Regardless of its reputation, one could argue that nothing happens in this story.

It is just eight pages describing a library.

It has no plot in the traditional sense. No leading character, no dialogue, no discovery. Just eight pages of description of the Library of Babel, its internal curiosities, and the kinds of books it holds.

Yet I couldn’t stop reading—and when we discussed it on my podcast, in the raw recording, we spent over two hours taking it apart piece by piece. Eight pages. Two hours of discussion.

Do you know why?

Because ‘stakes,’ as they’re invoked in writing advice, are not all of the same type. Just as the library of Babel contains an infinite number of books, there are countless ways a story can generate ‘stakes’.

As critical readers, we must discover what type of stakes the story contains, and judge the work accordingly.

Yet readers, and writers, often narrow down into the most common understanding of ‘stakes.’

What writing advice calls ‘stakes’ is usually just the most visible form of narrative pressure: the internal and external tension that drives the narrative forward. All too often, this becomes associated, almost exclusively, with conflict of any sort.

But ‘pressure’ as a mechanism is not limited to a single form. Life-and-death situations are not the only means to create that pressure, because there are multiple types of stories and each of them has a different driver—moral ambiguity, tonal dissonance, psychological fracture, aesthetic intensity, and thematic resonance. Each of these internal drivers will raise ‘stakes’ of a different sort.

So what other types of stakes can you find?

Below, I’m listing five different categories of pressure, each accompanied by a reading recommendation. The graphic below summarises where the category name, where the pressure originates (the source), what does it affect (the domain) and a question as an example of its core instability.

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But there is a trick: it demands that readers be active—simultaneously reading the words to identify the author’s intended meaning, while also reading between the lines to establish deeper meaning.

Developing this skill is particularly important when approaching literary fiction or idea-driven speculative fiction, where meaning often emerges from implication, irony, and narrative tension rather than from explicit moral instruction.

However, one of the most common obstacles to critical reading is the collapse of depiction into endorsement: treating narrative devices (what a text shows) as moral claims (what the text believes). This distinction is not always obvious, and even experienced readers can fall into it. Therefore, today we’re exploring this concept, using three classical works of fiction as examples.

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“Let’s be honest, we really don’t care about the plot. All we’re here for is the characters.”

I stopped scrolling.

That sentence… bothered me, but I had so many unpolished ideas about it that I chose not to engage and move on—yet my concerns lingered, nagging at the back of my mind. They resurfaced whenever I saw a Goodreads reviews of the same kind:

• “…characters are more empty and flat than their supposed hypnotic state” (1-star review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer).

• “He went from retarded to genius yet all he could do was to go on and on about his mommy issues.” (1-star review of Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes).

• “The main character was an empty shell […]” (1-star review of Embassytown, by China Miéville).

• “I legit have no idea what I just read but nice words yknow.” (2-star review of The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges).

These reactions are not aberrations; they are symptomatic—pointing to an understandable, yet often incomplete, response.

Truth be told, reading is subjective. For readers who seek emotional immersion, phrases like “I couldn’t care less” or “I can’t relate” represent genuine and honest reactions. For those specific readers, the book in question may have not done its job.

However, “I couldn’t relate” is not synonymous with “this book is bad.” Rather, it reveals more about the reader’s expectations, experiences, or reading habits than about the craft of the book itself. Many great works are intentionally uncomfortable, distant, or centred on lives that particular readers may never share.

Take Philip K. Dicks A Scanner Darkly as an example. This novel explores the lives of drug addicts teetering on the edge of overdose, told from their fractured perspectives. Here, reality is unstable, conversations meander, and events often defy straightforward logic—why would a cop’s head transform into a roach? (That’s precisely the point.) PKD wrote it to convey the experiences of people he knew in real life… but to non-addicts—people with their logic and reasoning intact, with their senses not distorted by drugs—the characters in this book are unrelatable:

• “I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. They felt artificial and shallow.” (1-star review in Goodreads).

• “If Dick was trying to put the reader into the mind of what a drug user thinks and feels, then he succeeded. Unfortunately, this makes for a terrible read.” (1-star review in Goodreads).

• “I didn’t find the characters nor scattered plot compelling […]” (another 1-star review in Goodreads).

It would seem that “relating” is less about true empathy for the character—and more about mirroring oneself.

On the one hand, empathy requires being curious and accepting about someone else’s interiority, even when it is alien, uncomfortable, or opaque. On the other hand, mirroring is a role-playing expectation: readers want characters to react exactly as they would, so that actions—even if unexplained—feel logical and predictable. If that doesn’t happen, then the plot or secondary characters must clearly label and explain everything.

The problem is that if everyone only rated books highly when the characters mirrored themselves, we would lose literature’s ability to expand empathy beyond our own narrow experience. When this expectation becomes dominant, literature collapses into familiar psychologies, known and ‘accepted’ moral arcs, limited and ‘common’ emotional vocabularies.

To further the issue, platforms like Goodreads and BookTube reward an immediate affective response… rather than reflective judgement. A star rating is quick, emotional, and social, so that a review saying “I didn’t connect” becomes a socially safe criticism: it sounds personal rather than not engaged with the text, it doesn’t require analysis, and—worst of all—it cannot be argued with.

