[megak1d]

I share this. I quickly grow irritated by Fry’s elaborate language when in written form.

[throwanem]

Like any skillful rhetorician, he constructs with an eye toward the intended medium. When that's prose, it reads a lot more smoothly than here.

[bloak]

That's right: his books are very readable.

(With a couple of his novels I felt that if he had made them a bit less entertaining and a bit more pretentious and if he weren't already famous as an actor and comedian then probably they would be taken seriously as "literary fiction". I'm thinking of "The hippopotamus" in particular.)