I had a discussion with one of my English teachers about what the point of literature was. I was reading John Irving's "A Prayer For Owen Meany", which I was enjoying immensely because it has what I call "clean storytelling". Irving is a clean storyteller, Robertson Davies is a clean storyteller, Charles Dickens is a clean storyteller. They're able to write a narrative that is very simple and very character based and you follow your characters through long periods of time, growing to love them as you watch them grow and mature and learn and die. I love books with clean storytelling because they're engaging and yet very neat and easy to understand and when one finishes it, it feels like one has made new friends.

He argued that Owen Meany was a crappy book because Irving doesn't know how to control his tone and that he simply isn't good enough to use a story effectively. I told him that the authors out there like Proust and Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and Joyce are not accessible enough, and that I simply don't enjoy reading their books because I don't know what's going on and I don't have fun with them. He told me that as I mature as a reader, reading more and more, I'll learn to like that type because my tastes will simply develop into understanding why Irving is inferior to Joyce.

He gave me a copy of Joyce's Dubliners to read and I just finished the first story a second ago. Dubliners is a lot more accessible than Ulysses, but I'm getting a sense of what he was talking about.

A bad writer will simply write "The man is evil", which is telling not showing, and that's bad writing.

A decent writer will write a scene in which the man does something evil, like killing a kitten or murdering a child.

A really great writer will write a passage in which one describes the man taking a stroll down the street, but he/she will manipulate their tone and their words so that the reader immediately feels a sense of menace amongst the man without even having seen him do anything evil.

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding everything yet, but I think I'm getting there. I'm still not ready to dive into Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, but I'm starting to see why books like those need to be so difficult to follow.