I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not
| classy.
| internet_points wrote:
| My notes say I read ~30 books last year (not counting kids
| books =P). I don't feel like I spend _that_ much time reading,
| I just ran out of good stuff on netflix. And the kids require
| less attention than they did.
| LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
| The claim is not that far off from someone claiming they watch
| a movie a week. A book probably doesn't take much more than 10
| hours to read on average. 50 movies are about 100 hours. Is one
| movie a week a mind-boggling amount of free time?
| coliveira wrote:
| I used to read a novel per week, and I had other things to do.
| I stopped this rhythm mostly because I don't see many new
| novels worthy the time, but it is a doable thing.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Ten novels a year seems light if you're an avid reader - I've
| certainly run circles round that record in the past, though
| I've admittedly fallen out of practice lately.
| ednite wrote:
| Steven Johnson encourages us to think across multiple scales of
| experience when reading 19th-century novels. I agree and I'd
| argue Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s, was the prototype.
|
| Don Quixote has always been one of my favorite books because it
| genuinely entertains me on a deep level. Every time I return to
| it, I'm pulled into a world that's funny, sad, strange, and
| timeless.
|
| Long before modern psychology, Cervantes captured the messy,
| conflicted inner life of someone trying to make sense of a
| changing world.
|
| Books like this still matter, not just as stories, but as a way
| to practice seeing the world in layers, something that helps us
| stay grounded and think more clearly in today's fast-moving,
| story-saturated world.
| nilirl wrote:
| The post does not answer 'How to Read a Novel'.
|
| Most of the post is devoted to 'Why I think fiction is useful'.
|
| The author's answer: vicarious learning.
|
| Author answers how to maybe rank and choose a book: Book that
| provides recognizable experience of human decision making is
| better than book that does not.
|
| Which is fine. But not 'How to Read a Novel'.
| mock-possum wrote:
| How to read a novel, step one: pick up the book. Gaze upon the
| cover. What is the title? Is there imagery? Does the face
| include the author's name, or any other text? Turn it edgewise,
| take in the spine - and then spare a glance for the back. What
| might be written on the pages beneath the cover?
| vonnik wrote:
| This is very true!
|
| I felt like the writer didn't really get what novels are for,
| and it explains why he decided he's a better fit for non-
| fiction. He seemed to be explaining novel utility to a bunch of
| imaginary STEM grads.
|
| Personally, I read for the metempsychosis. Like Zelig but with
| authors, a briefly shared subjectivity that shapes whatever I
| go back to when I put the book down.
|
| Reading novels helps me escape the tyranny of my own mind (just
| like reading history helps us escape the tyranny of our own
| time, as the man said). In a way I feel like the West meditates
| through novels.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I went through the same phase a couple decades ago and also came
| out with Middlemarch on top. Oddly I'd never heard of it prior,
| and only grabbed it because it was in some classics list at B&N.
| It didn't seem like anything I expected to like, but I was
| astounded.
|
| The one book I couldn't understand all the hoopla about was
| Faust. Even after reading it twice, it just seemed like a banal
| overplayed moral tale. Maybe it only works in German?
| crims0n wrote:
| Reading literary fiction is such an enriching activity in life, I
| highly recommend it. If you don't know where to start (and you
| need to retrain your attention span), pick up an audiobook. I
| started with Jeremy Iron's reading of Lolita. Nabokov's prose
| read in Iron's voice will make a believer out of anyone.
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