As far as I can tell, this thread is nothing more than a trap, a place where people can display their arrogance, and presumably, their knowledge about so-called "advanced reading." So let me see if I can persuade the OP as well as the other posters in this thread to dispense with such useless classifications as “intermediate” and “advanced” reading material.
First, I have never come across a book whose complexity did not humble me. As Nietzsche argued in “Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” and as Derrida later argued in
Of Grammatology, the task of writing is to translate immediate felt experience, that is, inchoate and archaic knowledge into an iconographic form, even when we know that there is no intrinsic relationship between the icons (i.e. letters) on the page and the meaning that they are supposed to represent or convey. In this sense, all writing is infinitely beautiful because it is infinite complex. We always know going in that writing will both fail to grasp and fail to fully convey the immensity of what we feel; we know that something will be lost in translation. But it doesn’t matter because we know that if we are patient, if we keep our myopia in check and if we keep writing and keep reading eventually we’ll start to think about things in a way we hadn’t before. This is why every book I’ve ever read has changed my life. Thus, the distinction between an “intermediate” or “advanced” book is useless and unnecessary.
Being “advanced” is not the property of a book. I want to suggest that what we conceive as a book being “advanced” is merely a function of one’s reading ability. The question isn’t how advanced is the book, the question is, how advanced of a reader am I? With sufficient analytical ability and knowledge of literary theory anyone can discern the complexity of even the most mundane book. If a person wants to challenge themselves they shouldn’t read more “advanced” books, they should demand more from themselves as a reader.
Take this for example. The other day I was watching the premiere of the new ThunderCats cartoon. In one scene the father, who is the king of Thundera, is trying to teach his son about the history of the kingdom and about justice. Now, if a kid is watching this they probably aren’t going to get the nuances of the narrative technique being employed and the philosophical underpinnings of the scene. But as I was watching the hairs literally started standing up on the back of my neck and on my arms. In terms of narrative technique I’m thinking about how the story is operating on multiple diegetic levels, that is the diegetic and the metadiegetic level. As the scene progresses and the father engages in a sword battle with his son I start thinking about mimesis and the dynamic interplay between diegesis and mimesis that’s going on. And since this is a telling and a teaching through a re-enactment I’m thinking about the morphology of power, so I start thinking about the French psychoanalyst Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage. And since the father is also trying to teach his son how to use the Sword of Omens, I start thinking about how the sword symbolizes justice, but more specifically how the balance represented by the edge of the blade symbolizes the notion of proportionality inherent to justice. The father then tells his son that before the ThunderCats the planet was filled with warring animals, so I start thinking about post-colonial theory and processes of otherization. And all this from a 2 minute clip in a cartoon. However, to the 10 year old watching this both the ThunderCats and the Lord of the Rings are going to be equally challenging to analyze because their reading abilities have not yet been honed. So again, the reading material is not “advanced” it’s a person’s reading level that’s intermediate or advanced.
So, to the OP I would simply suggest that you read more about literary theory and hone your reading abilities. And if you want to read something that was challenging for me to read try Atet A.D. by Nathaniel Mackey. Awesome book!
