"Difficult" books that are actually rewarding

[SirJazzHands]

I've been trying to get through a bit of The Sound and the Fury and I think from what I've read it's pretty fascinating.. same goes for Thomas Pynchon's V. and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
What I'm looking for is not necessarily something long, meandering, and difficult like James Joyce, because I believe that's trash.. but something that takes a little more than just reading to comprehend it, but not insanely hard.
Thanks :D

[Oniw17]

Difficult how?

[nathank]

Yeah, "difficult" could mean many things, but perhaps Moby Dick or The Sot-Weed Factor might interest you based on your other interests. Absalom Absalom is a really great and challenging work, but maybe you want a Faulkner break after Sound :)

[jlb4tlb]

I have problems with "Moby Dick" as a choice for reading. If the reader does not have a study guide it can become tiresome.

Just my thoughts

Jeff

[Lambert]

I have problems with "Moby Dick" as a choice for reading. If the reader does not have a study guide it can become tiresome.


Really? I thought Moby Dick was superb, never found it tiresome either.

[papayahed]

Crime and Punishment
War and Peace
The Fountainhead
One Hundred years of Solitude
In Cold Blood
Farwell to Arms

[JBI]

Remembrance of Things Passed
by Marcel Proust.

[Whifflingpin]

Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers." It's not fiction, but it is a good story (or does it contain some good stories? dunno, you decide)

I'd include it in the "difficult" category, not because it is in any way dull - in fact it is fascinating - but because it is so full that I, at least, had to read it in chunks, leaving time between to assimilate what I had read.

[JCamilo]

I suppose you can read any literature of quality, because needing more than a reading can be a way to measure a masterwork.
But if you mean, works where the language is used in a way that time/space is broken during the narrative, then it is amazing you consider the master of it all, Joyce as trash. Anyways, there thge other obvious names that did it, Virginia Woolf, the already mentioned Proust, Melville, Henry James, Dostoievisky, Tolstoi, Guimaraes Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka...

[SirJazzHands]

I'd actually been reading the first few pages of To the Lighthouse on Amazon and I like it. I don't know, Joyce is so.. "holier than thou" I guess is a good way to put it. Using all these crazy incomprehensible things.. it kills me haha.

But okay let's see.. I have already read Crime and Punishment (I love Dost), In Cold Blood (I like Breakfast at Tiffany's more though), A Farewell to Arms (surprised I liked this since The Sun Also Rises bored me, maybe I should try it again).
I'll certainly check out the Tolstoy, Woolf, and Henry James, though.

[metal134]

I just picked up "To the Lighthouse".

[papayahed]

Blindness by Jose Saramago

[Idril]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

[Etienne]

What do you mean by "difficult" and what do you mean by "rewarding"? You could read the dictionaries, encyclopedias, history books, philosophy books, psychology books... but that's not what you mean I guess? If I read your thoughts correctly, pretty much any classic should fit... as it's literary culture (if that means anything in itself...), vocabulary skills, historical information (and something you can't really get in history books), but of course, it always depend on the way you can understand and how well you read the books and also what you can remember.

But what is it exactly you want? Just read some books and magically get smart? That won't happen... just read the books you enjoy to read... and if it happens Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (not saying it's your case, Nabokov is genius), well... perhaps you're better not read at all...

[jlb4tlb]

Really? I thought Moby Dick was superb, never found it tiresome either.

It is an outstanding read. However it contains lots of whaling chapters that to little to advance the story line. Thus it can become tiresome.

Jeff

[Lambert]

I don't know, Joyce is so.. "holier than thou" I guess is a good way to put it. Using all these crazy incomprehensible things.. it kills me haha.

Joyce has to be the most rewarding of the "difficult" authors.

Incomprehensible trash? *tut tut* It's too easy to knock Joyce these days. Too few people to defend him (i.e. those who have had the patience to read his work, like myself), and too many people with an easy target.

No other Joyceans here to back me up, or am I totally out numbered by the Joyce-Haters... :p

[nebish]

5 books for a lifer-without-parole:
i.Ulysses ii.Crying of Lot49 iii.The Naked Lunch iv.Suttree
v.The Man with the Golden Arm

[Alexei]

"Nausea" by Sartre seems a good suggestion.

[Coelispex]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I read this a couple months ago after starting it three or four times and never getting past the first 200 or so pages. It is great.


**** SPOILER ALERT, DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ INFINITE JEST****
Oh, and Idril, I read your other thread about Infinite Jest, and the questions you have about it, so I guess I'll just explain them here...

The guy in the apartment is waiting for Kate Gompert but she never shows up because she tries to commit suicide and that's when she ends up in the hospital, you see her later at Ennet House.

Don G. doesn't die, he goes with Hal to exhume the corpse of Himself (James Incandenza) at the bidding of the Wheelchair Assassins because they believe "The Entertainment" (Infinite Jest V) is buried with James in accordance with his last wishes.

