Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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i find some of these choices rather uh odd

Nothing difficult about Trainspotting.

weird list. voting for 'bad behavior,' one of my favorite books.

i love many of these novels but only one of them is by kafka

strange (and not terribly difficult) choices:

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Pet Sematary, Stephen King
Coin Locker Babies, Ryu Murakami
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski

enjoyed all of them, though

hard to pick a favorite among the rest (not that i've read them all)

only finished 14 of those. tie between the silmarillion and gravity's rainbow

Canterbury Tales ain't tough unless you're reading in middle english

pet sematary ain't tough unless you are having it read to you by a toddler or your cat

Nightwood's hilarious

awww, church :(

xp

<i>Trainspotting</i> there probably just because of the dialogue.

You're not reading <i>Canterbury Tales</i> if you're not reading it in Mid. English.

If you're reading it in ME you're reading "The Book of the Tales of Caunterbury" I think.

The Castle isn't that hard? Voted Gravity's Rainbow, obviously. Any other answer is objectively wrong.

GR isn't that hard though. Just long.

I vote for whichever of these is coated in briars

Gravity's Rainbow, man. Once you get bit by the GR bug, you are a stan for life. Wanted to read it again when I finished it a few months ago.

Maybe for some of these "hard" means "intense/headfucky"? The Castle def fits that category, tho The Trial does so even better really.

The one that isn't hard but just long is definitely In Search of Lost Time. I've spend hours just getting lost in the flow of that thing. Still only halfway through, though.

what are ilx's 50 incredibly tough books for extreme readers?

I cast a Martin Skidmore Memorial Vote for Dhalgren.

Probably need some H. James on there (e.g. "The Beast in the Jungle").
Finnegans Wake almost surely, though.

The Unnameable.

Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" was tough for me to get through. An entire novel in one long mad monologue/paragraph.

Yeah, definitely some of these books are on here for unpleasant or disturbing subject matter rather than being difficult to read or comprehend

No Oulipo, no credibility.

I'll never finish Finnegan's, but of the baker's dozen of those I have read Gulag probabably wins for interminable misery. Others like ∞ Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, Tristram Shandy are speedy, funny reads, once one gets into the author's rhythm.

Favorite of the lot is Naked Lunch, despite the rough bits about ejaculating dead boys.

i had a lot more difficulty with the master & margarita than half the ones listed that i've read

this is a weird list

I lol-ed at how many of these items I have taught or am going to teach

stoked to see "Alphabetical Africa" on there!

Whats the most emotionally difficult book?

clearly this is down to dhalgren vs finnegan vs GR

agree with polyphonic that bernhard should be on this list

would probably pick "old masters" rather than "the loser" though

i guess "the loser" is a tougher read though

The question is which is our favourite, not which is toughest.

well ftr "old masters" is my favorite bernhard and dhalgren / FW / GR are my favorites on the list

i've read about twenty of these and for me the emotionally difficult ones were dhalgren and GR. i think a lot of it is down to the lack of closure.

Ugh geek love. Hated that shit. Emblematic of the 90s at their stupidest.

i think part of the difficulty of dhalgren is the volume of writing. he overdoes it and it's a lot to take in. but if you get past that there is some really sad stuff in dhalgren like the richards' family, the encounters on the bus line, the last chapter, etc. i really think it could have been a better book (and less difficult) with some serious editing. maybe i should take it up again.

the castle is existentially tough.

i found the bell jar in high school to be emotionally tough. i always felt sad while reading it.

I've had Clarissa putrefying on the shelf for a while. Maybe time to give it a shot.

JR is fantastic and is my vote. It's definitely difficult (almost entirely dialogue), and I personally find it emotionally exhausting too. It's one of my very favourite novels. I think Gaddis's The Recognitions.

I read Moby-Dick this year and was surprised by how distinctly not-difficult it was given its reputation. Also Virginia Wolff is not incredibly tough. Beckett
should be on the list, though I love him he's very hard to get through at times.

