Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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

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)