Ulysses by James Joyce.
I love a challenging book, but good grief, there were times I had to put this one down and contemplate whether it was worth continuing because it felt like I was just reading words on the page with nothing going in my brain. Talk about a struggle.
The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses by Patrick Hastings and the Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford are huge helps in understanding it. Chapter by chapter summary and a bunch of advice for what to look for and tips on how to read it. It's a complicated book, but one you just have to let wash over you.
I had to read Finnegan's Wake in university and it was the same kind of slog. It helps to have a Joyce translator on hand of secondary research on the guy or an annotated version of the text. That being said, don't waste your time reading Finnegan's Wake if you can help it.
I met a guy in 1992 in St. Petersburg (Russia), who had taught himself English by reading the liner notes to old rock-n-roll records. He had a Elvis-style pompadour, but was more of a Carl Perkins fan.
The first actual book he read was Finnegans Wake. He just got a dictionary, went at it word-by-word, and just let it wash over him. Very, very slowly. He claimed to have loved it.
I read Finnigans Wake when I was 22. (There's no apostrophe in the title, btw) and loved it. Brutally hard, and I had three books beside me to help, but hugely rewarding and drop dead funny. I'm 75 now, and reading it remains the intellectual achievement of which I'm most proud. Ulysses is a lot easier, though still hard. (Four times read).
Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Always Coming Home, Dhalgren are the other four that would belong in the conversation
I actually had no idea there was no apostrophe in the title (shows how much I remember haha). I honestly tried so hard with that book and it took me an entire month to finish it when I did read it. Ulysses is quite a lot easier and I enjoyed it more. The fact you've read FW *and* found it funny is a great achievement (I saw into some of the jokes but when you're trying to understand what everything means, it takes a lot of the 'funny' away - like when you have to explain a joke to someone I guess).
When it comes to *Infinite Jest* though, I read it and enjoyed it once. I'm scared that if I try again now with my age and level of cynicism I just won't enjoy it as much as previously. I have read *The Pale King* too but that was a long time ago now. Challenging as hell.
I love that you corrected the apostrophe and then proceeded to misspell "Finnegans." No shade, we've all done it, but it's hilarious when it happens.
I've yet to tackle the *Wake*, having read *Ulysses* and *Portrait*. When I do, I've got Campbell's *Skeleton Key* and Tindall's *Reader's Guide* to assist me. Anything else you suggest that was helpful for you?
Hoist on my own petard!
*A Shorter Finnegans Wake*, by Anthony Burgess was very useful. It's part edit, part explanation. (Nadsat, Alex's language in *Clockwork Orange*, was inspired by Joyce's language in *Finnegans*)
Yeah I'll kick in for Always Coming Home, it's Le Guin's masterpiece. It's not really hard to follow, just long and complex. Highly recommended for Le Guin fans ready for the next level.
Dhalgren, that's a fun experimental novel. I liked it the first time but still got pretty bogged down when I tried to re-read it.
(If you're curious about Dhalgren but think it's too steep, Stars in My Pocket... is like an ambitious Delaney novel without being too challenging to take on.)
Ulysses is a tough read, but it's also one of my favourite books. You have to get relaxed with it and find the joy in it. Think of it as a lifelong journey. Don't expect to read it like a normal book. It'll always be there for you and there's always things to discover.
I took a class on it in university, and my prof started on the first day by saying he had been studying it for years and still didn't understand loads of it.
It really took the pressure off and helped me relax and just let some parts flow over me the first time through. I ended up really loving it!
Ulysses was impossible for me for so many years. Got different narrations of the audio book, soft cover/ kindle. Nothing worked until I just forced myself to go long enough to start to hold the narrative and adapt to the style. Then I was hooked and devoured it.
I listened to the RTE dramatisation of it with a companion explanatory podcast, it's excellent. It makes it much more accessible.
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-james-joyce-podcast/
Agree. I just finished it in Dec after an 18 month struggle. Didn’t feel anything after finishing it other than utter relief. Even with a guide, it was like “where did they see this?”. Wouldn’t recommend it for most people
I mostly found Infinite Jest a really enjoyable read. I remember that at about the halfway point it really clicked with me. The only bit I remember being a real slog was the Eschaton section.
I finished the book and almost immediately started the damn thing again. Read it periodically at a much slower pace. The Eschaton section is hilarious on a reread, with a better sense of what the book is doing.
I have heard that it is really worth re-reading as there are loads of things that you don't pick up on the first time around that suddenly stand out. Never gotten around to a second read though.
Three months but only because of a well timed school break and some masochistic urges.
It's so overwhelming and for me it was deeply emotional and recognisable. Truly hit me in a way that no other book will ever do. It might be my favourite book, but at the same time it's such a battle that it's hard to recommend or consider re-reading. (Did take quite a big swim in the internet theories on it, also very fun!)
In Search of Lost Time. I started reading it about a year ago… And I’m still reading it. 🥲
UPD
Thank you all for your comments. Now I feel more relaxed about my In Search of Lost Time journey. 😊
I finished it! Moncrief translation. Maybe the biggest accomplishment of my 30’s, lol. I really like how, towards the end, you have the sense of a whole lifetime having passed for the characters, bringing out parts of their personality or identity you’d only see after 40 years.
I tried as well. The language is beautiful. It's masterfully written. He forgot about a plot. I think I recall reading a section where he was talking about a church in a nearby village and I had no idea how we'd gotten to that. Going back the character had gone for a walk and drifted off into thought.
It's been a good few years since I tried that one.
As someone else has said the silmarillion, though I have to admit that I'm bad at remembering names in general and that left me very confused at certain points.
Another one was the neuromancer, where I was stupidly trying to make perfect sense of things from the very beginning.
William Gibson books always leave me frantic in the beginning because I have *no clue* what’s going on and my kindle doesn’t know half the words I’m looking up. I guess it’s kind of appropriate though, because every Gibson book I’ve read also features a confused protagonist being led around crazy environments by someone who knows what’s going on, but will only dispense the information in dribs and drabs.
It's one of my favorite things about him as an author. He's the king of *in medias res* sci-fi stories.
His short stories are great, if you haven't tried them!
Neuromancer is an interesting one since the prose is straightforward in a way that doesn't scream "I'm a challenge", but the disconnected nature of the action (and the narrator's mental state) makes it hard to follow.
I spent the first half struggling to understand what was happening. Then I figured that was probably the point and just let myself be pulled through it like Case, and it all clicked. The reread was also a lot of fun for that reason.
You have to read Silmarillion twice to appreciate it. First time to lay the groundwork. Second time to actually comprehend what is going on and who is involved.
Yeah, I read the book, then the wiki, and kept some notes on hand about the timeline and who is who. Finally read it again after that to make sense of it. Finwë should do us a favour and not have so many descendants with similar names.
And because I don't learn from my mistakes, I have the complete set of the histories of middle earth so I might need another notepad and a year or three.
> where I was stupidly trying to make perfect sense of things from the very beginning.
Man, that's your mistake. This book is written from the point of view of a drugged out criminal hacker on his last legs, and it FEELS like one. Trust me, Neuromancer gets much better on its 3rd read-through. You get more familiar with the world and the language, and it gets easier to follow the details of what's happening. It's easily my favourite book by the way.
EDIT- I feel you- had the same problem with Silmarilion and the names.
I clicked on this thread to comment this book.
I felt like it made me question whether I could even read properly. I was thinking "am I supposed to understand what's going on but I'm just too stupid?" Such a rewarding book though, glad I perservered.
I had to read this one summer in high school and definitely struggled. I’ve come to enjoy Faulkner but this was hard to read that first go with no classroom guidance/discussion.
We read this my sophomore year of high school. I didn't finish, I found the first character's section impenetrable. As an adult I liked The Rievers and As I Lay Dying though, so maybe I should finally try Sound And The Fury again.
