Most Difficult Texts You've Read

[Paulclem]

There's cetainly a question about whether the books are difficult or just more work than normal. I wondered what books you found difficult that weren't on the lists.

I prepared for Tolstoy and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was despite the length. I didn't get on with Naked Lunch, but I found The Waste Land intriguing, and have regularly returned to it over a number of years. I think I realised that it was an influential and important poem, without fully undrstanding much of it when I first read it.

I read To The Lighthouse whilst doing my A levels, and it really had a positive effect upon me, though I had, at that time, nowhere to channel what it did. I think that reflects the limitations of the Eng |Lit course at that time. I may well have followed it up with more relevant reading if I had understood its import.

I also enjoyed The Gulag Archipelago, though I know, due to my ignorence of much of Russian history at that time, that I didn't get as much out of it as I might have. It is one of the few books I intend to re-read.

I read Sartre's Nausea and Iron in the Soul when I was in my twenties, and I felt that I didn't fully understand the implications of it due to my ignorence of the philosophy. These were difficult books for me, as I was aware that I wasn't getting them.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

It seems like for several of the books, the only characteristic that defines difficulty is length. I just don't think War and Peace and Moby Dick are that hard. They're just long. I didn't finish Absalom, Absalom because I wasn't in the mood for it at the time and found it boring, not because it was hard. The Spind and the Fury is only hard at the first section, and it's supposed to be. Aside from length and politics one may disagree with. I've never heard anyone claim Rand was a difficult read. Foucault,s Pendulum was diifcult, but not enough to warrant a place on the list. Even though I really hated To the Lighthouse, I didn't find it hard at all. The Scarlet Letter? Really? That's not hard at all. The Waste Land deserves its spot, though. Finnegans Wake of course does. I think that book is kind of a joke, though. I haven't read the others.

I really think a couple picks should be swapped out for Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, the latter of which is the most difficult book I've completed to date.

[Alexander III]

I will never ever complain of difficulty in regards to reading an english, french or italian book. I have been trying to learn latin, and reading Cicero and Caesar in the original is horribly rough, I can't imagine how brutal the poetry must be to read.

[fb0252]

Throw this in:

"Genius is the only justification for stunning difficulty, because only genius can reward enormous demands made upon the reader."

Harold Bloom discussing Paul Celan in "Genius".

[Heteronym]

War and Peace, Naked Lunch, The Waste Land, Foucault's Pendulum, and I'm reading Moby Dick.

Don't understand why some of those are considered difficult, unless it's because they're long.

[PeterL]

Those lists are funny. Come on, Moby Dick is certainly not difficult, and Foucault's Pendulum is one of the best novels ever, a joy to read. I laughed when I saw A Tale of a Tub listed; that is simple and fun to read; a;though it is rather dated. I will agree that Finnegans Wake is difficult, but if you want to read some really difficult thins, then try some of William S. Burroughs works, especially The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964), and his othe cut-up method books. There are other writers who have done the same sort of thing, and it is not easy to read.

[mal4mac]

From the first list; I read War and Peace...
Haven't tackled Moby Dick...
I made it about a third of the way through Solzhenistyn's Gulag Archipelago...

Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom! was a tough read for me.

.

The first list is misleading - War and Peace + Moby Dick are not at all difficult. The second list is better. Heidegger Being & Time + Finnegan's Wake are impossible. I've read bits of Hegel and have been too afraid to read a full work. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the hardest thing I've ever read and completed.

I also could just make it a third of the way through the Gulag Archipelago - too much tedious detail and repetition (same goes for the Old Testament and the Long Discourses of the Buddha).

A!A! by Faulkner was also a tough read for me... but I made it through (it's short!)

[mal4mac]

I prepared for Tolstoy and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was despite the length. I didn't get on with Naked Lunch...

Tolstoy is wonderful - AK and his main short novels are just as good as W&P.

I read Sartre's The Age of Reason recently and will not be going on to read Iron in the Soul - I just thought it was a really bad novel... not hard... just bad... I remember finding Nausea bearable a couple of decades ago, so might try re-reading that. Being & Nothingness I tried but found it impossible, definitely deserves to be on the "hard" list.

I also didn't get on with Naked Lunch - try Junkie, it's much more approachable, a good read.

[JBI]

It seems like for several of the books, the only characteristic that defines difficulty is length. I just don't think War and Peace and Moby Dick are that hard. They're just long. I didn't finish Absalom, Absalom because I wasn't in the mood for it at the time and found it boring, not because it was hard. The Spind and the Fury is only hard at the first section, and it's supposed to be. Aside from length and politics one may disagree with. I've never heard anyone claim Rand was a difficult read. Foucault,s Pendulum was diifcult, but not enough to warrant a place on the list. Even though I really hated To the Lighthouse, I didn't find it hard at all. The Scarlet Letter? Really? That's not hard at all. The Waste Land deserves its spot, though. Finnegans Wake of course does. I think that book is kind of a joke, though. I haven't read the others.

I really think a couple picks should be swapped out for Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, the latter of which is the most difficult book I've completed to date.

I can probably think of 10 Chinese classics more difficult than any of those but Joyce. Even a translated one like the lyrics of chu (songs of the south) has an average of two debatable footnotes per line, and has an eccentric vocabulary and exists in a genre unique to itself.

