Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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

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

― you can get fuckstab anywhere in london (wins),

ohhhhh yeahhhhhhh. get the gravity's rainbow companion by weissenburger. read a chapter, then the companion notes on that chapter--after three or four chapters you will be in the flow and not really care if you're getting all the refs. Enjoy!

don't get the companion and don't look anything up. just read the damn thing

well aren't you special! most people, including myself, were daunted by it when i tried over and over to get into it. It helped me immensely!

which book are we talking about now

i found reading out loud helped a lot w/ GR, FW and ulysses

I'll rectify RIGHT NOW imago

this sucks

a sucking comes across the page

naphtha is that even a word I doubt it

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

― i want to say one word to you, just one word:buzzfeed (difficult listening hour), 7. november 2013 00:01 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read it the summer before I started studying history, and all the 'history-writers don't know anything' was really deflating... Also, does the whole thing after the time-jump make any sense without some knowledge of the decembrist uprising? I had no idea what was going on, and it was definitely an 'aha' moment when I read an explanation of it.

wow free GR

http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/Thomas%20Pynchon%20-%20Gravity's%20Rainbow.pdf

Hah, does it have the weird printing hijinks around page ~270 in the Penguin edition?

i was kind of unprepared for how filthy GR was

like there were a lot of cleveland steamers iirc

pynchon's thing would appear to be keeping it relatively clean for 200 pages and then giving you polysexual omnideviant hell if GR and ATD are anything to go by

aw, only one steamer! and lots of shit = death pontification. and a toiletship

yeah i guess there was only one steamer scene.

aren't all the actual hard books by continental philosophers?

sold!

*starts on p200*

(there were dirty bits in ATD much earlier iirc)

ATD is like a sexual Bolero, it starts clean but fucking hell 700 pages in

i enjoyed the use of poo humor in gr as it obviously resonates with me, but i wasn't expecting it for whatever reason. i think i read the crying of lot 49 first and that was less of a psychosexual funhouse.

xp ok i'm going to read ATD next