I agree with you. I had to read it in german at school and it was really difficult. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how it sounds in english.
Printable View
I agree with you. I had to read it in german at school and it was really difficult. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how it sounds in english.
The idea is not that everything that is difficult is bad just that not everything is for everybody. John Dos Passos was a contemporary of James Joyce and he wrote in a similar style as Joyce. He wrote three books that should be read a one. The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money. Together it is more than 1200 pages and contains beautiful passages like this one here:
skating on the pond next the silver company's mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whale oil soap somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on the for sale there was shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down look out for muckers everybody said bohunk and polak kids put rocks in their snowballs write dirty walls up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work in the mills
we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn't learn to skate and kept falling down
That is from a segment of the book called Camera Eye. Surreal dreamlike passages which separate the chapters. It's not a fast read obviously and each chapter is told by a different character so it becomes difficult to remember what happened to who. The novel is no more or less difficult than Ulysses but I don't like James Joyce. There's nothing more to it. I use this example because the two authors are very similar. I did not like Gravity's Rainbow. I read another novel by Pynchon that I liked very much. Gravity's Rainbow I found to be too much. Dude must think he's Jesus. Yesterday I read Slaughterhouse-Five in one sitting. Some books you can read straight through others you have to stop and absorb what you've read.
Some of you sound like this "I don't like books that are too hard." Some like this "I love books that are really hard, they make me feel good about myself." I don't like Shakespeare I think he's dull. Some people think Shakespeare was something more than some dude that **** his pants as a kid and grew up to learn how to wipe his own ***. There is no total truth. Shakespeare wasn't the greatest writer ever. He wrote stuff, that is a fact. Was it well written? That too can be debated but less so. In the end it's all personal opinion. Liking Shakespeare doesn't mean you're smarter than anyone.
Some of me very often says: "I like books that are considered as strange, difficult because of the form".
Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
:thumbs_up
The hardest book I completed reading would be Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. But it's more philosophy/religion than literature. Crime and Punishment took some time and effort but I don't know if I should say it's "difficult" - it's more of its sheer length and weight rather than being esoteric or using obscure language. Another somewhat difficult book I've read was Democracy and Tradition by Jeffrey Stout, again, a philosophy and political book rather than literary. It took some effort to understand a couple of Shakespeare's longer plays, but that's more archaic language due to its historical time rather than "difficulty" as understood commonly
If you ask me on the hardest book I've attempted to read without success, that would be As I Lay Dying two years ago.
:blush:You might have chosen his Sickness unto Death which presumes the reader is literate in half a dozen languages. I tried but did not complete it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mason Pringle
I gave up on that one after fifty pages. I agree that it isn't literature. Like most philosophy & religious books it doesn't delight through content *and* form. Maybe the content (his ideas...) are interesting, but I'll be looking for someone who can express them better...Quote:
Originally Posted by Mason Pringle
Where is Wally in Hollywood?
Can never manage to find all those little bits and pieces.
I've tried with the first chapter of that book and was like WTF is he talking about. It's much harder than Fear and TremblingQuote:
Originally Posted by Gladys
Why would the word "loathsome" applied to a book give offence to any but the thinnest of skin?
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.Quote:
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..
You might try some of Cacian's, they make Beckett look like A.A. Milne.Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Juan Perez
"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!Quote:
Originally Posted by Emil Miller
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
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.
what companions did you find most helpful to your comprehension of finnegans wake? like i said, i've found clive's work, mcugh's annotations, and finnegansweb.com to be my most useful resources, but i still have a long way to go. to what degree do you feel you've mastered the text?Quote:
Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
I actually haven't delved into any of the companions out there. I'm generally more interested in poetry, and I tend to read Finnegans Wake like I read poetry, meaning that I dive in and read a bit when I'm in the mood for playing in a linguistic playground, and then I may put it down for days or weeks at a time and not revisit it. I don't think I could read FW like a traditional novel, and I'm also not sure I'd be interested in cutting through all of is linguistic Gordian Knots. While I do very much enjoy Joyce, I tend to save that level of dedication for my absolute favorite authors/works, and neither Joyce nor FW are on that level for me. So I haven't "mastered" the text at all, nor have I really tried. I just try to let myself get swept along for the ride and grasp what flotsam and jetsam of meaning that I can.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate
Hello.
I would like to find difficult English books, but not because they tell you a complex story or difficult concepts.
I'm looking for a book using a lot of complex English words and idioms. (I'm a foreigner trying to improve my English).
Which of the books you mentioned are more difficult in this sense?
Another difficult book is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" at least the Spanish version.
You might want to try Ulysses by James Joyce, if you are looking for challenging words and idioms. Joyce's Finnegans Wake is even more extreme along those lines, but it is too difficult for most native speakers of English, so you might try that later.
I recently finished The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. That was above my reading age, especially Justine.
The Confidence Man
The Cannibal. If I feel it ain't giving me pleasure I pack it in. But saying that I have persisted with some junk out of sheer desperate stubbornness. By the way there seems to be a strange set of threads which I have not gone near - all posted by a cove with the moniker Ausvsac Are they ok?