Every time anyone mentions Thomas Bernhard on ilx he always seems like the exact kind of writer I love. But he's never in any libraries or bookstores, why is that?

kids are made to read moby-dick, that skews its rep

bernhard has been in translation for a while but a big push to translate his oooovray only happened recently, post-bookstore-collapse, so maybe people just aren't hep anymore. i saw several of the new ones in a b+n, when they still carried books.

xpost

Whoops

I think Gaddis's The Recognitions is arguably more difficult than JR - very very different style though so it's hard to compare. If you don't know much about art or greek mythology then The Recognitions is basically impenetrable.

old masters on amazon from $4.63

is there an audiobook of j r

Trainspotting?!?!? Not hard to read at all. A case could be made for putting everything Irvine Welsh wrote later on the list, on the basis that it's almost unreadably bad.

Silmarillion is prob the hardest book to read on that list, in that it was never written to be read by anyone other than its own writer.

xp I guess there's my excuse gone.

haha an audiobook of JR would be amazing.

j. franzen wrote a whole essay about how unreadable 'j.r.' is, so i assume it can't be all bad.

the second half of "notes from underground" is very emotionally difficult.

yeah, I can't work out the rubric here:

OLD?

LONG?

FORMALLY COMPLEX?

EMOTIONALLY DRAINING/TOUGH?

OPAQUE STYLE?

seems like a funky swirl of all of these qualities

I'd say the texts with the highest attrition rate on the list are either Proust or Spenser- the ratio of people who start to people who finish is not so good for them.

i think finnegans wake fares worse than proust in that regard

There is an audiobook of J R – it's unabridged, 37 hours, came out a few years ago. Was on iTunes, but doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Why's Pet Sematary on here?

Xp there's an unabridged audiobook of the tunnel too, read by gass himself!

not dignifying this stupid fucking list with a vote, up yours Flavorwire

the second half of "notes from underground" is very emotionally difficult.

pretty sure the book is intentionally funny as fuck

FD was funny a lot of the time!

well exactly

the first half of the book is funny and bleak and jarringly modern for the year it was written. the second half -- where he is cruel to the prostitute and the reader is able to really feel, not just see, what it's like to be the underground man and truly hate themselves -- isn't funny anymore, in my view.

i mean, i can see how the wretchedness of it is all has the structure of humor or whatever, but i don't think "funny" is a good word to describe it. goes without saying that i love that book.

the parts where he is still with his "friends," sabotaging their night, is funny

I bought one of those horrible plastic trash cans from target

with the lid that pops up when you press the button

and the button broke so the lid is just up

the button broke within a week

I weigh the trash can lid down with tristram shandy

this is the second shitty plastic target trash can this has happened to

morelike nightsoil

Infinite jest and to a greater extent underworld are not remotely difficult reads. They're just long.

"the year of magical thinking" is a deliberately straightforward and relatable account of the grieving process

Treeship, have you ever read 'The Double' by Dostoyevsky? It is also very funny/excruciating re. the subject of self-loathing.

When I first read Dostoyevsky I was so surprised by how funny it was, I had always known him as a shorthand for difficult, heavy going literature, but the books are very readable, funny, lots of dramatic incident.

yeah, Dostoyevsky's not really heavy going, he's super readable - the difficulty of the books arises purely from the awfulness of all of his people.

practically every dostoyevsky novel i have read i have read at breakneck speed, mostly because if i stop to think i will throw the book against the wall in rage at these terrible people constantly being terrible to one another.

No Beckett?

Every time anyone mentions Thomas Bernhard on ilx he always seems like the exact kind of writer I love. But he's never in any libraries or bookstores, why is that?

I just bought one of his books... from a bookstore! I've only read on of his book but I didn't find it difficult to read at all.

