A Difficult Read, But Worth the Effort

[scw1217]

I am wondering what books you have read that you found difficult to read, but later were glad you managed it. This thought on the tail end of the conversation about James Joyce's "Ullyses". The one book that comes to my mind was the Diary of Mary Chestnut, which is published under several names. I believe the version I read was "Mary Chestnut's Civil War". Portions were rather boring, but then she'd throw in personal thoughts. I turned out to be a rewarding perspective on the Civil War.

[baddad]

I began to read 'voraciously' as a very young child. When I was 12yrs old I received a special collection of five Kurt Vonnegut books. I assaulted these tales with all my 12 yr old intellectual might, but could not figure out what the heck this guy was talking about, aliens, slaughter houses, billy bishop, tea pots, glass cages on another planet for the display of human specimans, etc.

When I was fifteen years old I dusted off the box these books originally arrived in, opened the first book in the collection, and quickly realized that Mr. Vonnegut was one of American literature's Godfathers.

Now my toughest reads involve too little light, or too small printing, but little in the way of angst for comprehension or understanding...........

[scw1217]

I'm not familiar with that one. My first long series read was C.S. Lewis "Chronicles of Narnia" series. I tried to read that to my daughter several years ago, but she couldn't be still long enough. LOL

A difficult read for me often involves difficult language. Older literature is hard for me to grasp. Poetry most times goes right past me. This is not to say I don't like to push myself. Sometimes the older language is amazingly beautiful.

[mono]

I have read many books that seemed very difficult, but worth the effort; the challenge of attempting to understand difficult fiction, philosophy, and some dense poetry, I think, seems necessary to expand one's own thought. Of course, however, there always seem some books distant from a reader's understanding.
A few fiction books that come to mind: The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James, War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy, numerous plays by William Shakespeare, The Faery Queene by Edmund Spenser (in its original English), and anything by Geoffrey Chaucer (also in its original English).
Difficult poets, but very worth reading: Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Petronius.
And almost all philosophy can seem incredibly difficult; I think if I constructed a list of difficult philosophy to read, it would extend far beyond the average attention span, seeing that most philosophy always evokes a good challenge. :D

[baddad]

......si amigo's......

[Wendigo_49]

Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid was a difficult read because you can't read more than 20 pages before you have to set it down to think about what you just read. Also, the exercises are sometimes difficut.

Ulysses was difficult in plot and usage of language but Joyce had nothing on his protege Samuel Beckett. At least in Ulysses I caught on to it about halfway through, but Beckett's trilogy is bordering on unreadable. Molloy is a nice setup for his style and at least has a somewhat plot. Malone Diesis an absurd story about a man in a room writing a story and his affection for dying which is best said by the first sentence in the book: I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
At last we come to The Unnamable. The title says it all. If you can come through the last part of the trilogy with a non-contradicting view on even if the narrator exists in our realm or any other, you did better than I. Every body knows the expression about an infinite amount of monkeys each with a typewriter will soon or later produce the greatest works of Shakespeare. Well the monkey who wrote this must not have had any punctuation keys, the tab key to indent paragraphs, and liked to contradict himself a lot. However I would take this over Shakespeare any day(not a big fan).All in all one of the hardest novels that you'll ever read but one of the most enjoyable.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,a saga spanning 9 volumes, is another difficult but enjoyable read. It was the grandfather to the postmodernist style. With it being published in the mid 1700's, the book uses some archaic words that aren't prevalent in our language but the hard part of this novel is trying to remember what the author was talking about 20 pages ago. Sterne basically wrote an entertaining and memorable character driven digression from the start of the first novel to the end of the 9th volume because of the author's death

Most research papers are difficult, unless versed in the rhetoric of the subject, but most are worth it in the end.

[Satine]

I just finished reading Jane Austen's "Emma." Difficult to get through because of the language, and although Austen is a phenomenal writer, I found the book VERY wordy and I sometimes felt that there was a little TOO much character development. I DID, however, enjoy the story, and I had heard that the movie "Clueless" is the modern-day version of the story. I've seen that movie COUNTLESS times, so reading the book and seeing all of the many parallels between the two was interesting. I try to pick up a classic here and there, and not allow myself to read only popular fiction (although that's usually the more enjoyable reading!)...On board now is "The Great Gatsby" but I've got to get through a couple more first.

[baddad]

Hi Wendigo 49, Welcome to the site. And, wow, great answer, well said.

[Molokai]

i found the iliad (trans: lattimore) to be very dense and a bit tedious at times, but it was worth it. it provided me with perspective to literature as a whole.

[PistisSophia]

The Gulag Archipelago - Andrew S..........what's his name.

The 900 Days - The Siege of Stalingrad....

IBM and the Holocaust - Edwin Black

[Wendigo_49]

Hi Wendigo 49, Welcome to the site. And, wow, great answer, well said.

Thank you.

[Padan Fain]

First Man in Rome - Colleen McCollough

The names take a while to get used to and the detail is almost overwhelming, but damn it's good.

[scw1217]

First Man in Rome - Colleen McCollough

The names take a while to get used to and the detail is almost overwhelming, but damn it's good.

I agree on this one. That is a great series of books and I learned more than I ever knew. I confess though to some confusion on who was who and to mentally "Americanizing" some of the names to avoid reading "Lucius Flavius" over and over again. LOL


I just finished reading Jane Austen's "Emma." Difficult to get through because of the language, and although Austen is a phenomenal writer, I found the book VERY wordy and I sometimes felt that there was a little TOO much character development. I DID, however, enjoy the story

I have read several of Jane Austen's books and plot wise they were a bit slow for me. But, I would not say they were not worth reading as they had interesting characters.

Another novel that comes to mind from Windigo_49's comment about lack of punctuation, was "Andersonville" by MacKinlay Kantor, but it did give one insight into what happened there.

[Literal]

I could distinctly remember tediously perusing through Jack London's Call of the Wild, perhaps owing to the fact that I read it in 4th grade. In fact, I was not able to comprehend that the narrator was a dog until several chapters into the novel! :eek2: However, that does not mean that I disliked the book. On the contrary, I perceived it to be a novel of uplifting themes and fast-paced plots. But in order to read this book as it was written, an open-mind and a considerable amount of time are required.