Like many of us, I use Storygraph and I enjoy looking at the mood tags – I think it’s a fun way to keep track of trends in my reading. I’ll also look at them before reading a book if I know I’m in the mood for something specific.
Most of them are pretty straightforward, but I’m not entirely sure what the common thread is among books that get marked “challenging” and I find myself going back and forth on when to use it. Sometimes it seems like it indicates a book is very dense and includes a lot of prose that’s challenging to read and decipher the meaning of. Sometimes it seems to indicate a book is dark, philosophical or complexly plotted and includes a lot of ideas that would challenge the reader to reevaluate their viewpoint.
For example, Paradise Lost gets the “challenging” tag seemingly on the difficulty of its language alone, as the story it tells will be familiar to most Western readers.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry, a modern nonfiction book by a child psychiatrist about how child trauma affects development, is not difficult to read but the emotional content is very heavy as he goes into detail about some of his cases (however, the book I read by a palliative care nurse about death and dying doesn’t have the tag).
One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Plague have beautiful, simple prose with complex plots and themes and all get the “challenging” tag.
Additionally, Othello is “challenging”, but Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Macbeth aren’t.
Obviously there’s no ultimate authority on this; these books are marked challenging because readers have voted they are. I’m just curious to know how other people are using the tag and what qualities in a book would cause you to mark it as “challenging” in your review.
by aurjolras