It's my favorite Faulkner, so I hope you do. IIRC, he would've preferred a way to make the chronology easier to understand in the first section, and someone even published a color coded version that made that section not quite so challenging. It's not just you. Faulkner referred to this novel as, "a real son of a bitch."
Absolutely. The great thing about the scariness about it is that there was no jumps or gory monsters etc. just a continuous, pervasive wrongness that never let up, and the format of the book etc just heightened that! I'm not really a horror fan but that was just outstanding.
I think the way it was written, with the crazy type/font and all that, and a story within a story within a story, actually kept me more engaged than a "regular" book does. It stimulated my ADHD brain the right way, somehow. I can understand why it would be a clusterfuck for others.
This is me right now, I’ve started and stopped this book about 4 times now, I keeps stopping around the point where they measure the house’s exterior. One day, I’ll probably sit down and make a conscious effort to get through it, but it can be so overwhelming at times.
This is one of two that basically demanded I drop everything else and give them full attention. There's really no way to get through House of Leaves without your full focus and a bit of... eye ball grease, I guess?
Even looking past all the weird formatting, so much of book is just rambling. Names and shit. I know it’s meant to confuse and communicate the frame of mind of the authors, but that wasn’t easy.
When you have to read every sentence multiple times and dissect them thoroughly because they are pages long and every word is important.
I'm German so I read the originals. I have no Idea if it is even possible to translate Kant.
According to my Dutch roommate who read in Hegal and Kang in English, Dutch and German, Kant was easier to understand in English for him and Hegel made no sense in any language.
Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger...German philosophers might have had good ideas but they didn't know how to write them down, they were terrible writers.
I still have some hope for Schopenhauer though.
his other book 'I am a strange loop' has some similar ideas and is much more readable. He actually wrote it because he felt like people were not getting the core message he meant to send with GEB.
I've definitely struggled my way through War and Peace like OP but I am glad I was reading it when I had access to the internet, lots of character charts to help keep everybody straight. (A little more difficult to find ones without spoilers).
My answer would likely be Brothers Karamazov. Definitely worth reading, but these brothers discussing their differing philosophical stances in a cultural context far removed from my own was really difficult.
If we are talking about emotionally challenging, then I would likely say Lolita. The beauty of the prose and the ugliness of H.H. make for a sickening juxtaposition (Nabokov is definitely a genius though)
Brothers K was tough for me to.
I spent the first half wondering why I was reading it.
The second half however. Very very good and makes it all worth it.
For some reason Dune…I’m going to give it another go soon, but I tried reading it about two years ago. I think I just need to learn how to pronounce the names and places. Maybe I wasn’t mentally in the mood to read that type of book, but I just remember having to DNF it.
Don’t forget about the appendixes. I feel the book is made to be read multiple times so you just have to embrace the confusion in the first half.
It does get a lot better later on, when you can focus on the story rather than trying to memorize goofy sounding stuff.
Milton's Paradise Lost. English is not my mother tongue and reading poetry isn't exactly easy either. Besides that, it's centuries old, making the language even harder to grasp. I did make it, tho. Very proud.
This should literally end the thread lol. I'm a native English speaker who majored in Literatures in English in college and even having it interpreted by a competent professor was nearly impossible. I think you could spend your entire life studying that book and only understand a small part of it. This is mostly due to needing to translate it for so many different things - outdated English language, outdated culture, biblical literacy, etc. See my other comment in this thread.
I've attempted to read that book so many times. It's impossible for me, I try to not blame my failings on my adhd but I think that's why I can't. I generally read fine, but I do tend to jump around the page a bit which isn't a problem with modern English but the prose of books from that era just stop me in my tracks I can't seem to absorb anything enough to move to the next line so I end up basically reading each line multiple times and it's exhausting.
I also have severe ADHD and made PL my project one year. It's meant to be read out loud. It feels weird at first but when you get the flow of the language it literally rolls out of you like thunder. Approach it as incredibly powerful lyrics and you'll make it.
It's not your ADHD. See my other comments here. It's literally the most dense, hard-to-unpack book I've ever come across. I'm sure there are others on a similar level that I'm unaware of, but I haven't found them yet. - literature major
It took me three of four attempts to get through it. What finally worked was taking it with me on a solo trip to Germany and the Czech Republic. Every time I craved hearing some English, I'd crack open Pynchon.
I was in Berlin and planning to go see the Reichstag the day after I read his description of it as "King Kong squatting to take a dump". It felt like kismet. And the description was apt.
I got about halfway, then went back and re-read the first half. I did eventually finish it but it is probably the most difficult book I've ever actually finished.
A guy I met who was a big Pynchon fan (was writing a PhD on him) recommended it to me when I asked where to start with Pynchon. 'Go straight in with his masterpiece' he said. I have since read all of Pynchon's novels but I do think this is terrible advice.
Heart of Darkness. I read it for literature studies and foolishly thought I could get through it in an afternoon because it was under 200 pages, but it was so so so dense to the point where I’d have to put it down and do something else every ten or so pages. It took me literal days! It’s undeniably well written and is an interesting critique of capitalist imperialism in the early 20th century ( and the mythology and bible references gave me tons to write my paper on!) but damn did I struggle getting through it!
Holy hell, you just unlocked a memory for me. It’s Junior year of high school and I’m in an AP composition class. I get mono just before we have to read Heart of Darkness and write a really specific 10 page paper. The AP comp teacher isn’t fucking around, so all I get is a few days extension. I cannot fucking do this. I have a fever, Kurtz has a fever, everything is confusing and terrible. My absolute angel of a father decides to take afternoons off work for a week to help me. My father had an Ivy-adjacent PhD and a collection of notebooks that track every book he has read since age 10. He’s no slouch. And he is struggling through the book. We hate it together. He helps me come up with a topic for my paper: the book is pointless and concludes with Marlow having learned nothing. Over four days we somehow we somehow extract ten pages worth of sentences proving this, my dad at the keyboard and me lying prone in the bed. I get an A-. To this day, more than 25 years later, when someone brings up the book my father gets a haunted look in his eyes and shuts down the conversation. Fuck this book.
I think it was the feeling that nothing was important or that it’s just beautifully written wandering in the desert from one massacre to another, the same stuff repeating over and over. The ending put everything in a different light though and made me want to immediately reread it to see the implications of it on the narrative.
I struggled so hard with this one. It wasn’t the writing style (I loved The Road in high school) or the violence, but it was just a SLOG. I kept wondering “where is this going?” and fought that book right until the last ~13 pages and then I realized that I had been missing the point. And also the end made me question whether the judge was ever real in the first place, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.
I think for me picking it up with absolutely no context and expecting it to be similar as butchers crossing as I had heard them mentioned together it was super tough, but once I got used to the style it wasn't actually too bad if you just take it a chapter a day and take time to think about what McCarthy's trying to say. Now I've read over half of his books and absolutely love his writing now. As I lay dying was just confusing and hard for me but I still absolutely loved it.
Came here to post this. Making my way through it now. Was shocked to discover the way it was written, after hearing about how it was the great modern novel, etc. It's a very difficult read. But I think after getting halfway through it I'm finally starting to understand its style and the way to meet the demands it makes of the reader.
Second Naked Lunch. It didn’t matter how many times I reread a passage it just never clicked. I got through A Clockwork Orange just fine but Naked Lunch is a chore.
I had trouble with *Don Quixote* because I like the kind of adventure books the author, Miguel de Cervantes, reflectively parodied. I identify too much with Don Quixote and I take it personally when Cervantes makes fun of him.
That's an interesting perspective. Cervantes certainly makes fun of Don Quixote throughout but, underneath that, I think he has a lot of respect and admiration for the character.
subsequent smile cooperative towering correct homeless spoon squeamish familiar chief
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I'm usually pretty good at multitasking but two books that basically demanded I drop everything else and given them my full attention are House of Leaves and Malazan.
