alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of what "universal praise" means is just peer pressure and people making their Identity fully around the art they consume. A lot of it is also marketing and pushing tastes into culture.
A key part of how to see if someone is just parotting acceptable opinions vrs is actually having an opinion, is to make them explain it. If its a generic "oh you need to read it, its great" or parotting of popular talking points, that person is not serious about their taste. They use the art as an ornament to make their personalities more interesting than actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way.
The only reaction that matters should be your personal one and what resonates with you.
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I think if someone read a book this dense, they earned their keep.
Also, what is our "Identity" if not the sum of all our influences?
This might be survivorship bias, the people who read and enjoy a difficult book for the sake of it probably don’t need social media validation to do so.