I love this line: “Plot makes perverts of us all.”

Just this week I described the unusually large number of men who read Anne of Carversville. “That’s because men are voyeurs,” he responded.

Lev Grossman writes for the Wall Street Journal that “a good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It’s what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it’s also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them.”

via WSJ, Jon KrauseModern writers abandoned plot. Life is not so tidy. Plot stories, especially those with a happy ending, are a lie. Life never ends this way, and if it does, the moment is soon lost.

In addition, we hate discipline — don’t we? Story lines reflect discipline and structure in the age of the Internet. Grossman says the literary landscape is changing, making the novel entertaining again.