I am trying to be generous towards this list (exploit the dismal cult of difficult literature to recommend some odd books, decent rhetorical move imo) but it turns out I am voting for "Probably the greatest and most difficult satire by one of the world’s most storied satirists." Sharp blurb, flavorwire!

I recently read the village of stepanchikovo, Dostoyevsky's only foray into straight-ahead comedy afaik. It's a lot of fun but a)pretty dark and b) not as funny as devils &c

gotta be Proust or Faulkner

Proust it will be ftw

where is The Man Without Qualities?

no ulysses

?

Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Pet Sematary, Stephen King

joke inclusions, as is silmarillion

the silmarillion is way better than lots of stuff on that list. easy to knock due to the hobbit's and the lord of the rings' ubiquity but up there with the fairie queene and the canterbury tales as extraordinary mythopoeic invention. not gonna defend trainspotting or pet semetary's inclusions except to say both are rad and too bad haters gotta hate

Tale of a Tub isn't a difficult satire so much as Swift realises halfway thru that he hates everything

DHALGREN

i haven't read most of these though

yeah the number of titles on this list which are in my opinion extremely readable and user friendly kinda belies the point

I mean all lists are corny clickbait, so that's got to be a given at this point, but I would learn something from, say, a list of the top 50 longest books, in order, that I'm not learning from this list because of its incoherence

but I like talking about books!

when I was in lol-college I wrote an undergrad paper about the unreadability of "Finnegan's Wake" with reference to Wittgenstein on private language- I have vague memories of my pained bleating about the work's resistance to being read as the asymptotic approach towards the conceptually impossible notion of a private language- like, we can't have a private language, but if we could, it would sound a lot like FW- probably just my attempt at a highfalutin justification for not being able to read the damn thing

nb qualmsley- i enjoyed all three but wtf at their placement on a list like this

Infinite jest and to a greater extent underworld are not remotely difficult reads. They're just long.

Difficulty in constantly flipping back-and-forth from IJ's main text to endnotes shouldn't be underestimated, especially if one hand is busy smoking.

Kilopage books are heavy

yea i presume thats what theyre getting @ w house of leaves also. like rotating the book around or w/e. cuz like esp the lude's (that's his name right?) journal part are really simplistic/easy 2 read

xps

I feel like the dominance of the Englishish grammar & hyperreferentiality stop FW being a private language quite, like it's uninward in lots of ways, always arguing and trying to tell stories (doing homework!). But I suppose it's ultimately arguing with itself & trying to explain itself to itself, so maybe that collapse of interior/exterior is symptom of what you're saying. Reading it now funnily enough, love it.

have read 2 of these, another 5 or so on the reading list. no compunction about voting GR though. if anything on here comes close to matching it then it'll have done fairly well

the 20c's cute and all but i voted moby-dick obv

FW would be literally unreadable if it were a private language - it's readable precisely because it's engaged in a multitude of other discourses. Derrida made a similar point about translation being possible because there was meaning that wasn't reducible simply to a particular language's expression iirc

I'm always astounded Eliot liked Nightwood enough to write a preface.

i mean obv what makes a certain kind of reading of FW difficult or perhaps impossible is that it's oversaturated in other discourses but this is exactly the opposite of being a private language i think

which brings me (by a commodius etc) to the point that "a TOUGH read" is only TOUGH if you think reading is one particular think. which in literature especially it surely isn't

yes FW def forces that point, single or traditional reading habits break against it. I think it's sometimes seen as a book for the academy when standard academic tight-interpretative, lock-down-the-metaphors, write-a-paper approaches run out or off against it - seems like more space for the enthusiast, the amateur, the cheerful crank in there.

yeah, FW like a super-reading adventure playground. you can swing through letting bits hook, catch and connect with each other, but it's a lot easier if you're relaxed about it all rather than 'I need to spend 17 years reading this to "get it"'

open world reading.

i enjoyed all three but wtf at their placement on a list like this

i'm glad to see them get props by association

Why's Pet Sematary on here?