This becomes more frustrating when “relatability” is treated as the primary measure of quality.

The truth is that not every book is meant to feel familiar, comfortable, and known. Some books are meant to be a window, or even a confrontation… and “connection” may not always be the point.

When complex or different characters are penalised simply for being unfamiliar, and when “I didn’t connect” replaces any discussion of writing, structure, themes, or intent, then “I can’t relate” polices what’s considered ‘acceptable’ literature. It does so through attrition. Books needing patient, interpretive work, aesthetic distance, and/or curiosity about unfamiliar modes of thought… simply fall into the invisible abyss of books that don’t “rack up” likes and impressions on social media.

That quote that sparked this essay represents the mindset that smooths literature into the limited known. Plot is not just ‘what happens’ in a story; plot is causality, structure, philosophical tensions, the ideas driving the setting—latter being especially true for speculative fiction. To say “we really don’t care about the plot” is really to say “we don’t care about the meaning existing beyond character affect.”

This narrows literature into mere emotional consumption, foregoing the inquiry it enables. A book becomes valuable only insofar as it produces a certain feeling of recognition.

Take Borges, for example.

His work is abstract, cerebral, emotional cool. He didn’t care in psychological intimacy, he didn’t aim for readers to feel mirrored by his characters. He often used his stories to make a covert social criticism (the case of Death & The Compass), or even as a literary response to other authors (e.g., There Are More Things is a critique to Lovecraft).

Borges’ writing defined a new genre. He inspired genre-making authors—yet by the dominant Goodreads metric, much of his work is “confusing”, “unrelatable”, “inexplicable”, “the weirdest dream”, or worse: “Read the Wikipedia first, drop some acid, then attempt this story.” (taken from a 1-star review of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius).

Borges’ value is around the intellectual ‘vertigo’ caused by peeling layers upon layers of philosophical and metaphysical implications. If “relatability” were the sole criterion, then Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Claris Lispector, W.G. Sebald… would all be downgraded as failures.

The danger isn’t that just some books get bad ratings. The danger is what readers are losing because of it.

Curiosity. Tolerance for opacity. Comfort with distance.

Trust in literature that doesn’t immediately please.

Writers, sensing this, write “to market” and preemptively polish down difficulty, abstraction, or strangeness to avoid being labelled as “unrelatable” or “difficult.”

In this way, a society can end up censoring itself—by unlearning how to read beyond immediate recognition.

Critical reading is a complex skill that demands practice—for we need to read while assuming that what is written in the page is not all that the text is saying. This is about questioning the text, trying to gather the “meaning between the lines” or “the fine print” of a story, while keeping an open mind. It is about trying to understand the author’s intention, but thematically (e.g., what does the story mean?), and presentation-wise (e.g., why is this sentence written this way?).

It easier said than done, honestly.

As readers we have preferences about the themes, about the motifs in a story, about how things should be presented, and event about how sentences should be structured. Those preferences—those likes and dislikes—can easily become a bias that kills our curiosity, leading us to judge a book too early and without trying to understand authorial intention.

I am not saying: “Do not judge the book at all”, what I am saying is: “suspend disbelief, let the book show you what’s mean to show you, then judge it.”

Again, that’s critical reading at its finest, and it’s a skill we must endeavour to acquire and practice.

Thus, in today’s essay…

I will focus on one element of authorial intention—namely, a story’s presentation—and I’ll show you one strategy that I consider fundamental to read without judging: reader-induced curiosity.

Once we have introduced key concepts, I will show you two examples of award-winning books that require you to suspend disbelief. These books are speculative fiction (sci-fi, in particular), and they cover cases of a few paragraphs, to the book’s entire structure.

Are you ready? Let’s get reading undone!

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What if it's not?

What if the author had an intention and we simply missed the point?

Let’s be honest: we are all prejudiced. We have tastes, habits, cultural expectations, things we look for as readers that prescribe (consciously or not) how a story—and all of its elements—should be presented. We come in with a lot of expectations around pacing, plot, character development, twists, and even what a “satisfying” ending should look like.

It is a common thing, to be biased… but it is also restrictive. We may end up reading books that follow a prescriptive recipe for storytelling… and when a book doesn’t fit that mold, we want to shoehorn it into what we expect.

Yet by doing so, we risk missing a crucial detail: fiction doesn’t have to follow any rules… least of all, rules imposed (subjectively!) by our preference as an individual reader. Especially in speculative fiction, where the only limit is imagination, an author might deliberately challenge form, voice, or structure to present a theme or idea we haven’t even considered before.

Speculative fiction is a playground for breaking rules—but that also implies that we, as readers, need to make an conscious effort to keep our biases in check to read a book without judging it… at least, not until we have finished and considered its meaning.

Let me show you some examples…

Here are three oddities, each belonging to a different book which I will name afterwards—once we dive into the discussion—not to bias you.

