We have great tools for [de]serializing both to binary and to JSON (binary, cereal, json, aeson, etc). But we have rather weak support for [de]serializing to human readable Haskell-ish external formats. Read instances are both (1) slow, because they take Strings, and (2) they don't allow sensible error messages! (Historical decision choosing Maybe rather than Either.) Right now I'm working on a project with a Racketeer who is trying to read a 6000 line file as a single list data structure. The derived Read instance is just telling him it won't parse, with NO error information, line number etc. To someone used to Scheme readers, that's rather poor. I wish I had something better to tell him! I am not aware of a library to recommend other than switching to JSON format on disk. OR manually kludging together a parsing hack that, for example, puts one element of the list on each line and makes much smaller calls to "read". Argh!, -Ryan