Why Hal vegges out and goes all primal scream in his college interview is not fully explained, but there is definitely enough trauma in the book to explain it. He sees his father kill himself, finds out his mother is having sex with his only peer competition (John Wayne) watches his brother engage in relationship after relationship that involve meaningless sex while himself remaining a virgin, etc. . . Plus he is seen as having normal conversations with people he is familiar with throughout the book and not really anyone else. Try to recall the short chapter about him when he was younger and his father pretending to be the "conversation expert" that Hal was supposedly sent to. Was this just so James could have a conversation with Hal, or was Hal really challenged when it came to making conversation? Also try to recall the Thanksgiving that Joelle came over to the Incandenzas. It was weird dinner conversation to say the least.

Those are my takes on things. The only thing I'm not sure about is the guy waiting for Kate, because it's sort of just implied and not said outright, but he waits and waits for a girl he just met that said she could get good weed and she never shows up. Kate Gompert is the only logical connection to me because she is the main female character associated with weed in the novel, and her suicide attempt gives a plausible reason for her never showing up.

[Sir Bartholomew]

The Sound and the Fury / To the Lighthouse

[johann cruyff]

Well,Moby Dick is the obvious one.Also,by Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red.Not insanely hard,but not too easy either.

[Kafka's Crow]

I shouldn't be answering a post in which James Joyce is referred to as "trash" but there I go. Joyce is neither difficult nor "trash". It is not his fault that he took the development of prose to its end and after him it is only either his imitation, repetition or sensationalist "bestsellers" (you always get what you deserve). Only Beckett comes to mind. He achieved greatness by contradicting Joyce in every aspect of his art. He is the opposite of Joyce in artistic terms and very rewarding. Most difficult and rewarding book has to be 'Remembrance of Things Past'. Joyce comes nearest to the definition of art whereby it is meant to create static response. 'Ulysses' can paint a picture of a single day in 900 pages and intellectually challenge its reader to contemplate and try to understand it for a life-time. Even the sexually explicit scenes in it do not create kinetic emotions. On the other hand, Proust's masterpiece is good at clarifying our own feelings, "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." I find Proust more difficult than any other writer and since he is so good at expressing our own experiences and feelings, he is very very rewarding.

[Nossa]

I second One Hundred Years of Solitude..it's a bit difficult at first, but one of the best books.

[Irrylath]

First off, Joyce is a master. A really good book is Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.

[*Classic*Charm*]

Heart of Darkness- Conrad. Reading it was like trudging through mud, but I appreciated it once I was done.:)

[Oomoo]

I second One Hundred Years of Solitude..it's a bit difficult at first, but one of the best books.

Why do you think so? I admit I could not finish the book. I think the premise of the book is wonderful and a lot of the techniques used make it "sound" very interesting - the magical realism, the ties of past to present, combination of the scientific and fantastic - and the prose was very good, but it didn't seem to have a plot and the characters were lifeless. It is clearly the work of a talented individual, but this book was more like a series well done miniatures, sketches than an actual complete book.

[tscherff]

i suggest "catch 22" by joseph heller
it is insanely funny. the humor alone will get you through.
surprised no one has suggested it so far.

[iloveoscar]

Remembrance of Things Passed
by Marcel Proust.

I tried to get through this about a year ago, I couldn't do it. I thought the writing was very good but I couldn't figure out the plot because there didn't seem to be one. I know someone mentioned A Farewell to Arms as a difficult book but I must say I completely disagree. I find Hemingway's writing very easy to get through. However, the subject matter discussed in this novel is very difficult. I was depressed for about a week after I finished it.

[ThePianoMan]

All of the works I've read by Dostoevsky have been challenging but well worth it - Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from Underground.

[Laughablefellow]

Just about any of the modernist authors (Joyce, Conrad, DH. Lawrence ect...) are pretty challenging, weaving stories that require a certain level of concentration and thought outside of the the novel to unwind, as such they can be especially rewarding on second readings. Not something I have a lot of time for unfortunatly and those authors named above were particularly difficult when being speed read to get the novel done in a week(along side a non-shakespeare Renaissance play and critical reading on both). They were particularly satisfying to pick at with classmates in tutorials though, perhaps simulating that elusive second reading.

I had to do the same with Moby Dick however and had no problems enjoying it immensely, though that might be because I was studying a language module whilst reading Pre-Civil War American Lit and so didn't have as much other reading to do.

[elitespart]

Heart of Darkness...great message but damn hard to read.

