This was not a week to start a long book....
All because of the debates. I can't remember what I read, and have been bluffing the book into thinking I know what's going on, but I don't. I read while watching the news before, during and after the debate, and poor Harry Hole seems very confused, or is it just me? The Snowman was not a good choice, I'll stick to shorter books till after the election....
Anybody else having problems remembering who characters are that were introduced earlier in their book?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I always hope the protagonist says something like, "it's nice to see you've given up parachute jumping, Gertrude" to refresh my memory about the forgotten character and then I realize that it's not the duck he had when he was a boy that I thought it was.
And I too do go back if the author is so inconsiderate as to not to give me a teeny clue as to who it is. But during the debates and after, when I went back to look, I would even forget what I was looking for.
Old age does nothing for self-confidence; ain't it a bitch trying to act old & wise?
because I think that age is getting to me, I think back on all the dumb shit I did all the way back to childhood. Then I realize that I am old and wise now....comparatively speaking.
But old age has it's benefits too, and I try to remember that. Things like how I don't give a crap anymore if I drop over to a neighbor's barbecue in my jammie pants....when I was younger, I would never have been caught dead out of the house without trying to look good. Or how I can wear flat shoes now, even though the style is super high heels. We get away with so much more now because we don't have to worry about being out of fashion. We absolutely know that we are out of fashion and fighting it will only make us look pathetic anyways.
Here's to old age! 
In my more curmudgeonly moments, I get angry that books aren't better written/edited so as to make the plot easier to follow.
Then again, if plots were easier to follow than they generally are now, lazy readers like us would probably adapt to even THAT, and find even THAT standard to be unacceptable, as well. 
Seriously though, I do think it's certainly NOT a prerequisite that a book must have many different things going on in order to be good. Some of the simplest books are some of the best-known and most well-loved classics (Animal Farm, for example).
That said, if there ARE many different things going on, there are ways of writing that make it all come together better than just sort of jumping from one thing to another, willy-nilly. For example, writing about a family can be exploited as a device in order to write about current issues relating to gender, in the sense that the family's size can be tailored in order to accommodate as many or as few issues as an author wishes to deal with; and since most people have families, they can relate well to 'black sheep' or pillars and the issues they are dealing with, rather than some random people who don't know each other, and bear no relation (literal or figurative) to each other.