The world’s most difficult books?
The Guardian responds to the Million‘s list of the most difficult books, and to be frank, the results are underwhelming. Here is what the Millions managed:
- Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
- A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift
- The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel
- To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
- Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
- Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
- The Fairie Queene, Edmund Spenser
- The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
- Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
Granted, like all lists, this one is shit. Its flaws include, but aren’t limited to the fact that it has a size fetish, the fictional works are entirely in English, and the philosophical works are philosophical works and so why should they count? I’d scratch Being and Time and The Phenomenology of the Spirit off on that account, and add The Guardian‘s suggested amendments: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. But the amended list is still problematic, because I’m not sure anyone finds To The Lighthouse a difficult read, and Women and Men is only difficult inasmuch as it’s been out-of-print for so long a paperback copy will cost you $180. McElroy’s Plus is a far more difficult novel, because it’s narrated from the perspective of an ornery satellite. (And it’ll only run you $187.90.)
Maybe it’s because of my unusual graduate school career path, but of the novels listed only The Making of Americans, Nightwood, Finnegans Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow seem to me to be genuinely difficult novels. Except they’re not really that difficult for the people who read them, because the people who read densely poetic world-building novels do so because enjoy doing so. I know that Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t for everyone, but there’s a subset of the reading population for whom it’s very much for. I’d have no qualms, for example, recommending it to someone who’s obsessed over Infinite Jest.
A better list of the world’s most difficult books would expand its purview to “the world,” and it would be comprised of books that people who love difficult books find difficult, instead of ones that people who don’t do. I’d suggest adding:
- Appleseed, John Clute
- Dhalgren, Samuel Delany
- JR, William Gaddis
- The Tunnel, William Gass
- Anything in German or Chinese, Because SEK Can’t Read German or Chinese
My list isn’t exhaustive, either, but at least it suggests that The Glass Bead Game might be tremendously complex or The Man Without Qualities can match Clarissa page-for-page. Since my list is a list and, as stated above, all lists are shit, I invite you to give me the what-for in the comments.
” . . .and the philosophical works are philosophical works and so why should they count?”
Why shouldn’t they count? It’s a list of difficult books, not difficult fictional books.
If they do count, then almost anything by Habermas is more difficult.
Nah. In my view (and I’ve read all of Habermas’ major works and probably a majority of his shorter essays), Habermas is easy compared to Hegel. I also find him much, much easier than, say, Derrida. Granted, Habermas is dense and he writes long sentences. He’s also, like Hegel, a system-builder, so that you can’t really get what he’s doing in X chapter until you see how it fits into the overall architecture of his thought. Nevertheless, I don’t think his technical language is all that difficult (for some reason, the Hegelian capitalizations always rub me the wrong way), and he also says what he means and means what he says.
I only found Derrida easy to the extent that when he confused me, I’d just walk into his office and ask him what he meant.
And I found Spencer far more difficult than Hegel, because Hegel was far more consistent in his system-building. Spencer just plain confused me, and I was annoyed until I realize that was his fault, not mine.
That would make things easier. Alas, I had no such options. Anyway, I ended up having to dive into Derrida’s later more explicitly “political” works–or, perhaps I should say ethical works (which is precisely the problem I have with them)–over the last few years, and I think I have him, or at least I have a defensible take on him. But man, it was a challenge for me.
In all seriousness, the most difficult thing about Derrida was trying to get him to talk about something other than his cats. And since I was in most of those late seminars, I don’t find it that difficult. I’m still mystified, however, by stuff like “White Mythology.” I know what it’s supposed to mean, because I’ve read the glosses, but I’m not quite sure how the glossers got from the words Derrida wrote to the ones they did.
Heh. I’ve heard that! However, I do have to say that I’m shocked to see that that you’ve succumbed to phonocentrism,
I would no more take a published philosopher’s explanation of what he/she meant as authoritative than I would take a student’s.
This isn’t really a place to launch into a discussion of authorial intent, but needless to say, I think asking a philosopher what he or she meant by X is far different than asking a novelist what their novel means. The former’s attempting to communicate an aspect of a theory, whereas the latter’s created an aesthetic object that’s meant to be interpreted.
