The reader who is outraged by being “forced” to look up an unfamiliar word — characterising the writer as a tyrant, a torturer — is a consumer outraged by inconvenience and false advertising. Advertising relies on the fiction that the personal happiness of the consumer is valued above all other things; we are reassured in every way imaginable that we, the customers, are always right.
The idea that a work of literature might require something of its reader in order to be able to provide something to its reader is equivalent, in a consumer context, to the idea that a cut-price mobile phone might require a very expensive charger in order for it to function.
- Eleanor Catton
You need to go read that right now, it's awesome (even if I did get turned onto it by Sady Doyle ((she dissed BPAL and praised Hannibal in the space of like two damn days, and that was it for me and Sady Doyle, even before the "Joanna Newsom comes from Tori Amos" article)) ).
(Which is sad, because in its heyday, Tigerbeatdown was amazing. But now she's writing 'think pieces' on How I Met Your Mother and Hannibal, and....yeah. A lot of women who wrote amazing blogs in the 00's are now completely shuttering their personal sides in the twenty-teens. It's really depressing.)