Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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'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)