The possible “value added” of authorial explanation is indeed different with respect to the different types of text, but in both cases it’s possible to code the explanation not as clarification of communication but as evidence of failure of communication. In the case of philosophical texts, this coding is in some sense even more obviously possible-”if that’s the argument/theory you were trying to articulate, you failed.” I don’t see why I should privilege the author’s interpretations of the argument.
This right here is one of the things that’s caused me to hold a lot of aspects of postmodernism in deep and vicious contempt.
An authors explanation of what they meant is almost always authoritative. Oh, sure, you can construct a plausible scenario in which they’d blatantly lie, I guess. But someone explaining what they meant when they wrote something down is authoritative on account of they’re the only ones who can really know.
Seriously. You might shoot back at them “if that’s what you meant, you expressed yourself awfully.” I’ve had professors tell me that. I’ve told professors that. But expressing yourself badly in no way undermines your authority to say what you intended.
it’s possible to code the explanation not as clarification of communication but as evidence of failure of communication
It’s possible, certainly, but it depends on your evaluation of the ethos of the person doing the explaining. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, if only because I frequently need to explain something I’ve told someone. But with literary texts, there’s the issue of what Joyce meant when he gave the bird-girl crane-like features in Portrait, and I don’t think he entirely knows why he did that. He can generate an explanation, but I’m far more likely to distrust it because he’s dealing with all sorts of symbolic burblings that a philosopher describing his theory of language doesn’t have to.
An authors explanation of what they meant is almost always authoritative.
Well, it’s authoritative by definition. But when it comes to literary texts, there’s the simple fact that creating an aesthetic object is different from constructing an argument. The latter entails, well, things like entailment, whereas the former doesn’t. They’re just different beasts, is what I’m saying.
Indeed, and your point is well-taken and one that I often try to keep in my own mind; I personally have an ongoing problem with approaching works meant as an explicit argument the same way I approach works of fiction.
However, I have met (and had rip-roaring arguments) with many people who are prepared to argue vociferously that an author’s interpretation of his own work is utterly unworthy of any sort of privilege, and indeed should be privileged less than others interpretations of it. And that’s just insanity.
There is a difference between what an artist intends to say, and what the work means.
I owe Derrida a great debt for showing the philosophical and ethical nightmare postmodernism becomes when you take it to logical extremes.
Are the philosophical works more difficult than books about protein biochemistry, string theory, C++ coding or hundreds of other technical topics? It seems to be restricted to fiction and the ‘soft’ sciences.
Never mind C++, Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language gave me a few headaches. That probably dates me.
I too remember the travails of Kernighan and Ritchie. I was hearing voices by the end of the two quarters I did Computer Graphics classes in grad school with only a 100-level C programming class background in C
not that anyone cares, but I was lucky the voices only spouted bad poetry not anything truly despicable.
Really? K&R is one of the best technical books ever written and arguably responsible for the success of C and Unix which underpins most everything with a computer in it more powerful than a toaster controller.
C however is not for the light at heart, but I don’t think you can blame the book for that.
I’m not blaming it! It’s a great book. There were parts of it I had to go over several times, and think about a lot. As a textbook, it ranks up there, for me, with Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics.
Are the philosophical works more difficult than books about protein biochemistry, string theory, C++ coding or hundreds of other technical topics?
This, exactly. Any random advanced physics textbook would rate above any of the books in my list, as would either Principia Mathematica, etc.
Any random advanced physics textbook would rate above any of the books in my list
I disagree. Most of them assume a math/physics background which renders them fairly accessible to the intended audience. Apples and durians.
That’s what I meant: they’re only difficult because I lack the requisite skills to understand them, not because they’re inherently difficult in the way Finnegans Wake is.
Is Finnegan’s Wake all that difficult if you have the skills to understand it?
From what I’ve read about reading it (!), it seems to be like Scottish cuisine – based on a dare (“I bet ye canna eat/read this, ye Sassenach bastard”). Unlike English cuisine, which is based on being able to use a spoon with whatever you cook.
Yes.