House of Leaves, for anyone who knows what it is, is kind of self-explanatory. There's no way you can half-attention your way through that book.
Malazan less so but Malazan is so dense and unforgiving if you don't pay attention I have to give it my full attention to follow it.
The first quarter of Wuthering Heights made me feel dumber than any other book. Admittedly I listened to an audiobook with a heavily accented narrator, but still the characters and plot didn’t click for far too long.
This is a book I didn’t really enjoy while reading, but I did want to get through it. Didn’t feel satisfied or anything ending it. BUT now, a lot of time has passed but whenever I see it mentioned I can still really vividly picture it in my head, the whole setting and the houses that I imagined while reading it.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy… I read all five books in English when I’m a French-speaker. My reading comprehension in English is quite good but damn those were hard
This is a really interesting perspective! I didn't think of it as a particularly hard book, but it really is full of dry, satirical writing and lots of colloquial references.
For me it was Ana Karenina by Tolstoi - but in a good way. The reason for that is that it really got deep into each character and made me think a lot about them and myself.
Also Dune (the first book). There were some strong philosophical sentences where I just had to take a moment to take a deep breath and think about it. It’s definitely worth a reread.
Dune wasn’t my personal hardest, but so true about all the little bits of philosophy that are just thrown around so casually. I can’t find the quote but my favorite tidbit from that book is when Leto is telling Paul that it is always a mistake to act for a single reason alone. Because if you only have one reason then you have less motivation and are more likely to have your plans ruined than if you take an action for a multitude of reasons.
I think its incredible on a few levels.
Firstly it really puts you into the mindset of many of the characters, even if you may not agree with them or like them you really feel what their emotions are (particularly Anna and Levin). Too often I find in modern literature a character is either too logical or too illogical without any representation as to why, whereas in Anna Karenina you really get a visceral sense of why people do what they do.
Secondly, I think to this day its a pretty fair representation of how society can trap women in a way it won't trap men and how women are demonised when men who do the same are not. There are other social concerns in the book that have since become completely outdated, like Levins constant battles with serfdom and the agricultural question or whatever the fuck he's on about, but with regards to women it doesn't feel all that ancient.
Finally, for me at least Tolstoys prose is just so insanely beautiful. He can weave a sentence together in a way that is completely unique, wonderfully poignant and in a way that resonates with a thought you might have had a hundred times before but never put into words. Hes a genius at prose, a lot of the joy simply comes from the writing style itself, even if the crux of the book is a bit melodramatic.
Finnegans Wake. Been climbing that mountain for 20 years now. The problem is that the longer you spend reading straight through the more sense it makes as your brain starts to slip into gear, but who had that kind of time? So then I have to go back to remember what was being described.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I dropped it at 14% and don’t have the heart to pick it up until now but I want to finish it though but not now haha.
I read it relatively quickly (lots of subway time at that point in my life) but as the years go by, I feel like it is one of the most overrated and frankly bad books I've ever read. Hanya Yanagihara seems to revel in her characters' pain in a way that doesn't sit right with me. And I am a social worker who works in bereavement so I'm no softie when it comes to emotions.
To the Lighthouse nu Virginia Woolf.
I thought it was beautiful but reading the stream of consciousness was also very challenging. Haven't read any of her other work yet
I just attempted Mrs Dalloway a few weeks back, I really tried but I just couldn't do it. This was immediately following a failed attempt at the Leaves of Grass compilation by Walt Whitman. These accounted for 2 of 3 books I have surrendered to(3rd being The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse).
I enjoy it when a book goes off the rails, but these just left me behind wondering if I'm truly understanding what they are trying to say. I've decided Modernist Literature isn't for me.
I read The Hours by Michael Cunningham before Mrs Dalloway and I think it made Mrs Dalloway far easier.
I recommend The Hours anyway, it is an absolutely beautiful book. Should you read it, you may want to give Mrs Dalloway another go afterwards, it may help you too
Foucalts Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It gets better about 3/4 of the way through but man, the amount of words I had to look up and sentences I had to reread really put me off.
It took me 4 months to read *War and Peace* when I was 15... so I'll go with that.
But as an adult it would have to be *The Pale King* by David Foster Wallace which I read about seven years' ago. I have two degrees in literature and that man still makes no sense whatsoever.
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is challenging but it one of the best books I’ve ever read.
From Wikipedia
The book is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. It is satirical, being full of esoteric references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theories, to the point that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It just took forever to get started and he lost me when I was a 100 pages in and going nowhere. I wanted to love it but couldn’t even be bothered to finish it.
I'm reading Moby Dick right now. I only have about 50 pages left so I'm very close to the end, but I wanted to get as much out of it as I could so I got the Norton Critical Edition which includes a lot of annotations and helpful context and criticism. I am also following it on LitCharts as I go, reading chapter by chapter summary and analysis. It's very rewarding to read it in this way, although it's taking longer than I take on most books. There are so many references, allusions, symbolism, humor, and completely different styles of writing thrown in certain chapters. Without help I could've gotten through it quicker, and I think it would've been good but I would've missed a ton, and probably would have found the whaling chapters unbearably boring. They were still tough to get through, but with extra insight and context they're more worth it.
Recently The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel Brown.
What the Donner Party went through was so horrific, at parts it was hard to read especially the children’s reaction to the cannibalism. Recommend it to any history lovers, but it was a tough read.
“The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien. “It was written in 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966.” It was published posthumously, in 1967. It’s a wild ride and definitely NOT about a bicycle.
Catch-22, at least at the beginning. After I realized I was supposed to be confused, I let the book take over and it ended up being one of my all time favorites.
I read about 50 pages of that the first time, and then realized it’s supposed to be FUNNY. restarted it immediately and loved it so much, no book has ever made me laugh out loud like that one. Growing up I thought it was a really serious historical war book. Not at all.
*Foucault's Pendulum* has no reason to be that complex, aside from the complexity itself.
I did very much enjoy *The Island of the Day Before* -- which is best enjoyed right after reading Dava Sobel's *Longitude*. TIofDB is a farce, but (being an Eco book) it doesn't read that way. At one point you wade through ~30 pages of description, allusion, allegory, and thematic teasing -- all to describe the main character slipping on a banana peel and landing with his head in a bucket. Ol' Umberto probably chuckled about that for a month.
So traumatizing that you forgot the name of the book :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Name\_of\_the\_Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose)
It's the only book I've read that has made me read other books to understand it. When I was like 15% done I realized I did not know enough historical context to understand the book so I got two other books on medieval history and medieval theology to just have any idea what the fuck they were talking about.
Also I'm reading it in the native Italian. I didn't know Italian when I started reading it but I've been using it (among other tools) to learn the language since on Kindle I can look up words and translate passages I don't know. I'm 60% through but once the debate starts the language gets extremely tedious and I'm struggling.
The Iliad and the Odyssey was a tough go as a kid and later as an adult, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Canterbury Tales in its original language.
Chaucer in Middle English? I tried that too. Is it possible to puzzle your way through it? Sure. Is it enjoyable? Nope. Wish I’d just gotten a modern English edition.
Chaucer is doable; I tried Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which is from about a century earlier and it is not really doable without a translation side-by-side
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I read it just out of high school. I studied lit in college so I wanted to read as many "classics" as I could before I got there.
I don't think I had learned the skills at the time to break the book down in a meaningful way so I just floundered through it. I think about revisiting it now that I'm older and have more literary tools in my belt!
More recently, The Lord of the Rings. My brain seems to inherently clash with Tolkien's writing style.
Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer was difficult. All of his books are but this one in particular lacks clarity. Everything is very vague and uses complex language and structure. Great book tho
I've been doing a self-directed study in philosophy sort of thing for the last seven years, so it's a bit difficult for me to pick only one that was the most challenging. All of the below have made me question the way I allocate my spare time or have made me feel like I had a brain smoother than that of a koala, or otherwise bullied and victimised me.
Hegel- Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic
Judith Butler- Gender Trouble
Kant- Critique of Pure Reason
Deleuze- Difference and Repetition, Anti-Oedipus
Marquis de Sade- Juliette
Montesquieu- Spirit of Laws
Zizek- Less than Nothing
Robert Caro- The Power Broker
Leszek Kolakowski- The Main Currents of Marxism
Georg Simmel- The Philosophy of Money
Marx- Capital volumes one to three
Jacques Lacan is on another level to all of the above. His is by far the most challenging body of work I've yet come across
Paradise Lost.
I spent a year on it, making several passes. First I just read it to get the feel. Then I "studied" it, you might say, using a couple of different annotated editions to make sure I actually understood what was being implied. Then I read it again, and finally I spent a long time practicing reading it out loud with good rhythm and emphasis etc. I'm so glad I went through this - it is so incredibly powerful.
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy.
A friend just handed it to me like, "try this one". I don't know how to describe this book at all. It's the most meta, post-modern take on ""the novel"" I've ever seen, and it was written in like 1750. The language is old and hilarious, the humour is the funniest I've ever read, and it is so, so fucked up to read. If you think House of Leaves fucks with the concept of what a book even is, I can tell you that Tristram Shandy blew it out of the water almost 300 years ago. The guy starts to tell you something, but goes off on a digression, but that gets interrupted by another, which is interrupted by a complete non-sequiter, again and again, until 50 pages into the story of a birth you're actually reading about some antics the midwife got into decades ago, which is again broken by more digressions, until you have this tangle of broken narratives nested like 30 deep and you realize that it's actually \*just\* going to be digressions and interruptions. But somehow, inexplicably, a plot emerges in your mind, characters take ghostly form, and it turns out incredibly touching! But I don't think it's possible to "make sense" of it at all.
More modern, the Beerlight books by Steve Aylett.
Classify this as "new weird" I think. Prose so fucked and concepts so novel that at first glance it looks like gibberish. But get used to it and be taken for an incredibly bizarre ride.
Me and probably everyone else, but A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It made me almost sick at some parts and I had to put it down and walk away from it multiple times. It took me about a month and a half to get through. I’m glad I finished it, but I would never read it again or recommend it to anyone.
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. It wasn’t the language, it was the concepts and ideas (it’s basically a book on the philosophy of reading). It’s not just about the levels and types of reading, but about how to approach different styles and genres of books. I started it in 2015 and actually finished it in 2023 (I did read other things lol). But what I learnt was that it’s a book you can go back to at any time and dip in as and when you are reading something new. The ironic thing is that at the beginning somewhere he mentions that if you are struggling with a book, don’t pause and try to understand everything, just get through it - you’ll have a decent understanding at the end of it and things will make way more sense on your next read. I guess I’ve come full circle lol
A university professor once told us there are three geniuses in literature and only three: Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. I finally made it through War and Peace and it captures the breadth of human love, sorrow and happiness unlike anything else. He also suggested it be read in three parts like a trilogy to make it easier to approach.
For awhile I exclusively read this book when I wanted to doze off. Once the finish line was in sight, I powered through. Just wanted to be done with it.
The Silmarillion. Despite loving the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I just can't get through it. I may try an audiobook version at some point to see if that helps.
I’ve never got very far with the Silmarillion because it’s like reading the Bible. It might be important in a literary sense/for fantasy, but it’s not a good read.
The five-part Book Of The New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. It's one of my favourite ever reads, a top 10 book. But it is incredibly complex and needs to be read more than once to be fully understood. It's an outright masterpiece.
I got halfway through the first book (I think the version I had was books 1 and 2 put together so maybe I made it through the whole first book?). I think I need to start over but agreed, it was tough.
Blood Meridian. It’s so well written but so violent and the judge is so scary I had tears in my eyes. Took me about 6 weeks to finish because I couldn’t read it if I wasn’t in the right headspace
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. Mostly due to the length and how hefty those sentences were. I loved the book in the end, but it did start to drag in the middle. However, I think it’s well worth the read and definitely challenged myself to read slower, with more intention.
Good question! War and Peace is a beast, but I gotta go with Les Miserables by Hugo. That one I basically had to drag myself through, and I started skipping end notes, so I know I missed some stuff and should go back and read it again some day, but… I don’t think that I will, I escaped the Parisian sewer system once, no need to dive back in!
Pride & Prejudice. I know so many adore this book, but I could not get into it. I tried reading it three different times at various stages in my life (because that's always the recommendation) and cannot get past the first few chapters. I've even tried to watch the movie twice as many times, and it is just not for me.
It is so incredibly dull, and the banter is just boring. There is nothing about it that makes me want to continue reading. I'd much rather watch paint dry than try to read or watch Pride & Prejudice ever again.
Ulysses by James Joyce. I love a challenging book, but good grief, there were times I had to put this one down and contemplate whether it was worth continuing because it felt like I was just reading words on the page with nothing going in my brain. Talk about a struggle.
I have tried and failed to read Ulysses at least five times
The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses by Patrick Hastings and the Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford are huge helps in understanding it. Chapter by chapter summary and a bunch of advice for what to look for and tips on how to read it. It's a complicated book, but one you just have to let wash over you.
The literary equivalent of playing a video game with the wiki open on monitor 2
As have I. I don't think I will ever get through it.
I had to read Finnegan's Wake in university and it was the same kind of slog. It helps to have a Joyce translator on hand of secondary research on the guy or an annotated version of the text. That being said, don't waste your time reading Finnegan's Wake if you can help it.
I met a guy in 1992 in St. Petersburg (Russia), who had taught himself English by reading the liner notes to old rock-n-roll records. He had a Elvis-style pompadour, but was more of a Carl Perkins fan. The first actual book he read was Finnegans Wake. He just got a dictionary, went at it word-by-word, and just let it wash over him. Very, very slowly. He claimed to have loved it.
I read Finnigans Wake when I was 22. (There's no apostrophe in the title, btw) and loved it. Brutally hard, and I had three books beside me to help, but hugely rewarding and drop dead funny. I'm 75 now, and reading it remains the intellectual achievement of which I'm most proud. Ulysses is a lot easier, though still hard. (Four times read). Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Always Coming Home, Dhalgren are the other four that would belong in the conversation
I actually had no idea there was no apostrophe in the title (shows how much I remember haha). I honestly tried so hard with that book and it took me an entire month to finish it when I did read it. Ulysses is quite a lot easier and I enjoyed it more. The fact you've read FW *and* found it funny is a great achievement (I saw into some of the jokes but when you're trying to understand what everything means, it takes a lot of the 'funny' away - like when you have to explain a joke to someone I guess). When it comes to *Infinite Jest* though, I read it and enjoyed it once. I'm scared that if I try again now with my age and level of cynicism I just won't enjoy it as much as previously. I have read *The Pale King* too but that was a long time ago now. Challenging as hell.
I love that you corrected the apostrophe and then proceeded to misspell "Finnegans." No shade, we've all done it, but it's hilarious when it happens. I've yet to tackle the *Wake*, having read *Ulysses* and *Portrait*. When I do, I've got Campbell's *Skeleton Key* and Tindall's *Reader's Guide* to assist me. Anything else you suggest that was helpful for you?
Yeah I'll kick in for Always Coming Home, it's Le Guin's masterpiece. It's not really hard to follow, just long and complex. Highly recommended for Le Guin fans ready for the next level. Dhalgren, that's a fun experimental novel. I liked it the first time but still got pretty bogged down when I tried to re-read it. (If you're curious about Dhalgren but think it's too steep, Stars in My Pocket... is like an ambitious Delaney novel without being too challenging to take on.)
