Life as it is vs. life as it should be.

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I wanna talk about books a little here. First of all, in my humble opinion, there are two types: the one that tells us how life and we as humans should be. In that category fall all the self-help books, books about human development, books that give us spiritual guidance, etc. Authors like Stephen Covey, Anthony Robbins, Scott Peck, the Bible and the Koran come to mind. There are obviously novels out there with a message, but they tend to be moralizing. If the author wants to teach, let him do it up-front, I like it just fine and I have read many of them. In the second category fall all the books, mostly novels, that describe life and us humans as we are. They don’t add, they don’t take away. And here come my two superstars in that category, Stephen King and John Irving. (You might argue that Stephen King is a horror book writer, but there I would disagree. He uses horror as a tool to describe the real demons in us.) Those two can be painful to read, but life itself is painful lots of times. What makes them great writers is that they give you exactly the right amount of information about their characters, they provide the reader (‘constant reader’, in Stephen King’s case) basically with a template where his/her imagination can roam freely and fill in the blank parts. I’ve read most of the novels of both of them, and many I have read several times. What kind of literature do you prefer, and why? Please share.