After reading that, you’ll no longer think that Nobel Prize winners for literature write books that are difficult to read and understand.
That said, people who read less tend to believe that more and bigger words equal better writting. My (usually scientific) texts are described as "telegraphic", and heavily expanded without adding any real content. E.g. "the house was white" gets transformed to "the paint that covered the beautiful house was pure white".
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite
He also did the screenplays for most of Bela Tarr’s movies
Girl, Woman, Other is one of my overall favorites from the last few years. Th character work is phenomenal. Do try to read a hard copy, rather than on an ereader, if you can. The book uses punctuation and the layout of text on a page creatively, and I’m not sure how well that gets preserved in an ebook.
If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.
In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.
Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’
Warning: spoilers follow that do not diminish the knock out punch this work delivers: It's written in it's own language, a mixture of Russian and UK slang, which one cannot read at first. About 3 chapters in, the language clicks and then a good reader starts the book over from the beginning. It is a popular book due to the film, and the ultra violence depicted within, but it is also ground breaking philosophical literature because the main character is a hardened criminal and is the narrator, he spends the entire novel explaining his philosophy of life, which by the end of the novel you realize is the same philosophy of modern politics, and the UK edition of the novel ends with the entire novel being the story of a senior member of parliament's youth origin story.
The fact that the novel is in a fictional language increases the reader's submersion in the story line, creating one of the most impactful novels I know.
Another great read, much shorter, more like getting into a street brawl: Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky. Practically the creator of self critical essays, and often the first read for people interested in Existentialism.
Anything from the "Beat Generation" authors, anything from Philip K Dick, anything from Herman Hesse.
* Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Fall - Albert Camus
* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
And that's why we see in the halls of our colleges, where these works are pored over day in and day out, that these humanities majors are the font of wisdom in our civilization.
BTW Nietzche speaks in goodreads quotes and meme-like aphorisms. If you can't get through Nietzche maybe reading isn't for you. (There's nothing wrong with audiobooks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv5IyRuEVI4&t=10s either)
Wisdom does not equate with power, in fact: overt power is not the result of wisdom, but fanatical perseverance to wealth creation, often in opposition of wisdom in favor of simple dominance of others, and basic mental illness driving that individual.
Plus, my MBA was also to understand the world, as business is this world.
Aside from the fact that I doubt it's true, this seems a lot like panning The Third Man as derivative of later thrillers.
I understand that for some books specific quotes don't quite get across what makes the book great. But in those cases I expect the author to address that characteristic directly, and make an effort to try to explain why the book is great despite not being very quotable. And by quotes I mean quotes that can span an entire page if need be.
The only exceptions to this that I'm inclined to allow is when your descriptive writing skill is at such a pro level that the review itself is a piece of art. But most "professional" book reviewers are not even at that pro level frankly.
An example of actual "pro level" would be this Martin Amis line from one of his reviews:
"You can stir a vat of molasses with James Wood's Chekhov boner." (I'm recalling the line from memory)
Kind of a stretch there. No casual reader can handle Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann) or the Glass beads game (Hesse) without serious effort. Sure, one can try, in the same way one can try running a marathon without training, with the same predictable results.
For those that have tried, but cannot penetrate these types of books, start with any Nobel Literature winner that looks interesting. They are the gateway to serious literature, and by reading the recognized "best written intellectual novel of the year" you'll be gradually exposed to the writing structures used in harder to penetrate literature.
Don't be fooled into thinking that a Nobel Literature winner is difficult to read, none of them are and that is why they have the award. They are also white knuckle rides through tragic human lives where the main character wins against incredible odds, and these novels demonstrate the critical thinking and secondary considerations necessary to prevail when others are crushed. Great literature teaches one first hand how to use critical thought, a dire need today.