For me a lot of this simply comes down to trying (I can't always say I'm successful) to make the prose do more than one thing. Each sentence should ideally imply something beyond the action (at least most of the time...if you did it with every single sentence that could come off as burdening the text, or simply contrived.) As in...
It took her three tries to get the key in the lock.
Nervous much?
Or
It took her three minutes to bring herself to put the key in the lock.
What's on the other side of the door?
As for me, a "difficult" or "easy" read comes with no judgment of quality...much of the time. I might enjoy something difficult as a challenge, or easy as something light to pass the time. It may be that the difficulty is in figuring out a mystery, or the easy is because the text is "transparent window" as Asimov once put it.
But if it's easy because the text is repetitively bare-bones but not in a good way, or difficult because the author is trying to hard to write "beautiful" prose that doesn't serve the story, then I won't care much for either.
no subject
It took her three tries to get the key in the lock.
Nervous much?
Or
It took her three minutes to bring herself to put the key in the lock.
What's on the other side of the door?
As for me, a "difficult" or "easy" read comes with no judgment of quality...much of the time. I might enjoy something difficult as a challenge, or easy as something light to pass the time. It may be that the difficulty is in figuring out a mystery, or the easy is because the text is "transparent window" as Asimov once put it.
But if it's easy because the text is repetitively bare-bones but not in a good way, or difficult because the author is trying to hard to write "beautiful" prose that doesn't serve the story, then I won't care much for either.