Perhaps it was included to flatter the list's readers that they had read at least one extremely hard book.

Perhaps it was included ironically, as if to say the book is so dreadful that the list's compiler could not possibly finish it unless locked in a prison cell with it for 20 years.

Perhaps it was included as the all-important challop that was designed to stimulate extra clicks from the sheer need of some of its readers to point derisively and laugh, while inviting all their friends to do the same.

(strokes chin and ponders)

Yes. It was that last one.

perhaps. at any rate pet semetary is scary as fuck, maybe the most frightening (though not most disturbing) novel i've ever read

Well if you think that the king succeeds at being horrific that's a definition of "tough" that's as valid as any surely

I know ppl who'd never go near a macabre story about children dying, for reasons that needn't be explained, yet would have no problem enjoying the obvious pleasures of a great book that happens to have an unusual ("difficult") style or structure

And neither group are really "extreme readers" this list is stupid everyone otm

groups are hard to stereotype

FW like a super-reading adventure playground. you can swing through letting bits hook, catch and connect with each other, but it's a lot easier if you're relaxed about it all rather than 'I need to spend 17 years reading this to "get it"'

Yes, yes yes Fizzles OTM.

Though I take this attitude with a lot of 'hard' texts, and have to keep reminding myself that it is often (usually?) an indicator of a sort of educational privilege that you can be confident enough to be relaxed about it.

Also, just about to start reading Nightwood for the first time, hoping dismissiveness of it here doesn't sway my personal reaction to it.

IT is a tough read cause it gave me nightmares. Hogg is a tough read because its world is unremittingly bleak, shabby & violent. Freedom is a tough read cause I couldn't be arsed to finish the tedious POS. These are as much valid measures of toughness as length or complexity.

In any case, if you think about books in terms of how "hard" they are you are at least an Extremely Stupid Reader

Xp I don't have one of your fancy educations and I love a lot of these books and I think fw is a hoot fwiw

whole list should alternate between derrida, deleuze, and dr. seuss books maybe?

No Homi K. Bhabha, no credibility.

Gilbert Sorrentino - Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Boris Vian - Froth on the Daydream

your fancy educations

Pretty sure I didn't have a fancy education either. Not what I meant.

Think fancy in this context == grad school?

I've read Infinite Jest, The Silmarillion, Gravity's Rainbow and The Castle.

Out of these, the one I had the most fun with was probably Infinite Jest and the one that was the most "difficult" for me was probably Gravity's Rainbow.

I actually enjoyed the Silmarillion more than any other Tolkien books. I think that's mostly just because I like creation myths/mythological histories.

I got a levels

Dunno what you meant then sorry

I was expecting to see Foucault's Pendulum on here base off its reputation; never tried reading it myself. As far as this list, I never got around to finishing In Search of Lost Time so I'll go with that.

I loved DeLillo's White Noise when I read it a few years ago. Is Underworld "harder" to get through?

I really like Nightwood, emil.y. When I said it was hilarious I meant that literally: I think there is deliberate humor in the way one of the main characters hijacks the text with his verbosity, and in general there is a playfulness to the way Barnes exploits the elasticity of the text. xp

xps to Leee and wins

Basically all I meant was there's a whole lot of cultural suppositions you're making if you're going to tell someone "hey, just chill out and relax, Finnegans Wake is well easy". It's a mixed bag of cultural and social capital, which amongst other things includes level of education, but that's not the primary thing at all.

I'm trying to say be self-aware so you don't come across as patronising, but maybe that self-awareness is being read as patronising in itself?

Silmarillion is easy when you're a thirteen year old Tolkien freak. I probably couldn't read it now.

