The Most Difficult Book You've Ever Read

(I am waiting until I actually finish the book which will be the answer to mine.)

After finishing all of the above, a feeling not unlike total satisfaction was experienced.

It wasn't even that the subject matter was difficult (I've read other popular science books on similar topics without difficulty) but he seemed to be talking around in circles, and never quite reached a conclusion. He has this habit of going off on tangents (Rennaisance Ventian scociety, WTF?) for pages at a time, then just goes straight back into a few paragraphs of heavy maths without so much as a recap.

And his extended metaphors, or little stories to try to make things clearer were just clumbsy.

I did make it through, all the way to the end, but it was a hard slog. I found *my* mirotubules quite strained keeping my attention on it.

Most difficult for me is, so far, 'Either/Or' by Kierkegaard. Bloody hell. I read all the words, and I understood them individually, but all together I felt like a dumb, dumb chap.

tom, 'the apology' is key, the other stuff usually lumped in with 'last days' or 'trial and death' of socrates ('euthyphro', 'meno', 'crito', 'phaedo') might set a few themes or whatever (and the framing stuff and dramatic stuff in the 'phaedo' is key), but some other dialog might better convey some of the more 'technical' themes. so say as a first shot:

'apology'
beginning and end of the 'phaedo'
'meno'
'sophist'
and say i dunno 'protagoras' or 'phaedrus'?

i don't know how representative that might be.

I mean there's always the suggestion that Plato wrote his works so that people would have something problematic they'd have to sharpen their brains trying to figure out.

i meant "and why would you recommend that particular plato", by the way.

Something annoying me here. Bad definitions of difficulty maybe? Or fetish of difficulty in the first place? He's young, I'd guess.

1) None of those are really difficult
2) "I like McSweeney's
3) Don Delillo
4) Fetish of difficulty, yah

yeah i don't know why someone would read that way either. i bet he is 19.

THE BIBLE

fucking dull

i think the poster is just plain pretentious: setting those artificial constraints on a reading list reeks of weird gimmickry and attempt to impress. i.e. why not just read what you want, whether or not it's difficult? probably because you are 19, and have a "neat idea"

i can't wait until he finds out he hates infinite jest on page 10

"I'm going to read 12 whole books, pay attention to me"

finnegans wake or gtfo

ha i was just going to post that

i usually read a sci fi novel after any heavy lifting literary stuff or just take a break

i really enjoyed that don delilo book about football but i hated underworld so much put it down 50 pages in totally disgusted & with no desire whatsoever to ever return to it

carlos fuentes 'terra nostra' was hard going for me, as was john fowles 'the magus' but that is basically because they were really sad and psychologically fucked-up, not "difficult" per se.

The baker's dozen on this Amazon list looks like more of a challenge than that blogger's.

http://www.amazon.com/MOST-DIFFICULT-BOOKS-EVER-WRITTEN/lm/R29VPS3NEIQ0AS

i really enjoyed that don delilo book about football but i hated underworld so much put it down 50 pages in totally disgusted & with no desire whatsoever to ever return to it

― flopson, Monday, January 17, 2011 12:08 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha ive tried to read underworld multiple times and always end up putting it down after a few dozen pages

Oh wait I FORGOT how much I HAAAAAAAAAAATE reading any latin american literature translated by Edith Grossman (Vargas Llosa, Garcia-Marquez, Álvaro Mutis) because she is an airless old dame and actually RUINS the literature in her translation. i find reading anything she's touched a FUCKING SLOG so, in other words, i guess i agree that reading '100 years of solitude' in english, translated by her, is really stinkin' difficult.

The hardest book I ever read was either:
• Richardson's Pamela...but I feel a cosmic connection with anyone else who has. It's like having been through boot camp together.
or
• The Miracle of Forgiveness aka "you are a bad person" by Mormon leader Spence W. Kimball...my bishop made me read it in repentance for having blown a dude. And, really, it's just as repetitive as Pamela, but instead of worries about Mr. B, it's the message that "you are a bad person." Easy read, made me feel...just guess how it made me feel.

xxxp

I wrote down Sir Charles Grandison just then & thought 'hey, maybe I should read…', but no.

