Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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