Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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

highly recommend both books

ulysses is awesome if not the best thing ever. nothung! finnegans wake never seemed worth the effort but i never took a class on it or was taught how to appreciate it. the ones most people seem to have read are the silmarillion and gravity's rainbow. surprised there isn't more mention of tristram shandy, the sweetest novel ever published?

Ulysses is the best thing ever yes

I'm surprised Nabokov's Ada isn't on the list. What a hot, gorgeous mess that one is.

my vote for my favorite of those listed was for tristam shandy.

Tristram Shandy has been on my reading list for too long now. Time to crack it open.

War and Peace is simply big. Only thing difficult about it is carrying it around.

^^ took two classes w/ this guy in college, he was a HOOT

Same here, but my biggest regret was not taking his JAJ seminar.

This thread is awesome.

I've only read 8 of the books, but "Sound and the Fury" is certainly my favorite of those. Pet Semetary is not a challenging read but it was chilling.

Also, I've never read Finnegan's Wake. Do I:

1. Fumble though it (fake it!) without warning or companions once, feel like a dumbass, then re-read with a companion book at my side?

or

2. Know going in that I'm fucked and just read it with a companion book at the get go?

3. get drunk and just read it out loud for the sounds

anyone read this?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XFm17WPPL._SL500_SY300_.jpg

if you read FW with a companion book you will get the advantage of some kind of thread leading you thru, but the disadvantage that that thread will be mostly bollocks - most of the companions i know of try to "decode" the book and that isn't the point in the end.

but on mature reflection i'd say yeah take a companion, it won't kill the book for you and it might sustain your interest long enough to develop your own strategies for reading it

War and Peace is long but awesome and easily read. It is action-packed, at least in the War-sections. However, the last 200 pages or so are really boring. It might be the biggest masterpiece with the worst ending.

wd stress tho that anybody who hasn't read A Tale of a Tub shd read it pronto

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

trainspotting is "hard" because it's written in irish slang language

― flopson, Wednesday, November 6, 2013 7:00 PM (4 hours ago)

uh

shitty listicle redeemed by that flopson post

Yeah solid lol but as for the other floppy posts surely the only dick-measuring is in the og article "if you read a hard book have a cookie" whereas every half smart post itt has been more wgaf if a book is hard or not

Btw I've never read gravitys rainbow, bet it's good tho

rectify asap, i'll read a book of your choosing