[aeroport]

Honestly, I'm not sure I consider Dostoevsky particularly "challenging" - at least not the P&V translations - outside of the fact that his books tend to be rather long and take a while to read. "Rewarding," for sure, but really quite reader-friendly.
Anyways, I second (or third or fourth or whatever) all the Moby-Dick suggestions. I would add The Beast in the Jungle - a rather challenging work by Henry James that is not quite novel-length. Your verdict on this work would be a pretty good indication of whether his stuff is your thing; if you like it and want to get really serious, his last three novels - The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors - might serve you well. I'm currently in the latter half of The Ambassadors, and, for all its formidable sentence structures and abstraction, am finding it an extremely engaging and (based on the view from here) rewarding novel. It requires no extensive outside knowledge like Joyce sometimes does; just get an edition with endnotes (Penguin, Modern Library, etc.) that translates the occasional French phrase, and one is essentially set.

[Laughablefellow]

Anyways, I second (or third or fourth or whatever) all the Moby-Dick suggestions. I would add The Beast in the Jungle - a rather challenging work by Henry James that is not quite novel-length. Your verdict on this work would be a pretty good indication of whether his stuff is your thing;

Ah I've read that, thought it was brilliant. I think I actually ended up writing an essay on it as well.... The only other James I've read was The American which was still quite a good read but didnt have the same mind bending implications of Beast in the Jungle.

[sir orange]

mmh, challenging but rewarding books... I would suggest you Charlie Brown.

[ben.!]

Heart of Darkness, hard to read, but rewarding, you get an interesting philosophy on what is the essence of evil itself that resides in all our hearts...

I always like to think that Heart of Darkness is the adult version of Lord of the Flies, if you want an easier book to understand and read, then Lord of the Flies is your go.;)

[aeroport]

Ah I've read that, thought it was brilliant. I think I actually ended up writing an essay on it as well.... The only other James I've read was The American which was still quite a good read but didnt have the same mind bending implications of Beast in the Jungle.

Yeah, I feel similarly. I read The American right after Portrait (really good!), and was thus not quite as impressed. The Beast is one of my favorite works of his, though. I should probably reread before class starts...

[Hira]

I second One Hundred Years of Solitude..it's a bit difficult at first, but one of the best books.

I agree. One of the brilliant books I've ever read!


Why do you think so? I admit I could not finish the book. I think the premise of the book is wonderful and a lot of the techniques used make it "sound" very interesting - the magical realism, the ties of past to present, combination of the scientific and fantastic - and the prose was very good, but it didn't seem to have a plot and the characters were lifeless. It is clearly the work of a talented individual, but this book was more like a series well done miniatures, sketches than an actual complete book.

When the story goes in circles, what plot can you hope to have?

Also I am reading Portrait, it does seem like a difficult brilliant book.

[mayneverhave]

Proust's prose style wasn't so much difficult as it was long. Proust doesn't possess many of the stylelistic qualities of modernism that made it difficult, i.e. random jumps in time, etc.

The only difficulty in Proust that I could imagine was his use of extremely long sentences and paragraphs, some of which lasted for an entire page. Ultimately, when reading Proust, I was memorized by his sensual use of language, and the long sentences reverberated with memory (as the author intended). Unlike when reading Ulysses, I never had to resort to a dictionary or other sources when reading Proust (though I've only read part one of In Search of Lost time).

I find Ulysses to be a better novel than À la recherche du temps perdu. More difficult, yes, but more rewarding. Although both are fantastic.

[The Intended]

I found Great Expectations by Charles Dickens to be quite difficult, both to get through and to pick up on all of the nuances of the literature. This, however, was probably because it was my first classical book -- other than Dracula -- and was required reading, which always seems to put a damper on the experience. I was very satisfied at the conclusion, once given the chance to reflect of the lessons presented (though I'm not ever sure I would re-read the thing).

[Remarkable]

"Seeing" by Jose Saramago and "Un amour de Swann" by Marcel Proust(Ok,I don't know the title in English).

[mayneverhave]

"Seeing" by Jose Saramago and "Un amour de Swann" by Marcel Proust(Ok,I don't know the title in English).

Un amour is "Swann in Love", the third section (at least in my translation) of Swann's Way, which is, in turn, the first section of the much longer In search of lost time.

again, I never found Proust difficult. It was like reading poetry.

Also, how is Dostoevsky in anyway difficult? He uses a relatively small vocabulary, short sentences, and tends to state his themes bluntly and openly. No tip-toeing around with Fyodor. The only problem I could see is the fact that his works are grounded in 19th century Russia, and are very, very Russian. Most of the time though, he explains the traditions and social functions of Russia that we might not be accustomed to.

At least I can read Dostoevsky without any other external reading, unlike Joyce - who requires a large dictionary, a map of Dublin, a knowledge of various languages (latin, french, etc.), and a book of Irish proverbs.

Joyce is fantastic though. I wouldn't have it any other way.