Ah, well I wouldn't try to tell anyone how to enjoy ANY book, though I might say "this is how I enjoy it"

I mean if someone I know is thinking of reading the wake I'll assume we share an interest in literature at least, don't think that's too presumptuous

the silmarillion is engaging as hell and deceptively simple but overall a better impression of hellenic myth than ulysses is. inklings > modernists

are you saying that it is better than ulysses??

way better

lol, no way.

I'm just going to back away slowly from the emil.y and wins' sub-discussion -- I have no idea what's at stake here!!!!

Haven't read any Tolkien, but if it has a scene where a character takes a dump and wipes himself with a short story written by Tolkien himself, then we'll talk.

qualmsley is XTREMEST reader

tolkien knew more languages than joyce, his tone was more solid, and the fables he related fuckloads more trippy than ulysses' travesties. joyce wrote better characters, for sure, and they're shakespearian in their pathos, but tolkien was working on a cosmic not urban scale, so apples and oranges

Or if The Silmarillion has any singing bars of soap.

Lol leee nothing to see here I'm just shooting the shit

Whew!

no singing lightbulbs, either. singing stars!

Lol leee nothing to see here I'm just shooting the shit

Me too, no beefs here.

Except maybe with qualmsley. ^__^

extreme reading is like you're driving down a highway at 55 mph and you have the book in your lap, or maybe you are skydiving or snowboarding while reading.

or you can be drinking an energy book while reading, that's extreme too i hear.

i tried reading with my glasses off, that was pretty extreme i guess.

maybe not extremely extreme.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4139pllL0tL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I was once reading a menu in a restaurant and I guess I was holding the menu a bit too close to the candle on the table and the menu caught on fire. That was probably the most extreme reading I've done.

http://www.lyrics007.com/Extreme%20Lyrics/More%20Than%20Words%20Lyrics.html

if you do the floyd/zeppelin test on joyce and tolkien, tolkien scores a 4 and joyce a 0, unless you count barrett solo albums (then joyce gets a 1)

flavorwire

n+1?

lol @ everybody itt pulling out their dicks all "oh, why i just breezed through gravity's rainbow"

trainspotting is "hard" because it's written in irish slang language

I was surprised to see Pet Sematary on here, but its inclusion resonates with me. I read it at 15 while I was on vacation, 2000 miles away from home and the little 3 year old sister I doted on. I ended up having an hour-long crying fit on the floor of my hotel room when I finished.

most people who read in their spare time would consider infinite jest a hard book to read. for a reference point, my mother's favourite authors are tom robbins and john irving. her cowokers, who she occsasionaly shares books with, have never finished a book by either any time she's lent them one, because they found them too difficult

for some reason to the lighthouse was really hard for me. the radical pov games i guess. i was very impressed.

i read 'the silmarillion' on an airplane last summer and i am reasonably sure i would've given it up as a bad job if i hadn't been stuck w/o anything else to read the dense fog of archaic wikipedia entries style was pretty fatiguing

reading that as a kid riding high off of having blasted through lotr was a real let-down

i dunno if we should blame tolkien too much for the unreadability of the silmarillion -- it was assembled after his death, mostly from writings he didn't expect ever to be published.

House of Leaves isn't difficult or disturbing, unless you're driven to blind rage by words falling across multiple pages and shit.

my main difficulty w/ GR was the sudden shifts from character to character. i had a hard time keeping all the plot threads straight.

i found ulysses EASY because i read it side-by-side with this bad boy

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31FPWk2oUDL._BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

oh hey look! somebody put ulysses up with all of the annotations!

http://www.columbia.edu/~fms5/ulys.htm

read this one side-by-side with finnegan's wake

http://www.amazon.com/Joyces-Book-Dark-Finnegans-Ingraham/dp/0299108244

^^ took two classes w/ this guy in college, he was a HOOT

highly recommend both books

ulysses is awesome if not the best thing ever. nothung! finnegans wake never seemed worth the effort but i never took a class on it or was taught how to appreciate it. the ones most people seem to have read are the silmarillion and gravity's rainbow. surprised there isn't more mention of tristram shandy, the sweetest novel ever published?