Clarissa is sort of extraordinary iirc (17/18 years ago now), repetition & slowness def give it a kind of intensity & psych depth that you don't get elsewhere in the novel at that moment. But I couldn't, wouldn't go back.

Difficult/tedious - Independent People - Laxness.

yeah, i don't hate clarissa. it's nothing i'd read again... but i don't regret it at all.

and i'll admit delillo isn't a bad writer... i just don't share any of the same concerns as his books/characters. i think the lenny bruce stuff in underworld is what made me hate him so much.

Never read Indie Peeps, but I enjoyed some other (shorter) Laxness.

"speaking evil of dignitaries"!

Crowley's the only one on Remy's list I defend by instinct: I get where kinds of badness lie in him (awkward 'lyrical' style, possibly a mystifying hippy, writes basically static books of late, blankish charcters, can end up lecturing), but his virtues are close to those faults, and I find him more interesting than most US writers now. I may tend to overrate him, tho', because of his patchy uk publication history.

Oh god I have read Crowley, I read "Great Work of Time" in an anthology last year and made a (lapsed) mental note to read his novels. Yeah most of those badnesses woof lists are mighty close to things I love in fiction tbh

Read and adored "GWoT" I meant to add.

the problem with that blog post is he's not gonna get to have fun with any of those books. like oh my god you only get to not know what's in moby-dick once. be sure to blow through it as fast as you possibly can.

I'm thinking incontinence must be the like lack of self-control definition.

lol wrong thread

ps - I hated Moby Dick.

i have only read crowley's 'the solitudes' and it was such a slog. there were moments where i wanted to say 'this is amazing' but they ended up amounting to... nothing.... passing graces... and ultimately i was left feeling like i'd wasted my time.

re original question: there are plenty of postmodern touchstones i haven't gotten to but the only real answer i have to this is finnegans wake, which is the end-point of a certain kind of density.

most famously difficult books are just really long. gravity's rainbow took me multiple tries but i think that's just because i had to be in the mood, and kept getting distracted by other books -- war and peace took multiple tries too, but it's pretty hard to read a page of war and peace and not understand/feel it. you just don't necessarily want a long-term relationship.

even infinite jest stops being disorienting by the halfway mark, once you're comfortable inside the stories.

yeah FW has to be the "hardest" work of fictional prose by most sane measures. The Amazon list upthread is right that yr Lacans and Kants and Hegels are much more difficult to parse than 99 percent of novels.

x-post Yeah, I'd def agree with that in a lot of cases.

The Amazon list upthread is right that yr Lacans and Kants and Hegels are much more difficult to parse than 99 percent of novels.

w/ respect to fans of kant and hegel's prose this may not be the readers' shortcoming.

The Faerie Queen

I've only read excerpts because I was forced to.

w/ respect to fans of kant and hegel's prose this may not be the readers' shortcoming

lol true but the difficulty remains

yeah no doubt.

I tried reading Being and Nothingness at age 17...that went basically nowhere.

people make fun of nietzsche because he's such catnip for alienated 17-year-olds frustrated by girls, and he totes is, but honestly the main reason kids read him and not kierkegaard or kant is he's actually got some style.

(actually i really like kierkegaard, but still.)

oh yeah my totally unqualified opinion of sartre is "the wiki article will do".

kierkeaard is a lot easier for me to read than kant/hegel/bacon

well that's your choice

Maybe The Sound And The Fury, maybe Ulysses.

I was once introduced to a literary guy as follows: "This is Ismael, he's just finished Ulysses". "You should've read Finnegan's Wake instead".

I hope this reading all these books makes the blog-posting kid a better writer/arguer. "Is the writing of long and deliberately difficult novels primarily a man’s game?"

kierkeaard is a lot easier for me to read than kant/hegel/bacon

i feel the presence of an actual person with actual personal concerns and obsessions when i read kierkegaard (which n.b. i haven't done since i was a teenager so this should all really be in the past tense) and all of his ideas seem to be an outgrowth of that personality, so i thought he was way more fun to read than more impersonal philosophers even when i preferred impersonal ideas. nietzsche is the same -- he thinks and writes exactly how you'd expect if you knew him. (he's a flashier, funnier, and less agonized writer than soren though.) maybe it's that central-european romanticism vs. french/british empiricism thing? somebody who remembers their reading better and did more of it to begin with can explain why i'm off-base here.

