I'm all with you on the modern novel thing. I am inexpressibly bored with all these unpleasant people and their adulteries. It's also the reason why I watch next to no TV, and why I watched only 1/2 of one episode of Dallas, back in the day. Where's the fun in watching rich, mean people be beastly to each other?

Which is not to say I demand a happy-ever-after ending. As my darlin' son once put it after reading a lot of Greek myths: "I like these stories because they don't have happy endings and they don't have sad endings. They just end."