Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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?