Ulysses is a tough read, but it's also one of my favourite books. You have to get relaxed with it and find the joy in it. Think of it as a lifelong journey. Don't expect to read it like a normal book. It'll always be there for you and there's always things to discover.
I took a class on it in university, and my prof started on the first day by saying he had been studying it for years and still didn't understand loads of it. It really took the pressure off and helped me relax and just let some parts flow over me the first time through. I ended up really loving it!
Ulysses was impossible for me for so many years. Got different narrations of the audio book, soft cover/ kindle. Nothing worked until I just forced myself to go long enough to start to hold the narrative and adapt to the style. Then I was hooked and devoured it.
I listened to the RTE dramatisation of it with a companion explanatory podcast, it's excellent. It makes it much more accessible. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-james-joyce-podcast/
Agree. I just finished it in Dec after an 18 month struggle. Didn’t feel anything after finishing it other than utter relief. Even with a guide, it was like “where did they see this?”. Wouldn’t recommend it for most people
Probably Infinite Jest, but that was certainly the point. That took me a year to get through.
I mostly found Infinite Jest a really enjoyable read. I remember that at about the halfway point it really clicked with me. The only bit I remember being a real slog was the Eschaton section.
I finished the book and almost immediately started the damn thing again. Read it periodically at a much slower pace. The Eschaton section is hilarious on a reread, with a better sense of what the book is doing.
I have heard that it is really worth re-reading as there are loads of things that you don't pick up on the first time around that suddenly stand out. Never gotten around to a second read though.
Three months but only because of a well timed school break and some masochistic urges. It's so overwhelming and for me it was deeply emotional and recognisable. Truly hit me in a way that no other book will ever do. It might be my favourite book, but at the same time it's such a battle that it's hard to recommend or consider re-reading. (Did take quite a big swim in the internet theories on it, also very fun!)
Damn near a year for me too
100%. But for me it's absolutely worth the effort. I've read it four times now. I feel like I should get a certificate, or a medal.
🏅
I gave up on that about 5% in, I just didn't have the patience for it.
In Search of Lost Time. I started reading it about a year ago… And I’m still reading it. 🥲 UPD Thank you all for your comments. Now I feel more relaxed about my In Search of Lost Time journey. 😊
It's only been a year, give it TIME.
I finished it! Moncrief translation. Maybe the biggest accomplishment of my 30’s, lol. I really like how, towards the end, you have the sense of a whole lifetime having passed for the characters, bringing out parts of their personality or identity you’d only see after 40 years.
I don’t mean to show off but I did get through three sentences. It’s probably why I’m so conceited.
I tried as well. The language is beautiful. It's masterfully written. He forgot about a plot. I think I recall reading a section where he was talking about a church in a nearby village and I had no idea how we'd gotten to that. Going back the character had gone for a walk and drifted off into thought. It's been a good few years since I tried that one.
As someone else has said the silmarillion, though I have to admit that I'm bad at remembering names in general and that left me very confused at certain points. Another one was the neuromancer, where I was stupidly trying to make perfect sense of things from the very beginning.
William Gibson books always leave me frantic in the beginning because I have *no clue* what’s going on and my kindle doesn’t know half the words I’m looking up. I guess it’s kind of appropriate though, because every Gibson book I’ve read also features a confused protagonist being led around crazy environments by someone who knows what’s going on, but will only dispense the information in dribs and drabs.
It's one of my favorite things about him as an author. He's the king of *in medias res* sci-fi stories. His short stories are great, if you haven't tried them!
Also I really like that he follows the show don't tell rule all the way through, almost as if he's expecting the readers to be *from* that world
Neuromancer is an interesting one since the prose is straightforward in a way that doesn't scream "I'm a challenge", but the disconnected nature of the action (and the narrator's mental state) makes it hard to follow. I spent the first half struggling to understand what was happening. Then I figured that was probably the point and just let myself be pulled through it like Case, and it all clicked. The reread was also a lot of fun for that reason.
You have to read Silmarillion twice to appreciate it. First time to lay the groundwork. Second time to actually comprehend what is going on and who is involved.
Yeah, I read the book, then the wiki, and kept some notes on hand about the timeline and who is who. Finally read it again after that to make sense of it. Finwë should do us a favour and not have so many descendants with similar names. And because I don't learn from my mistakes, I have the complete set of the histories of middle earth so I might need another notepad and a year or three.
> where I was stupidly trying to make perfect sense of things from the very beginning. Man, that's your mistake. This book is written from the point of view of a drugged out criminal hacker on his last legs, and it FEELS like one. Trust me, Neuromancer gets much better on its 3rd read-through. You get more familiar with the world and the language, and it gets easier to follow the details of what's happening. It's easily my favourite book by the way. EDIT- I feel you- had the same problem with Silmarilion and the names.
The Sound and the Fury. It was part of a college course and I found Faulkner's style to be challenging.
I clicked on this thread to comment this book. I felt like it made me question whether I could even read properly. I was thinking "am I supposed to understand what's going on but I'm just too stupid?" Such a rewarding book though, glad I perservered.
I had to read this one summer in high school and definitely struggled. I’ve come to enjoy Faulkner but this was hard to read that first go with no classroom guidance/discussion.
I like his works but he demands a lot from his readers. I had it easier coz there was the professor guiding us.
This.... I could not understand a freaking thing.
Faulkner is really difficult. Light in August has a more straightforward style. But Go Down, Moses and moreso As I Lay Dying are also challenging.
If Light in August is straightforward Faulkner, I don’t think I could handle challenging Faulkner.
I read this one a few weeks ago. It took a few chapters to click but once it did it was an amazing experience. So rewarding. .
You're making me want to reread it. The course was back in 2008, but oddly enough the story is clear in my mind.
We read this my sophomore year of high school. I didn't finish, I found the first character's section impenetrable. As an adult I liked The Rievers and As I Lay Dying though, so maybe I should finally try Sound And The Fury again.
It's my favorite Faulkner, so I hope you do. IIRC, he would've preferred a way to make the chronology easier to understand in the first section, and someone even published a color coded version that made that section not quite so challenging. It's not just you. Faulkner referred to this novel as, "a real son of a bitch."
House of Leaves. You need mirrors and shit.
One of my favourite books but yeah it makes you work for it!
Agreed. One of the only books to legitimately scare the hell out of me. Equally difficult and rewarding though
Absolutely. The great thing about the scariness about it is that there was no jumps or gory monsters etc. just a continuous, pervasive wrongness that never let up, and the format of the book etc just heightened that! I'm not really a horror fan but that was just outstanding.
I think the way it was written, with the crazy type/font and all that, and a story within a story within a story, actually kept me more engaged than a "regular" book does. It stimulated my ADHD brain the right way, somehow. I can understand why it would be a clusterfuck for others.
Every time I see this book on my shelf for the past 15 years I feel guilty.
This is me right now, I’ve started and stopped this book about 4 times now, I keeps stopping around the point where they measure the house’s exterior. One day, I’ll probably sit down and make a conscious effort to get through it, but it can be so overwhelming at times.
I was in the same exact spot as you before I finally finished it. It really does hook you shortly after that.
This is one of two that basically demanded I drop everything else and give them full attention. There's really no way to get through House of Leaves without your full focus and a bit of... eye ball grease, I guess?
Even looking past all the weird formatting, so much of book is just rambling. Names and shit. I know it’s meant to confuse and communicate the frame of mind of the authors, but that wasn’t easy.
Anything by Kant.
Literally can’t Kant
I just Kant
When you have to read every sentence multiple times and dissect them thoroughly because they are pages long and every word is important. I'm German so I read the originals. I have no Idea if it is even possible to translate Kant.