Yet there will never be a blogger who will list it. The blogger just put books he knows of, which appears to be limited.

As for difficult books, Joyce is unique in that his difficulty exists for difficulty's sake, which is unique to modernism and postmodernism, which is an interesting idea to think about.

As for Eliot, a good edition and a good teacher will get someone through it alright.

[Raven Falcon.]

I can probably think of 10 Chinese classics more difficult than any of those but Joyce. Even a translated one like the lyrics of chu (songs of the south) has an average of two debatable footnotes per line, and has an eccentric vocabulary and exists in a genre unique to itself.

Yet there will never be a blogger who will list it. The blogger just put books he knows of, which appears to be limited.

As for difficult books, Joyce is unique in that his difficulty exists for difficulty's sake, which is unique to modernism and postmodernism, which is an interesting idea to think about.

As for Eliot, a good edition and a good teacher will get someone through it alright.

Joyce's works are a catalyst of ennui.

[RetsixArp]

I started reading Ulysses spasmodically half a century ago and finished it on Bloomsday a dozen or so years ago. Now back cannibalizing it for my own purposes and getting more out of it each time I step onto Joyce's sacrilegious turf.

I tried reading an ancient paperback copy I bought ages ago, used, but I could never quite make it thru.

A few years ago, I bought the unabridged audio version on CD & listened to it in the car. Actually, I think listening to it & reading along was the way it was meant to be read & understood; in fact, Joyce alludes to this early on in Ulysses, when Bloom ponders how nice if grandfather were to make a recording for posterity that his family could listen to now & then.

I've done the same w/ other books, but the only one on the list I've read is Moby Dick & that only a few years ago. One problem with Moby Dick is that there's very little story in them thar pages: much of the novel is devoted to musings on whales & whale hunting. But with those Biblical characters Ishmael & Ahab (& the ship Rachel), it prompted me to read the Holy Bible thru, which I also got on CD.

The rest of the list never interested me, except for Sound/Fury, which I found hard going: I may get that on CD too.

[RetsixArp]

...I read Sartre's The Age of Reason recently and will not be going on to read Iron in the Soul - I just thought it was a really bad novel... not hard... just bad... I remember finding Nausea bearable a couple of decades ago, so might try re-reading that. Being & Nothingness I tried but found it impossible, definitely deserves to be on the "hard" list. ...

For years, I could not get into Sartre's Nausea & have read only parts of B/N.

Later, because Sartre said he wanted to be remembered for his last philosophical tome, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I read both volumes of that over about 12 years. Two psychiatrists, Ronald Laing & David Cooper, wrote a much short synopsis of Vol. 1 in their Reason & Violence (1964), but there is even a more lucid reduction of Sartre's 1300 pages in a lecture by a guy named Michael McGee from 1989, called Rhetoric, Organizational Communication, & Sartre's Theory of Practical Groups, & available online. McGee defines Sartre's primary terms using the example of a retiring bus driver. (An example in Sartre was people standing @a bus stop.)

[Heidy]

I didn't think The Waste Land was difficult at all, huh.

Most difficult text I've read actually probably was Moby Dick as I haven't finished it. It's been like 5 years since I've attempted it though.

Yeah, i agree.
I red Moby Dick and i must admit -it's the most boring book i have never red-O.O
At the end it's nice ,like every book, because you understand that the hunting of the white whale isn't only a work, but the meaning of the captain's life.
However there are a lot of pages so stupid that i d like so much to delete for POSTERITY
And i am sure that i will not read it again.

But you asked the most complicated book we have red, and according to me is "The trial" by Kafka :P
I have red it i don't remember how many times..it's complicated, but really stimulating ACCORDING TO ME..because there are a lot of people that don't like Kafka. Like the latins say "de gustibus non disputandum est".

Greetings from Italy

[Samsa]

The Sound and the Fury is only hard at the first section, and it's supposed to be.

I've heard a lot of people say this and I'd have to disagree. I found that once you know Benjy's section is fragmented and non-linear it becomes much easier to understand. Initially some scenes may be confusing, but that's just because there's no context for them. For me, Quentin's section was the most difficult to grasp. Benjy has a simple mind whilst Quentin's is complex and deeply troubled.

As for the list, I've only read The Wasteland and The Sound and the Fury. I got halfway through Moby Dick before giving up, which is a shame because I enjoyed Melville's short stories like Bartleby the Scrivener and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. It wasn't that I found the novel difficult, I just lost interest somewhere about the point where Melville devotes a chapter to the significance of the colour white.

[Drkshadow03]

I think people are confusing difficult for unreadable. Moby Dick, for example, is a perfectly readable book, but I wouldn't exactly call it an easy one. I think it's a bit more challenging than just, "Gee golly, this is a really long book." The various permutations of "nonfiction" whaling literature that makes up the bulk of the novel at the expense of the main plot is not exactly a standard linear narrative and getting through them and making sense of them in relationship to the plot can be quite an arduous task. Are the words themselves particularly difficult on a sentence-by-sentence level? No.

But this shows exactly the problem with this discussion. No one is elaborating what they mean by difficult. I imagine a work can be difficult in a number of ways (employing a complicated non-linear narrative, difficult style, eccentric vocabulary, difficult philosophy, etc.)