Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

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

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

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

uh

― Wendy Carlos Williams (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 6, 2013 6:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what? is that not true?

ah scottish right lol

I've hardly read any pynchon but against the day is one of my favourite books ever

blood meridian is hard as fuck to read but super good and rewards close reading immensely

You don't have to get 200 pages into GR before a character decodes a message using precious bodily fluids.

I gave up on Blood Meridian, and it was for a class! So yes, I vouch for its difficulty.

xp sweet! *starts on p199*

GR and ATD are my two favourite books ever. Tristram Shandy is probably third; hope it gets a few votes here

Pet Semetary is a deeply unscary book that gets overly praised because it has a homicidal ghoul toddler in it. The only part of it that resonated as being upsetting was the argument either at or directly after the funeral; all of the supernatural murder afterward just seemed stupid to me in comparison.

(for reference, I read this like maybe within a year of my brother dying so I was probably not in a frame of mind to appreciate mining a family death for macabre murder scares)

Heart of Darkness isn't difficult going either, it's just super racist.

voted Johnny Got His Gun

was going through my books the other day for a move and found my copy of 'blood meridian' with a bookmark like 20 pages from the end. now i'm torn between finishing it (i left off three years ago) and starting over again.

The dancing paragraph that ends Blood Meridian destroyed me. Anyway, voting Finnegans Wake, not sure why everyone else isn't.

haven't read it

I never knew Pet Semetary got that much praise--thought it got lumped in with all of King's trashy stuff.

Like a lot of media, the books on this list that I read and appreciate have a lot of life context in them (my state of mind or life when I read them etc.) How a book resonates so often is a part of your life at the time.

Kind of like how The Road will always mean way more to me than Blood Meridian ever will.

how do you get 20 pages from the end of something and not finish it?

normally i'm a committed book-finisher, but i was reading it on a trip, got to that point right as my plane landed, and somehow never felt in the mood to pick it back up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

oh well I'm definitely not reading Infinite Jest now

the long tail

Oops, forgot to vote for GR.

oh well I'm definitely not reading Infinite Jest now

― veneer timber (imago), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 12:06 AM (28 minutes ago)

yer fucking loss man, its awesome

haha that was truculence @ the robbing of lot 49 (from bottom)

maybe will read IJ, but have to write it first ;)

of the 'no votes' crew, i really enjoyed reading underworld and hopscotch both. they are both v immersive, engrossing reads.

surprised GR lost this!

Have just started Joseph McElroy's Women And Men which is reputedly both longer and more difficult than virtually everything on this list. 20 pages in; it's extraordinary - a gigantic poem of selves and selves-in-selves and a great communal Self that isn't even a self. Strikes me that it could be a fairly great work.

A swirling, deistic reverie of compassion and our relationship to the void which extends from & into us. I can't even - this is twenty pages. After 1,200 I'll presumably reach Enlightenment

Keep us posted!

xo

i love mcelroy but never did finish w&m

also of all the vollmanns to pick!

Haha yeah seriously, I think I scanned it as rising up rising down until I looked at the list just now

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)