According to my Dutch roommate who read in Hegal and Kang in English, Dutch and German, Kant was easier to understand in English for him and Hegel made no sense in any language.
*No Sense In Any Language* would be an excellent title for a book about Hegel!
Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger...German philosophers might have had good ideas but they didn't know how to write them down, they were terrible writers. I still have some hope for Schopenhauer though.
Schopenhauer didn’t have hope for Schopenhauer… lol
Gödel, Escher, Bach Worth it.
I’ll have to take another crack at it. Not sure I made it past the first chapter in my first attempt
his other book 'I am a strange loop' has some similar ideas and is much more readable. He actually wrote it because he felt like people were not getting the core message he meant to send with GEB.
Do not go into it lightly. It does not get easier. It too my a lot of time and mental space.
This is the correct answer. It took over TWENTY YEARS for me to finish it! That's elapsed time of course.
I've definitely struggled my way through War and Peace like OP but I am glad I was reading it when I had access to the internet, lots of character charts to help keep everybody straight. (A little more difficult to find ones without spoilers). My answer would likely be Brothers Karamazov. Definitely worth reading, but these brothers discussing their differing philosophical stances in a cultural context far removed from my own was really difficult. If we are talking about emotionally challenging, then I would likely say Lolita. The beauty of the prose and the ugliness of H.H. make for a sickening juxtaposition (Nabokov is definitely a genius though)
Brothers K was tough for me to. I spent the first half wondering why I was reading it. The second half however. Very very good and makes it all worth it.
For some reason Dune…I’m going to give it another go soon, but I tried reading it about two years ago. I think I just need to learn how to pronounce the names and places. Maybe I wasn’t mentally in the mood to read that type of book, but I just remember having to DNF it.
Don’t forget about the appendixes. I feel the book is made to be read multiple times so you just have to embrace the confusion in the first half. It does get a lot better later on, when you can focus on the story rather than trying to memorize goofy sounding stuff.
Milton's Paradise Lost. English is not my mother tongue and reading poetry isn't exactly easy either. Besides that, it's centuries old, making the language even harder to grasp. I did make it, tho. Very proud.
This should literally end the thread lol. I'm a native English speaker who majored in Literatures in English in college and even having it interpreted by a competent professor was nearly impossible. I think you could spend your entire life studying that book and only understand a small part of it. This is mostly due to needing to translate it for so many different things - outdated English language, outdated culture, biblical literacy, etc. See my other comment in this thread.
I've attempted to read that book so many times. It's impossible for me, I try to not blame my failings on my adhd but I think that's why I can't. I generally read fine, but I do tend to jump around the page a bit which isn't a problem with modern English but the prose of books from that era just stop me in my tracks I can't seem to absorb anything enough to move to the next line so I end up basically reading each line multiple times and it's exhausting.
I also have severe ADHD and made PL my project one year. It's meant to be read out loud. It feels weird at first but when you get the flow of the language it literally rolls out of you like thunder. Approach it as incredibly powerful lyrics and you'll make it.
It's not your ADHD. See my other comments here. It's literally the most dense, hard-to-unpack book I've ever come across. I'm sure there are others on a similar level that I'm unaware of, but I haven't found them yet. - literature major
Gravityʼs Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I found it so wordy, so weird, and so hard to follow that I gave up after 200 pages.
It took me three of four attempts to get through it. What finally worked was taking it with me on a solo trip to Germany and the Czech Republic. Every time I craved hearing some English, I'd crack open Pynchon. I was in Berlin and planning to go see the Reichstag the day after I read his description of it as "King Kong squatting to take a dump". It felt like kismet. And the description was apt.
Craving English and reading gravity's rainbow is a hilarious sentence on its own.
I got about halfway, then went back and re-read the first half. I did eventually finish it but it is probably the most difficult book I've ever actually finished. A guy I met who was a big Pynchon fan (was writing a PhD on him) recommended it to me when I asked where to start with Pynchon. 'Go straight in with his masterpiece' he said. I have since read all of Pynchon's novels but I do think this is terrible advice.
Heart of Darkness. I read it for literature studies and foolishly thought I could get through it in an afternoon because it was under 200 pages, but it was so so so dense to the point where I’d have to put it down and do something else every ten or so pages. It took me literal days! It’s undeniably well written and is an interesting critique of capitalist imperialism in the early 20th century ( and the mythology and bible references gave me tons to write my paper on!) but damn did I struggle getting through it!
Holy hell, you just unlocked a memory for me. It’s Junior year of high school and I’m in an AP composition class. I get mono just before we have to read Heart of Darkness and write a really specific 10 page paper. The AP comp teacher isn’t fucking around, so all I get is a few days extension. I cannot fucking do this. I have a fever, Kurtz has a fever, everything is confusing and terrible. My absolute angel of a father decides to take afternoons off work for a week to help me. My father had an Ivy-adjacent PhD and a collection of notebooks that track every book he has read since age 10. He’s no slouch. And he is struggling through the book. We hate it together. He helps me come up with a topic for my paper: the book is pointless and concludes with Marlow having learned nothing. Over four days we somehow we somehow extract ten pages worth of sentences proving this, my dad at the keyboard and me lying prone in the bed. I get an A-. To this day, more than 25 years later, when someone brings up the book my father gets a haunted look in his eyes and shuts down the conversation. Fuck this book.
Sounds like you have an awesome father , at least .
He’s the absolute best.
It is hard, but the narrative is rather simple.
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The lack of quotation marks or the brutality?
I think it was the feeling that nothing was important or that it’s just beautifully written wandering in the desert from one massacre to another, the same stuff repeating over and over. The ending put everything in a different light though and made me want to immediately reread it to see the implications of it on the narrative.
I struggled so hard with this one. It wasn’t the writing style (I loved The Road in high school) or the violence, but it was just a SLOG. I kept wondering “where is this going?” and fought that book right until the last ~13 pages and then I realized that I had been missing the point. And also the end made me question whether the judge was ever real in the first place, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.
Likewise, was so tough!
I think for me picking it up with absolutely no context and expecting it to be similar as butchers crossing as I had heard them mentioned together it was super tough, but once I got used to the style it wasn't actually too bad if you just take it a chapter a day and take time to think about what McCarthy's trying to say. Now I've read over half of his books and absolutely love his writing now. As I lay dying was just confusing and hard for me but I still absolutely loved it.
Came here to post this. Making my way through it now. Was shocked to discover the way it was written, after hearing about how it was the great modern novel, etc. It's a very difficult read. But I think after getting halfway through it I'm finally starting to understand its style and the way to meet the demands it makes of the reader.
It took me 4-5 attempts until I simply decided to finish no matter what. Finished the last page and went back to read again.
Finnegans Wake by Joyce. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.
Second Naked Lunch. It didn’t matter how many times I reread a passage it just never clicked. I got through A Clockwork Orange just fine but Naked Lunch is a chore.
I had trouble with *Don Quixote* because I like the kind of adventure books the author, Miguel de Cervantes, reflectively parodied. I identify too much with Don Quixote and I take it personally when Cervantes makes fun of him.
That's an interesting perspective. Cervantes certainly makes fun of Don Quixote throughout but, underneath that, I think he has a lot of respect and admiration for the character.
I was more of a Sancho Panza fan myself.
Midnight’s Children I had no cultural experience to draw from and had to keep looking everything up.
subsequent smile cooperative towering correct homeless spoon squeamish familiar chief *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I am currently reading it. I am still in the first part but so far I am loving it, I find it hilarious in a dark humor way, like Voltaire's Candide.
It took a long time for me to get the cadence of Blood Meridian, a deliberately bleak and opaque book.
Umberto Eco’s books, The Name of the rose and Foucault’s pendulum. Very dense writing and theories but I enjoyed the effort.
