Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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.

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)