[Tersely]

I would go to the library with a list of books from different genres and time periods and start like that. Read the first couple of chapters and try to gauge if you think you can handle it or not. Work slowly. When I first got into reading, I found British Literature the most fascinating for me. I couldnt even read pride and prejudice without getting lost and wondering how characters zapped from one room to the next, because it didnt lay it out for me. Another thing is to look up words you dont understand, because it usually means something important that your missing. If you keep trying eventually you'll be able to pick up any book and just start off.
It helps to start with well known authors who have alot of articles and information you can look up on. Then work your way towards the lesser known.

[Tersely]

I found Great Expectations by Charles Dickens to be quite difficult, both to get through and to pick up on all of the nuances of the literature.

Surprisingly, I thought that too. I told my husband I couldnt believe it because he was so mainstream, but Dickens (even the other novels that are more well known) were really hard to follow. Glad to know it really just wasnt me who noticed. I read that particular novel like 6 months after I got into classics. Guess I need to work more at it.

[JBI]

Un amour is "Swann in Love", the third section (at least in my translation) of Swann's Way, which is, in turn, the first section of the much longer In search of lost time.

again, I never found Proust difficult. It was like reading poetry.

Also, how is Dostoevsky in anyway difficult? He uses a relatively small vocabulary, short sentences, and tends to state his themes bluntly and openly. No tip-toeing around with Fyodor. The only problem I could see is the fact that his works are grounded in 19th century Russia, and are very, very Russian. Most of the time though, he explains the traditions and social functions of Russia that we might not be accustomed to.

At least I can read Dostoevsky without any other external reading, unlike Joyce - who requires a large dictionary, a map of Dublin, a knowledge of various languages (latin, french, etc.), and a book of Irish proverbs.

Joyce is fantastic though. I wouldn't have it any other way.
3000 pages is daunting to almost any reader, especially if the first 30 pages deal purely with how one gets ready to go to bed. Dostoevsky I would argue needs the same amount of extra material in order to understand as Joyce, that is, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners, Chamber Music, and Pommes Pennyeach are very accessible, just neglected.

Pynchon comes to mind as the difficult Post-Modern author, Gravity's Rainbow being almost unreadable at parts.

Literary fiction will probably only get more difficult/abstract as time progresses, being that authors are constantly trying to shake off the anxiety of influence.

[PoeticPassions]

Dostoevsky, of course is my favorite... My favorite novel of his is Brothers Karamazov. But if you want something more nihilistic or political then try his THE POSSESSED.

Also, I vote for Heart of Darkness by Conrad, 100 Years of Solitude, Dead Souls by Gogol, King Lear by Shakespeare (by far his most complex and layered play), any Kafka will leave you reeling or wondering (or confused), and lastly my recommendation is a book called DEATH AND THE DERVISH by Mesa Sekimovic... it is a spectacular book (though some is lost in translation) and the symbolism, the words, the flow... amazing. It's poetic and "difficult"

[PoeticPassions]

It's Mesa SELIMOVIC... sorry, typo :)

[GatsbyTheGreat]

Violin by Anne Rice. It said a lot of things that resonated with me but at times I wanted to just pawn the book off! She cries and is very self-indulgent in her style, but ultimately comes up with something that is highly relatable.

[Simao]

Why people say Moby Dick is a difficult book? I read it and besides the chapters where he goes on and on about the whales and the ships it is quite simple and entertaining. But maybe you guys consider it difficult because of that? Because I didn't really read some of those chapters because well, they get me boored quickly.

[HotKarl]

I would try this John Hawkes novel--The Lime Twig.

It's not particularly long or difficult to read, but even the plot is scattered and cryptic. Reading it is like shining a flashlight into a dark room; you can never see what you're reading all at once.

[*Classic*Charm*]

I have to say- I didn't think Great Expectations was rewarding at all. I hated reading it. I'll try again someday, reluctantly, so that I don't sound like an idiot if I missed it entirely.

[The Intended]

I have to say- I didn't think Great Expectations was rewarding at all. I hated reading it. I'll try again someday, reluctantly, so that I don't sound like an idiot if I missed it entirely.

I think it's one of those books that you have to have someone who really understands it well explain why it's such a great book. I know I thought the same thing before my English teacher lined everything out for us, and then I realized how rewarding it was. As casual reading, I would probably skip it.

[capek]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I couldn't put that book down, personally.

This is more of a technical manual, but I just finished Invisible Landscapes by the Mckenna brothers. Parts of it were very obtuse, as to be expected, but I was surprised at how beautiful and piercing it actually turned out to be. When you turned a stern eye to it, of course.

[Igetanotion]

Difficult is such a personal thing. Like I cannot, I mean, CANNOT read "A Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man" by Joyce, at all. I've tried a few times and I just can't stand it.
Where other people have found "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to be difficult, but I've read it three times and its a breeze to me. It all depends on your intersets, if you get hooked on a book you'll enjoy it no matter what.