What are these things(?) we call language and culture, and how do they relate to the body? And why did Joyce engage them in this particular way? Why do puns and slapstick make us laugh?
Secondly, very much like Ulysses multi- and over-determination are the entire game. It is dynamically created in interpretation. It is just a chicken-scratching a trashpile;and also history;and conscious secrets;also the unconscious. And more.
Where the heck does meaning reside?
And like so many things, reading Finnegans Wake (and Ulysses, for that matter) is better if you don’t do it alone. If you don’t get the joke, there’s a chance someone else can explain it to you, and vice versa.
You’re conflating accessibility with difficulty.
Accessibility is a function of your pre-existing knowledge. Difficulty is a function of the subject matter, the quality of its presentation, and your idiosyncratic ability to learn new material.
Even if you have the prerequisite knowledge, the material that the text presents may be sufficiently new and challenging that it is difficult.
A typical first term college-level calculus course is a good example. Without the necessary algebra and trigonometry foundation, calculus will be inaccessible. But even with it, the vast majority of students will find their first explosure to calculus to be enormously challenging.
So any Statistical Mechanics textbook would be inaccessible to most, but the one I had where the author used gothic letters for the symbols, including three nearly indistinguishable capital “B”s for different properties, would be difficult.
My understanding is that Being and Time and The Phenomenology of Spirit are considered damned confusing books by professional philosophers, although as a non-philosopher I’d have to take their word on it.
The Phenomenology is a couple of orders of magnitude harder to read than Being & Time; in the case of the latter, you have to keep up with Heidegger’s word-coinages, but that said it’s not a terribly incomprehensible book.
Whereas the Hegel is just … well, I’ve never had the experience with any other book of reading the same paragraph over & over again and repeatedly finding that I had no damn idea what had just been said. (“Force & the Understanding,” btw.)
Maybe that was just my doltish self, but I’ve made it through some fairly prickly Kant and Joyce and Pynchon without that sense of functional illiteracy’s taking hold.
If nonfiction philosophy books “count”, then you need to add “Relativistic Quantum Mechanics” by Landau and Lifshitz. Good luck getting 3 pages into chapter 1.
But perhaps your point is that philosophy is akin to fiction, while the L&L text mentioned above is entirely too ‘truthy’ to count as fiction.
Broch’s Death of Virgil. Though a book partially written in a concentration camp probably deserves a break. And by the end of The Magic Mountain *I* was ready to walk into a machine gun.
Right about Bloch. I really want to be able to read that book, but it’s shaken me off every time I’ve tried.
… Re: To the Lighthouse, it’s not a difficult book to people who read modernist lit, but my efforts to get bright friends to read it have left me forced to admit it’s not terribly accessible. There’s a reason why Mrs. Dalloway is the lowbrow Woolf favorite.
But To The Lighthouse is pretty much the second most accessible Woolf novel!. As the Guardian writer points out, if they needed a Woolf novel, they could at least gone with The Waves.
Is number one orlando?
The Years, I would think. It was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.
I found To the Lighthouse very difficult for the first 30-40 pages, and then it all started flowing really naturally. I don’t have a lot of experience with modernist novels, but based on my limited experience, I found To the Lighthouse more accessible (and better) than most.
See, this is what I don’t get: that’s not a difficult book if that’s the kind of book you enjoy. I loved The Death of Virgil, and would likely re-read it if I didn’t have a cat named Virgil and wouldn’t want to cry every time I saw the cover.
not a difficult book if that’s the kind of book you enjoy
But don’t they mean difficult for casual followers of literature? If you like Frank Zappa then Ornette Coleman probably isn’t so difficult to enjoy, but if you’re pretty much a Top 40 fan maybe you shouldn’t waste your money on a John Zorn record. Going from Harry Potter to Finnegans Wake would be pretty difficult.
I don’t think so. The Millions, at least, is a hard-core literary type site. Otherwise, it would be a matter of saying “people who don’t listen to jazz find experimental jazz difficult to listen to.” I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
The Millions, at least, is a hard-core literary type site.
Then I’m glad for the inclusion, on this and the introductory post, of several books I found too bewildering to slog through.