Here is the first example:

He knew, too, about the AM station that played the top-ten-type tunes on and on plus an enormous amount of DJ chatter in between, which sometimes was not chatter, in a sense. If that station had been tuned to, and the racket of it filled your car, anyone casually overhearing it would hear a conventional pop music station and typical boring DJ talk, and either not hang around at all or flash on in any way to the fact that the so-called DJ suddenly, in exactly the same muted chatty style of voice [...]

This is the second one:

"The Ciiiity!.... That's where you're heading [...] But, Silent Man, there's no way to get to the City. If you wanted to go to the Clay Meadow, say, that's no problem: go past the stones, [...] through the kook village, and the Clay Meadow will be right there. [...] You should've told me right away that you want to go to the Reeds. [...] But I can make it to the Anthills. I'll make it there myself, and I'll take you there, too. [...] But you aren't going to the Anthills. [...] You're going to the Reeds. But I can't go to the Reeds, I won't make it"

And here is the third one:

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been [...]

Look at them closer. Strange syntax (borderline incorrect); meandering passages, seemingly non-sensical topics on each of them.

Is that bad writing? Or is there an authorial purpose behind them?

Let me tease you a bit more. These three books are traditionally published and written by renown authors; two have won renown, prestigious awards and one was banned for over two decades. Two are consider classic Masterpieces, one is a modern masterpiece that’s now deemed paramount within its niche genre.

One you know all of that, perhaps you stopped flinching.

Maybe even wondered: how did they get away with it? After all, there is so much “wrong” in these texts—and yes, I’m using the quotes intentionally, because there is nothing wrong in those texts. They just happen to subvert every piece of writing advice you may have heard of. Even the things we, as readers, learnt to consider "proper or quality writing."

What validates these sentences is something we, as readers, often fail to consider: authorial intention.

The author is not dead…

—but while that’s a conversation for another essay, we still need to consider the fact that the author’s intention does have a lasting impact in their own work1.

What if we assume that the writer penned those words intentionally? What if we consider the writing style may be a type of literary show-don't-tell?

The authorial intention—the reason as to why an author chose to write in one specific way at a specific point in their story—cannot be denied. Especially within literary-adjacent genres.

If we manage to keep those biases in check and to actively ponder why the author wrote in that strange way… well, we may discover the book is, objectively, a technical masterpiece. We may, subjectively, hate it—but recognising the difference between both of those statements (and the value that brings to us as reader and also as writers) is fundamental.

Because I’m not teasing you when I say that those three excerpts were written with a very specific meaning in mind.

Let me tell you some details:

1. The first excerpt is from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick (PKD)—a controversial book following an undercover narcotics officer that just fell onto the vice. Most of the "meandering" dialogue or thoughts are actually reflecting the scattered and inconsistent mind-state of someone who's high. The meandering text is just a way of making the reader experience what it’s like. There is a purpose and a theme—and it gets far more impactful when you read PKD’s Endnotes.

2. The second excerpt is from Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. This is a much-banned absurdist book criticising how illogical bureaucracy can by, and how easy it's to accept a twisted reality simply because it is easier. The dialogue didn't make sense because the lack of sense was part of the allegory… and the book had to be written in a pretty abstract way in hopes of getting past the censors. I did a whole episode on it:

3. The last excerpt is from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and, those specific words are found carved in a wall. Within the book, this is not written by a human, but by an eldritch entity who has quite a strange purpose to do so… one even the protagonist has trouble understanding.

Knowing that, the pattern becomes clear: in each of these cases, the authors had plot-related reasons to go against the "rules of proper writing" to craft an experience that went beyond a sequence of events. PKD sought to immerse readers in the illogical, wasted stated of mind of a drug-addict, the Strugatsky sought to make a political critique and confuse the censors, and VenderMeer was trying to write as a non-human for plot reasons I won’t spoil.

Yet some readers are too eager to label this "bad writing" when, in reality, is just the fabled show-don't-tell advice enacted through literary tricks—namely, using grammar and sentence structure to implicitly showcase something without actually telling the reader about it.

So… how do we discover the authorial intention?

How can we, as readers, approach a text with a mind open enough as to cast away judgement and let the story takes us wherever it wants? How can we keep our biases on check until after we’ve finished the story?

That is exactly what my series, The Reading Craft, is all about.

There are a few things that I want to cover, but most of all, this series will be about detecting those “knee-jerk reactions” we have as readers so that we can approach original, rule-breaking stories with an open mind.

For example, we will investigate:

• Why do we assume certain things are “bad writing”?

• How much of our judgment is rooted in expectations from other genres or conventional storytelling?

• How can we sharpen our critical thinking to respect the craft behind the weird?

• How can we get better at detecting authorial intention?

• How the cumbersome “relatability” plays against us when approaching these works.

But the investigation will be, as usual, practical. I want to tackle close readings of challenging or misread works, share exercises or reflective prompts, and—if there is quorum for that—open up for a readalong or discussion on how we struggle on putting our preferences aside (including what works and doesn’t work for each of us).

Expect weird, expect uncomfortable, expect strangeness.

But most importantly, expect a challenge.

Until next one!

~Livia