In Defense of Difficult Literature

On Valentines Day, I bet my girlfriend that if she read The Brothers Karamazov, then I would run a triathlon with her.  Now, I'd bought her a copy of Villette over a year earlier that she still hasn't finished, so naturally I assumed I would never run a triathlon.  She finished Ilyusha's funeral a week ago.  Crap.

Of course, as a classmate noted, it's a fair trade.  In both cases, muscles are being strenuously exercised.

Literally.

As Ben Marcus notes in his famed 2005 Harper...