I hope it’s clear here — if not in the post itself, then by the links to comments at my place — that I’m not claiming that people who read these books are smarter than who don’t. It’s just a category of readers, i.e. the people who read these books are the kinds of people who read these books. I don’t read Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean I’m not as bright as someone who does.
No, I got what you were saying and took no offense. I was just glad to know that even some people who apparently are among that category had difficulty with, say, Dream Songs.
This is how I feel about Dhalgren and The Magic Mountain. But Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World is the sort of book I enjoy, and I found it very difficult.
The White People by Arthur Machen is very good, but can be difficult to read without losing the plot repeatedly.
I tend to compulsively finish things, but as I recall I only made it about a third of the way through The Magic Mountain. I agree with SEK that To the Lighthouse didn’t seem especially difficult.
Also sympathize with the tedium induced by Mann’s epic. Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is much more accessible and one of the great novels from the last century.
MM and Doktor Faustus weren’t hard. Joseph and his Brothers was a slog.
JR and Pynchon weren’t hard. G. Stein is tough for me. Beckett’s novels sometimes. Gass gave me problems.
I don’t know what “hard” means here. Trust me, you can will the determination to read, or look at, every word of anything. Do we mean read with “understanding?” Do I understand The Castle?” I wouldn’t make that claim.
Books are to me, people, in some sense subjects. “Reading” a good book, or a bad one, is entering into a unbounded relationship with an other and the Other. There is no finality here.
On the basis of the first fifteen pages of the first Left Behind novel, I am here to tell you that that is not correct.
Also too, the Book of Mormon.
Faerie Queene is difficult only because it is in Elizabethan English.
I found reading The Canterbury Tales difficult too, despite all the fart jokes. I can’t imagine why.
you’re not a Farrelly brother? nor are you Ben Franklin
I was just gonna mention A Tale of a Tub elsewhere assuming that people found it as amusing as I do. I’ve only read the Spenser Swift and Woolf and yeah, two are in archaic language but if that’s what makes books difficult why isn’t it a list made entirely of early English works? I believe Spenser was not the only guy writing at the time.
I have to cut Spenser some slack: even people who read it when it was written, around 1600, found it difficult to read because its style is deliberately archaic. It’s not Wake difficult, but it’s deliberately obtuse.
I don’t find Tale of a Tub difficult to read because of the language, it’s the arcane references that require some knowledge of 17th Century English politics.
Not really true, although once you get the hang of the stanzas you can definitely gallop through the narrative, pricking on the plain. What makes FQ difficult is that it is a kind of bottomless allegory, so that (for example) what seems like pro-Elizabeth propaganda can also be read as a sharp critique of her myth-making. Put another way, the problem isn’t making sense out of it but in trusting the sense you make out of it.
But none of this makes it as difficult as a statistics textbook.
I’ll second Dhalgren. But no Chapman’s Homer? It left me softly whimpering, if not silent.
Chapman’s Homer is so difficult, people who read it lose the ability to identify Spanish explorers correctly.
[Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.]
It’s a baseball thing:
Red Sox Beat Yanks 5–4 On Chapman’s Homer
It’s not all that clear that’s a mistake; see see C. V. Wicker, “Cortez-Not Balboa”, in College English, Vol. 17, No. 7 (Apr., 1956), pp. 383-387, expanded on in Charles J. Rzepka, “‘Cortez: Or Balboa, or Somebody like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet”, in Keats-Shelley Journal , Vol. 51, (2002), pp. 35-75. (Links to stable JSTOR cites for those with library-granted access.)
Clarissa is just long, not difficult.
Yes. I teach a class in the history of the English novel to Thai students, and they always find the excerpts from Clarissa considerably less difficult than those from Tom Jones, Great Expectations or Middlemarch: not just linguistically, but in terms of the characters’ psychology and the moral judgments being called for.
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual
Flann O’Brien: At Swim-Two-Birds
As far as Flann O’Brien is concerned, The Third Policeman was plenty twisted.
And in my opinion, Life: A User’s Manual is the best novel of the 20th century.