Ulysses is the best thing ever yes

I'm surprised Nabokov's Ada isn't on the list. What a hot, gorgeous mess that one is.

my vote for my favorite of those listed was for tristam shandy.

Tristram Shandy has been on my reading list for too long now. Time to crack it open.

War and Peace is simply big. Only thing difficult about it is carrying it around.

^^ took two classes w/ this guy in college, he was a HOOT

Same here, but my biggest regret was not taking his JAJ seminar.

This thread is awesome.

I've only read 8 of the books, but "Sound and the Fury" is certainly my favorite of those. Pet Semetary is not a challenging read but it was chilling.

Also, I've never read Finnegan's Wake. Do I:

1. Fumble though it (fake it!) without warning or companions once, feel like a dumbass, then re-read with a companion book at my side?

or

2. Know going in that I'm fucked and just read it with a companion book at the get go?

3. get drunk and just read it out loud for the sounds

anyone read this?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XFm17WPPL._SL500_SY300_.jpg

if you read FW with a companion book you will get the advantage of some kind of thread leading you thru, but the disadvantage that that thread will be mostly bollocks - most of the companions i know of try to "decode" the book and that isn't the point in the end.

but on mature reflection i'd say yeah take a companion, it won't kill the book for you and it might sustain your interest long enough to develop your own strategies for reading it

War and Peace is long but awesome and easily read. It is action-packed, at least in the War-sections. However, the last 200 pages or so are really boring. It might be the biggest masterpiece with the worst ending.

wd stress tho that anybody who hasn't read A Tale of a Tub shd read it pronto

haha i like the final exam section of war and peace because it's like after a huge dinner u retire for cigars w tolstoy and he pontificates about history until he falls asleep

trainspotting is "hard" because it's written in irish slang language

― flopson, Wednesday, November 6, 2013 7:00 PM (4 hours ago)

uh

shitty listicle redeemed by that flopson post

Yeah solid lol but as for the other floppy posts surely the only dick-measuring is in the og article "if you read a hard book have a cookie" whereas every half smart post itt has been more wgaf if a book is hard or not

Btw I've never read gravitys rainbow, bet it's good tho

rectify asap, i'll read a book of your choosing

Btw I've never read gravitys rainbow, bet it's good tho

― you can get fuckstab anywhere in london (wins),

ohhhhh yeahhhhhhh. get the gravity's rainbow companion by weissenburger. read a chapter, then the companion notes on that chapter--after three or four chapters you will be in the flow and not really care if you're getting all the refs. Enjoy!

don't get the companion and don't look anything up. just read the damn thing

well aren't you special! most people, including myself, were daunted by it when i tried over and over to get into it. It helped me immensely!

which book are we talking about now

i found reading out loud helped a lot w/ GR, FW and ulysses

I'll rectify RIGHT NOW imago

this sucks

a sucking comes across the page

naphtha is that even a word I doubt it

haha i like the final exam section of war and peace because it's like after a huge dinner u retire for cigars w tolstoy and he pontificates about history until he falls asleep

― i want to say one word to you, just one word:buzzfeed (difficult listening hour), 7. november 2013 00:01 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read it the summer before I started studying history, and all the 'history-writers don't know anything' was really deflating... Also, does the whole thing after the time-jump make any sense without some knowledge of the decembrist uprising? I had no idea what was going on, and it was definitely an 'aha' moment when I read an explanation of it.

wow free GR

http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/Thomas%20Pynchon%20-%20Gravity's%20Rainbow.pdf

Hah, does it have the weird printing hijinks around page ~270 in the Penguin edition?

i was kind of unprepared for how filthy GR was

like there were a lot of cleveland steamers iirc

pynchon's thing would appear to be keeping it relatively clean for 200 pages and then giving you polysexual omnideviant hell if GR and ATD are anything to go by

aw, only one steamer! and lots of shit = death pontification. and a toiletship

yeah i guess there was only one steamer scene.

aren't all the actual hard books by continental philosophers?

sold!

