And there definitely are loathsome books and revolting writers but perhaps it's best to adopt the old school inspector's motto of mol mus urrain dhuit is cron nas lugha dhuit. De do bheachd Ennison. You catch more flies with mil than with fionn-ghearr.
I'm currently reading to some of S.Beckett's poems and find them very difficult!
I wouldn't say War and Peace is a difficult text. It's boring, but it's not difficult. I read and finished it because I honestly thought I'd love it.
What I consider difficult text is The Divine Comedy, or Shakespeare, some versions of Quijote, of which I have three, one of them in Spanish. Perhaps also anything having to do with war... Les Mis, A tale of two Cities to me was like reading Sanskrit. I just have a mental block about it.
As for War and Peace I have not seriously taken in consideration the possibility of reading it as of yet, so I don't know.Originally Posted by LaMaga
But Dante's Comedy, Shakespeare's plays(of which I've only read four) and the Quijote don't seem so difficult to me! It depends on hoy wou define "difficult": of course they are gigantic works and raise too many questions for one to summarize them - especially shakespeare - but they are at least very readable.
Don Quijote is a very fluent reading, and a very funny one. What's to be said difficult are the themes Cervantes decided to deal with, and Cervantes' authorial's position. Whereas one always feels comfortable with Dante's "own" beliefs - indipendently if you share them to some degree or not -, one cannot say for sure what Cervantes really thought about his characters and how it differs from what he wanted the reader to believe in.
And for Shakespeare the problem becomes much bigger.
Anyway, although all three are not easy reading, they can still be readen to various degrees, making them universally appreciable, which cannot be said of the likes of Joyce, eg.
I would instead say the works of the three of them are inexhaustible sources of analysis and are some of the most definitive piece of art ever created by men, but they're still approachable by everyone with enough competence.
Of course there's a difference if you are Auerbach or an inexpert reader, so that, for example, a genius like Samuel Beckett spent his life reading Dante's Comedy, but still..
Last edited by Corona; 12-12-2012 at 06:05 AM.
You might try some of Cacian's, they make Beckett look like A.A. Milne.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Hardest book: Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
Ulysses (Joyce)
Paradiso (Lezama Lima)
Some short stories by Borges
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)....could never finish it!!!! (although i've read other novels by this distinguished and confusing author).
"Ulysses" was very difficult for me too.
"The Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by P.A.M Dirac was tough, but not as tough as "Ulysses".
English literature in original version and Spanish literature from the sixteenth century, “The exemplary novels” (?) by M. de Cervantes. Old language, although you know its modern version, implies a distance which I overcome with patience and dictionaries.
What is more, reading Shakespeare to me implies having a translation in Catalan language (if I can have one decent) with the aim to help me in the very difficult passages, which to me I’m afraid to say are almost all of them. Nevertheless, one learns a lot in this compared or contrasting reading, this is true. To end with, now I am also reading Moby Dick and H. Melville is not W.S. but is hard to me too, old English too...and exciting, of course.
Sorry...it looks as though I got no friends, I talk too much, but here you are, thanks for Reading and excuse my linguistal faults.
I don't get why most of those books are on that list. I've never had much trouble reading those considered part of Modernism (The Sound and the Fury, The Wasteland) with the exception perhaps of Finnegan's Wake. At least in Modernism there's some sort of referential framework you can fall back on, and in texts such as T.S. Eliot's or Joyce's there's so many footnotes it's impossible to get lost (except perhaps within the footnotes themselves). I've found some Postmodern works a lot harder to read, as I'm not always very familiar with the references in for example Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I don't know if the list is restricted to fiction only, otherwise I'd like to include Sein und Zeit which is, to quote another reader of his works, either the most brilliant thing I've ever read or the biggest joke ever written. His work is difficult due to his unique use (and invention) of language and philosophical terms and his inherently German sentence constructions. (Seems like Sein und Zeit was on the second list, so I guess I can only say I agree.) I remember also struggling somewhat with Samuel Beckett's final part of his trilogy, L'Innomable (The Unnamable), due to its highly abstract content and form.
Who is this "Cacian"? I would love to see this ultra-sophisticated, ultra-complex poet in action - in fact, it seems like someone at this very forum has adopted the name!
the book i've put the most effort into is ulysses. i could have gone through it once with an annotated guide with relative ease, but i studied it thoroughly over the course of few years and many times through because i really enjoyed the level of detail and wanted to master the text. i've put a good deal of time and effort into finnegans wake as well. i would say i've mastered about 10% of the text and it's taken almost as much effort as i put into my entire study of ulysses. i think the mistake most people make is using the very outdated skeleton key. the best resources i've found for fw are mcugh's annotations, hart's structure and motif in finnegans wake, and finnegansweb.com
i read moby recently. i got through it quickly and loved it, but i'd say that it's a pretty demanding read. i would say the same about proust's in search of lost time (the updated moncrieff translation), which i am working on but have not yet finished.
The only book I have read out of these is Umberto Eco's Focault's Pendulum. I mostly agree with the appraisal, but I would say that The Island of the Day Before was worse. I gave up reading Umberto Eco after that.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
Outside of philosophy, I'd say Finnegans Wake and the late works of William Blake are the toughest things I've read. It also depends on how one defines "difficulty." I don't consider length a factor, and War & Peace, outside of its epic length, is one of the most lucid novels ever written. There's not a single passage in it that one struggles to understand.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
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