I forgot about asking for help with Plato, on this thread. I should act on it.

I hope this reading all these books makes the blog-posting kid a better writer/arguer.

if he were reading them and not just looking frantically at each word in succession while the clock ticks and half his brain is occupied by the math of his stupid meta-game, maybe

(woof, are you on tumblr ... ? I was just seeing this pop up in reblogs on my dashboard and I tabbed over to ilx and here it was ...)

xxxpost

well Kant & Hegel were central European Romantics for a start

also by my math this guy is 30 or pushing it btw

xpost situation i don't even follow anymore

well Kant & Hegel were central European Romantics for a start

yeah i don't know what my problem with kant is. maybe it's all that hume-love. he isn't exactly out in the wilderness receiving ecstatic truth. or obsessing uselessly over abraham/isaac/his own christ complex.

nah kant is messed up as a writer and possibly as a thinker and a dude, Hegel ditto

not to be a stan for either (although /maybe/ for hume) but surely a lot of the difficulty w/ kant/hegel can be attributed to translation issues?

hegel is all clause of a clause of a subclause of a gerund of a newly-minted term of an archaic poetic construction

don't get me wrong I find that abstruseness v. beautiful usually but it doesn't lend itself to clarity of exposition. Hume can write and do gags so he wins.

I was once introduced to a literary guy as follows: "This is Ismael, he's just finished Ulysses". "You should've read Finnegan's Wake instead".

― Ismael Klata, Monday, 17 January 2011 18:01 (35 minutes ago)

god english 'literary' ppl are waste

also if those ppl aren't english

oh here's something that's either Difficult for me or just requires a really specific mood that i can be in for months and then not be in for years: proust.

Henry James - The Wings of the Dove

Thomp - no, not on tumblr, but Blue Lines Revisited is in my Reader, so saw it there.

Philosophers, prose and fun: loved Kierkegaard far more than Nietzsche in my adolescence - something about the combo of religion, girl trouble, angst and aphorisms that drew me in. I think of him as a lively and brilliant writer at his best, often drags me through puzzling stuff purely with style, or is neatly over-compressed so that I'm stuck figuring out what he's on about.

And with NV on this - Hume's a brilliant writer: polishes himself so well, able to be funny, and always engaging. Berkeley can be quite amazing too - eg the 'false imaginary glare' passage from the second dialogue. There are good reasons writers like him, beyond the strangeness of his ideas. And I like Hobbes as a writer too. Of that British run, it's only really Locke whose fingers I'd gladly break.

Oh wait I FORGOT how much I HAAAAAAAAAAATE reading any latin american literature translated by Edith Grossman (Vargas Llosa, Garcia-Marquez, Álvaro Mutis) because she is an airless old dame and actually RUINS the literature in her translation.

Don't know much about her but I had been thinking of picking up her translation of Quixote...

Another example of one I couldn't finish.

Hume's a fantastic writer. And there's a book called something like 'The Humour of Kierkegaard' which collects all his (surprisingly many) funny bits, which is not a bad entry to his work.

The Most Difficult Book You've Ever Read

I wanna say Melville's Pierre, but I haven't finished it - it's an ongoing slog, alternately exhilirating and frustrating. And I love Melville - I've read Moby Dick (twice), Billy Budd, and sundry other items.

Otherwise, maybe Sanatorium Under The Sign Of Sagittarius by good ol' Bruno Schulz, always getting the football removed just when he's about to kick it.

Hegel, Phenomenology

Heidegger, Being & Time

only parts of either

fiction: maybe FW (read it and gone round it again), maybe GR (in many ways couldn't stand it), maybe something else I started once and have now forgotten.

pierre is a lot more interesting to me than moby dick
xpost

hi velko