Do you think you have to understand a book to appreciate it?
My gut would have said yes.
You read slow and critically and with understanding comes, at least some sort of, appreciation.
But that might not be exactly true.
If you have read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, you know what I am talking about – and Stephen King agrees with us.
The book of Revelation too.
See, a beautiful book can still be beautiful – even if it eludes me here and there.
This is kind of like all the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, if you think about it.
The Grapes of Wrath is, of course, a fine novel. I believe that Blood Meridian is another, although there are great whacks of it that I don’t fully understand. What of that? I can’t decipher the words to many of the popular songs I love, either.
-Stephen King, On Writing