*starts on p200*

(there were dirty bits in ATD much earlier iirc)

ATD is like a sexual Bolero, it starts clean but fucking hell 700 pages in

i enjoyed the use of poo humor in gr as it obviously resonates with me, but i wasn't expecting it for whatever reason. i think i read the crying of lot 49 first and that was less of a psychosexual funhouse.

xp ok i'm going to read ATD next

trainspotting is "hard" because it's written in irish slang language

― flopson, Wednesday, November 6, 2013 7:00 PM (4 hours ago)

uh

― Wendy Carlos Williams (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 6, 2013 6:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what? is that not true?

ah scottish right lol

I've hardly read any pynchon but against the day is one of my favourite books ever

blood meridian is hard as fuck to read but super good and rewards close reading immensely

You don't have to get 200 pages into GR before a character decodes a message using precious bodily fluids.

I gave up on Blood Meridian, and it was for a class! So yes, I vouch for its difficulty.

xp sweet! *starts on p199*

GR and ATD are my two favourite books ever. Tristram Shandy is probably third; hope it gets a few votes here

Pet Semetary is a deeply unscary book that gets overly praised because it has a homicidal ghoul toddler in it. The only part of it that resonated as being upsetting was the argument either at or directly after the funeral; all of the supernatural murder afterward just seemed stupid to me in comparison.

(for reference, I read this like maybe within a year of my brother dying so I was probably not in a frame of mind to appreciate mining a family death for macabre murder scares)

Heart of Darkness isn't difficult going either, it's just super racist.

voted Johnny Got His Gun

was going through my books the other day for a move and found my copy of 'blood meridian' with a bookmark like 20 pages from the end. now i'm torn between finishing it (i left off three years ago) and starting over again.

The dancing paragraph that ends Blood Meridian destroyed me. Anyway, voting Finnegans Wake, not sure why everyone else isn't.

haven't read it

I never knew Pet Semetary got that much praise--thought it got lumped in with all of King's trashy stuff.

Like a lot of media, the books on this list that I read and appreciate have a lot of life context in them (my state of mind or life when I read them etc.) How a book resonates so often is a part of your life at the time.

Kind of like how The Road will always mean way more to me than Blood Meridian ever will.

how do you get 20 pages from the end of something and not finish it?

normally i'm a committed book-finisher, but i was reading it on a trip, got to that point right as my plane landed, and somehow never felt in the mood to pick it back up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oh well I'm definitely not reading Infinite Jest now

the long tail

Oops, forgot to vote for GR.

oh well I'm definitely not reading Infinite Jest now

― veneer timber (imago), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 12:06 AM (28 minutes ago)

yer fucking loss man, its awesome

haha that was truculence @ the robbing of lot 49 (from bottom)

maybe will read IJ, but have to write it first ;)

of the 'no votes' crew, i really enjoyed reading underworld and hopscotch both. they are both v immersive, engrossing reads.

surprised GR lost this!

Have just started Joseph McElroy's Women And Men which is reputedly both longer and more difficult than virtually everything on this list. 20 pages in; it's extraordinary - a gigantic poem of selves and selves-in-selves and a great communal Self that isn't even a self. Strikes me that it could be a fairly great work.

A swirling, deistic reverie of compassion and our relationship to the void which extends from & into us. I can't even - this is twenty pages. After 1,200 I'll presumably reach Enlightenment

Keep us posted!

xo

i love mcelroy but never did finish w&m

also of all the vollmanns to pick!

Haha yeah seriously, I think I scanned it as rising up rising down until I looked at the list just now

also w&m isn't longer than a number of the "long" books on this list. its just v. dense and imagistic.

and yeah, i guess relatively long (but relative to what)