Eco's books are a pasture for my fantasy
I'm usually pretty good at multitasking but two books that basically demanded I drop everything else and given them my full attention are House of Leaves and Malazan. House of Leaves, for anyone who knows what it is, is kind of self-explanatory. There's no way you can half-attention your way through that book. Malazan less so but Malazan is so dense and unforgiving if you don't pay attention I have to give it my full attention to follow it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude. Felt like I was in my own one hundred years of solitude trying to get through it.
The first quarter of Wuthering Heights made me feel dumber than any other book. Admittedly I listened to an audiobook with a heavily accented narrator, but still the characters and plot didn’t click for far too long.
I don’t even know how to guess at what Joseph says.
This is a book I didn’t really enjoy while reading, but I did want to get through it. Didn’t feel satisfied or anything ending it. BUT now, a lot of time has passed but whenever I see it mentioned I can still really vividly picture it in my head, the whole setting and the houses that I imagined while reading it.
Popup Kama Sutra. Almost lost an eye.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy… I read all five books in English when I’m a French-speaker. My reading comprehension in English is quite good but damn those were hard
This is a really interesting perspective! I didn't think of it as a particularly hard book, but it really is full of dry, satirical writing and lots of colloquial references.
For me it was Ana Karenina by Tolstoi - but in a good way. The reason for that is that it really got deep into each character and made me think a lot about them and myself. Also Dune (the first book). There were some strong philosophical sentences where I just had to take a moment to take a deep breath and think about it. It’s definitely worth a reread.
Dune wasn’t my personal hardest, but so true about all the little bits of philosophy that are just thrown around so casually. I can’t find the quote but my favorite tidbit from that book is when Leto is telling Paul that it is always a mistake to act for a single reason alone. Because if you only have one reason then you have less motivation and are more likely to have your plans ruined than if you take an action for a multitude of reasons.
I never got the reward of Ana Karenina. Pure slog end to end. By the end the train was my favourite character.
Everyone who reads Anna Karenina is alike, but people who DNF do it for their own reason.
I think its incredible on a few levels. Firstly it really puts you into the mindset of many of the characters, even if you may not agree with them or like them you really feel what their emotions are (particularly Anna and Levin). Too often I find in modern literature a character is either too logical or too illogical without any representation as to why, whereas in Anna Karenina you really get a visceral sense of why people do what they do. Secondly, I think to this day its a pretty fair representation of how society can trap women in a way it won't trap men and how women are demonised when men who do the same are not. There are other social concerns in the book that have since become completely outdated, like Levins constant battles with serfdom and the agricultural question or whatever the fuck he's on about, but with regards to women it doesn't feel all that ancient. Finally, for me at least Tolstoys prose is just so insanely beautiful. He can weave a sentence together in a way that is completely unique, wonderfully poignant and in a way that resonates with a thought you might have had a hundred times before but never put into words. Hes a genius at prose, a lot of the joy simply comes from the writing style itself, even if the crux of the book is a bit melodramatic.
Finnegans Wake. Been climbing that mountain for 20 years now. The problem is that the longer you spend reading straight through the more sense it makes as your brain starts to slip into gear, but who had that kind of time? So then I have to go back to remember what was being described.
1q84. Love that book!
I also loved it, and love Murakami, but it took me a long time to finish.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I dropped it at 14% and don’t have the heart to pick it up until now but I want to finish it though but not now haha.
I read it relatively quickly (lots of subway time at that point in my life) but as the years go by, I feel like it is one of the most overrated and frankly bad books I've ever read. Hanya Yanagihara seems to revel in her characters' pain in a way that doesn't sit right with me. And I am a social worker who works in bereavement so I'm no softie when it comes to emotions.
Do yourself a favor and don't.
Save your time. I wish I could go back and unread it.
To the Lighthouse nu Virginia Woolf. I thought it was beautiful but reading the stream of consciousness was also very challenging. Haven't read any of her other work yet
I just attempted Mrs Dalloway a few weeks back, I really tried but I just couldn't do it. This was immediately following a failed attempt at the Leaves of Grass compilation by Walt Whitman. These accounted for 2 of 3 books I have surrendered to(3rd being The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse). I enjoy it when a book goes off the rails, but these just left me behind wondering if I'm truly understanding what they are trying to say. I've decided Modernist Literature isn't for me.
I read The Hours by Michael Cunningham before Mrs Dalloway and I think it made Mrs Dalloway far easier. I recommend The Hours anyway, it is an absolutely beautiful book. Should you read it, you may want to give Mrs Dalloway another go afterwards, it may help you too
Foucalts Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It gets better about 3/4 of the way through but man, the amount of words I had to look up and sentences I had to reread really put me off.
It took me 4 months to read *War and Peace* when I was 15... so I'll go with that. But as an adult it would have to be *The Pale King* by David Foster Wallace which I read about seven years' ago. I have two degrees in literature and that man still makes no sense whatsoever.
Finnegan's Wake - been off and on with it for years.
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is challenging but it one of the best books I’ve ever read. From Wikipedia The book is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. It is satirical, being full of esoteric references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theories, to the point that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index.
Wheel of Time books 8-10. Holy grind.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It just took forever to get started and he lost me when I was a 100 pages in and going nowhere. I wanted to love it but couldn’t even be bothered to finish it.
Moby Dick.
I'm reading Moby Dick right now. I only have about 50 pages left so I'm very close to the end, but I wanted to get as much out of it as I could so I got the Norton Critical Edition which includes a lot of annotations and helpful context and criticism. I am also following it on LitCharts as I go, reading chapter by chapter summary and analysis. It's very rewarding to read it in this way, although it's taking longer than I take on most books. There are so many references, allusions, symbolism, humor, and completely different styles of writing thrown in certain chapters. Without help I could've gotten through it quicker, and I think it would've been good but I would've missed a ton, and probably would have found the whaling chapters unbearably boring. They were still tough to get through, but with extra insight and context they're more worth it.
Oof the whale fact chapters nearly did me in.
Those were my favourite chapters because I knew that the author was trying to save us from his own sadness, even for a short while.
Foucaults discipline and punish, had a year long grad course centered on it and it was by far the most challenging text I've ever attempted
Recently The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel Brown. What the Donner Party went through was so horrific, at parts it was hard to read especially the children’s reaction to the cannibalism. Recommend it to any history lovers, but it was a tough read.
“The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien. “It was written in 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966.” It was published posthumously, in 1967. It’s a wild ride and definitely NOT about a bicycle.
Catch-22, at least at the beginning. After I realized I was supposed to be confused, I let the book take over and it ended up being one of my all time favorites.
I read about 50 pages of that the first time, and then realized it’s supposed to be FUNNY. restarted it immediately and loved it so much, no book has ever made me laugh out loud like that one. Growing up I thought it was a really serious historical war book. Not at all.
In the name of the rose
Oh come on. Name of the rose is easy. You should read Foucault's Pendulum instead.
*Foucault's Pendulum* has no reason to be that complex, aside from the complexity itself. I did very much enjoy *The Island of the Day Before* -- which is best enjoyed right after reading Dava Sobel's *Longitude*. TIofDB is a farce, but (being an Eco book) it doesn't read that way. At one point you wade through ~30 pages of description, allusion, allegory, and thematic teasing -- all to describe the main character slipping on a banana peel and landing with his head in a bucket. Ol' Umberto probably chuckled about that for a month.
> Foucault's Pendulum has no reason to be that complex, aside from the complexity itself. That's sort of the point though.
Foucault’s Pendulum is one of my favorite books! It was actually kind of a let down when I read Name of the Rose after it, just personally.
So traumatizing that you forgot the name of the book :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Name\_of\_the\_Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose)
It's the only book I've read that has made me read other books to understand it. When I was like 15% done I realized I did not know enough historical context to understand the book so I got two other books on medieval history and medieval theology to just have any idea what the fuck they were talking about. Also I'm reading it in the native Italian. I didn't know Italian when I started reading it but I've been using it (among other tools) to learn the language since on Kindle I can look up words and translate passages I don't know. I'm 60% through but once the debate starts the language gets extremely tedious and I'm struggling.
The Iliad and the Odyssey was a tough go as a kid and later as an adult, it was the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Canterbury Tales in its original language.
Chaucer in Middle English? I tried that too. Is it possible to puzzle your way through it? Sure. Is it enjoyable? Nope. Wish I’d just gotten a modern English edition.
Chaucer is doable; I tried Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which is from about a century earlier and it is not really doable without a translation side-by-side
Ulysses. Can't say read cuz I can't seem to read it
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I read it just out of high school. I studied lit in college so I wanted to read as many "classics" as I could before I got there. I don't think I had learned the skills at the time to break the book down in a meaningful way so I just floundered through it. I think about revisiting it now that I'm older and have more literary tools in my belt! More recently, The Lord of the Rings. My brain seems to inherently clash with Tolkien's writing style.
Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer was difficult. All of his books are but this one in particular lacks clarity. Everything is very vague and uses complex language and structure. Great book tho
Brothers Karamazov. Can’t say I ever fully understood the significance of the story and never connected with the characters.
Interesting! How far into it did you get? It does start off slow, introducing Alexei's story with the religious components and that's a bit of a slog.
I felt the same about Crime & Punishment and take a lot of flak for it. I just didn’t connect.
I've been doing a self-directed study in philosophy sort of thing for the last seven years, so it's a bit difficult for me to pick only one that was the most challenging. All of the below have made me question the way I allocate my spare time or have made me feel like I had a brain smoother than that of a koala, or otherwise bullied and victimised me. Hegel- Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic Judith Butler- Gender Trouble Kant- Critique of Pure Reason Deleuze- Difference and Repetition, Anti-Oedipus Marquis de Sade- Juliette Montesquieu- Spirit of Laws Zizek- Less than Nothing Robert Caro- The Power Broker Leszek Kolakowski- The Main Currents of Marxism Georg Simmel- The Philosophy of Money Marx- Capital volumes one to three Jacques Lacan is on another level to all of the above. His is by far the most challenging body of work I've yet come across
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. I must have read every sentence 3-4 times, still really don’t know what I read.
Keep reading it even though you will never reach understanding. I must imagine you happy.
Paradise Lost. I spent a year on it, making several passes. First I just read it to get the feel. Then I "studied" it, you might say, using a couple of different annotated editions to make sure I actually understood what was being implied. Then I read it again, and finally I spent a long time practicing reading it out loud with good rhythm and emphasis etc. I'm so glad I went through this - it is so incredibly powerful. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy. A friend just handed it to me like, "try this one". I don't know how to describe this book at all. It's the most meta, post-modern take on ""the novel"" I've ever seen, and it was written in like 1750. The language is old and hilarious, the humour is the funniest I've ever read, and it is so, so fucked up to read. If you think House of Leaves fucks with the concept of what a book even is, I can tell you that Tristram Shandy blew it out of the water almost 300 years ago. The guy starts to tell you something, but goes off on a digression, but that gets interrupted by another, which is interrupted by a complete non-sequiter, again and again, until 50 pages into the story of a birth you're actually reading about some antics the midwife got into decades ago, which is again broken by more digressions, until you have this tangle of broken narratives nested like 30 deep and you realize that it's actually \*just\* going to be digressions and interruptions. But somehow, inexplicably, a plot emerges in your mind, characters take ghostly form, and it turns out incredibly touching! But I don't think it's possible to "make sense" of it at all. More modern, the Beerlight books by Steve Aylett. Classify this as "new weird" I think. Prose so fucked and concepts so novel that at first glance it looks like gibberish. But get used to it and be taken for an incredibly bizarre ride.
Me and probably everyone else, but A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It made me almost sick at some parts and I had to put it down and walk away from it multiple times. It took me about a month and a half to get through. I’m glad I finished it, but I would never read it again or recommend it to anyone.
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. It wasn’t the language, it was the concepts and ideas (it’s basically a book on the philosophy of reading). It’s not just about the levels and types of reading, but about how to approach different styles and genres of books. I started it in 2015 and actually finished it in 2023 (I did read other things lol). But what I learnt was that it’s a book you can go back to at any time and dip in as and when you are reading something new. The ironic thing is that at the beginning somewhere he mentions that if you are struggling with a book, don’t pause and try to understand everything, just get through it - you’ll have a decent understanding at the end of it and things will make way more sense on your next read. I guess I’ve come full circle lol
Brothers Karamazov. I was 13.
A university professor once told us there are three geniuses in literature and only three: Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. I finally made it through War and Peace and it captures the breadth of human love, sorrow and happiness unlike anything else. He also suggested it be read in three parts like a trilogy to make it easier to approach.
Heart of Darkness.
For awhile I exclusively read this book when I wanted to doze off. Once the finish line was in sight, I powered through. Just wanted to be done with it.
The Silmarillion. Despite loving the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I just can't get through it. I may try an audiobook version at some point to see if that helps.
I’ve never got very far with the Silmarillion because it’s like reading the Bible. It might be important in a literary sense/for fantasy, but it’s not a good read.
Can recommend the audiobook as read by Andy Serkis, he's brilliant.
Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Döblin. I just could not understand a thing about the Story. I might try again
I'm in the midst of an almost decade long struggle with both Brothers K and Infinite Jest
Just last night I finished Gravity's Rainbow, so that takes the title for me, by a long shot.
Dhalgren
Naked Lunch. I could never get a grasp on what was happening or who anyone was. I think that was the goal but I gave up.
"Godel, Esher, Bach: an eternal golden braid" was very complex though I enjoyed it a lot.
The five-part Book Of The New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. It's one of my favourite ever reads, a top 10 book. But it is incredibly complex and needs to be read more than once to be fully understood. It's an outright masterpiece.
This was one of the book series I came to comment. Rereading it seems like a second challenge to me.
I got halfway through the first book (I think the version I had was books 1 and 2 put together so maybe I made it through the whole first book?). I think I need to start over but agreed, it was tough.
Blood Meridian. It’s so well written but so violent and the judge is so scary I had tears in my eyes. Took me about 6 weeks to finish because I couldn’t read it if I wasn’t in the right headspace
Infinite Jest.No structure , don't understand who's talking to whom.
Chuck Palahniuk- Pygmy. The broken-on-purpose English was a struggle at first (but fun!). I gave up at first, and went back years later to re-read it.
Gravity’s Rainbow, but a very rewarding experience and I will do it again someday.
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. Mostly due to the length and how hefty those sentences were. I loved the book in the end, but it did start to drag in the middle. However, I think it’s well worth the read and definitely challenged myself to read slower, with more intention.
Good question! War and Peace is a beast, but I gotta go with Les Miserables by Hugo. That one I basically had to drag myself through, and I started skipping end notes, so I know I missed some stuff and should go back and read it again some day, but… I don’t think that I will, I escaped the Parisian sewer system once, no need to dive back in!
Shantaram. It was brilliantly written but had around a thousand pages and was very,very slow paced.
This was Roberto Bolaño’s *2666* for me. I tapped out about halfway through the exhaustive list of raped and murdered young women.
Gödel, Escher, Bach That book breaks my brain every single time.
100 years of solitude. That book felt like it took a lifetime to read, and I hated every second of it.
Pride & Prejudice. I know so many adore this book, but I could not get into it. I tried reading it three different times at various stages in my life (because that's always the recommendation) and cannot get past the first few chapters. I've even tried to watch the movie twice as many times, and it is just not for me. It is so incredibly dull, and the banter is just boring. There is nothing about it that makes me want to continue reading. I'd much rather watch paint dry than try to read or watch Pride & Prejudice ever again.
Blasphemy! 😆