The thing that surprises me is that there is no obsessive Life: A User’s Manual: A User’s Manual wiki/website dedicated to tracking down every last internal cross-linkage and external reference. This will be my project for my 40s.
You appear to have screwed the walrus with your Amazon links for the books.
Nevermind, someone apparently fixed them as I was typing up that comment.
Teach you to call me a walrus-fucker.
All ten of my list would be expository non-narrative books. I just can’t read those any more.
Betty Crocker melts my brain.
What, like Welfare and Capitalism in Post-War Japan? High theory and and social science books are all I can read anymore. Fiction drowns me in metaphorical space.
Fiction or not. Tell me a story.
If we’re going to deal with global literature, I’d add Brazilian author Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas, which I loved but which is extremely difficult even for Portuguese speakers. Foolishly, it was translated into English as best as it could be (which wasn’t very good), and nobody has tried since.
[Full disclosure/shameless self-promotion: I just wrote about the book and its author here this weekend.]
We have studiously ignored South America, Colin. Or they have. Quite a bit of magic-realism would fit on these lists — I’m thinking Hopscotch and the like — and I’m surprised 2666 wasn’t on it.
I’m surprised you add 2666. What was it about it that would have you include it on the list?
I wouldn’t have included it — Bolano’s narratives not difficult, his narratives just overlap — it’s just that both the Guardian and the Millions have a Bolano fetish, so I figured I’d see it on the list.
[And to be fair, I didn't mean to condescend regarding South America. If anybody demanded people READ ALL THE BOOKS IN ALL THE LANGUAGES before making a list like this, well....that wouldn't be so much a Herculean task as a Babel-onian one.]
Tristram Shandy.
I read the first few pages of that just before bed on the eve of a vacation and was really looking forward to a week of reading. The project was abandoned early the next morning. Turns out it’s not all hilarious jokes about sperm.
Yeah, next time try Moby Dick.
I’ve always had trouble with the Dresden Codex and it’s a picture book!
SPOILER ALERT:
At the end, everybody dies.
So, you would call it similar to Hamlet?
Yes, or the Philadelphia Eagles playbook.
That would have been a funnier joke a few days ago.
Ah shit. Missed that. Twenty yards and loss of down for Hogan.
I must confess to having confused the Dresden Codex with the Dresden Files . . .
I thought it was Dresden Codak:
http://dresdencodak.com/2012/07/04/dark-science-19/
Indeed. I mean, it took hundreds of years before anyone could learn to read it at all.
By that standard, why the hell isn’t the Phaistos Disk on that list? No one has been able to read that turkey.
Greg Egan: Schild’s Ladder.
I haven’t even heard of that. New book!
Presumably poetry is fair game, since Spenser’s on there. So what about the Cantos or Paterson or Zukofsky’s A or the Maximus Poems or Paul Celan or John Ashbery?
Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools is pretty hard, if only because a lot of the characters seem to have several different names.
To the Lighthouse isn’t especially difficult. It’s just boring. Although not as boring as The Waves.
Having attempted to read Ulysses once, I find it slightly frightening that:
A) it’s not on the list
B) nobody here seems to have a problem with its absence.
It’s because the Wake‘s already on it, and it’s much more difficult to read than Ulysses.
There is, for me anyway, an element of Ulysses, difficult and enjoyable and worth it contrasted with Wake, difficult and . . . difficult
Are either in English?
Ulysses pretty much *is* English.
True, but Ulysses is certainly more difficult than To the Lighthouse or The Magic Mountain, to name other modernist novels that have been mentioned in the thread that I’ve read.
After a couple false starts, I found the rhythms of Gravity’s Rainbow and burned through the rest, Byron the Bulb and all. Gaddis or Magic Mountain strike me as more difficult by far. (Flann O’Brien is a delight.) What about The Unnameable or La Jalousie, both of which I have started and given up on quite early?
At least the Robbe-Grillet is very short. I loved it. For some reason, the second half, In the Labyrinth gave me more problems.
I adored The Erasers, which can be read like the straightforward, Chesterton-esque mystery novel that it sorta kinda is. It took me all of one sitting to burn though.
What about The Unnameable or La Jalousie, both of which I have started and given up on quite early?
Any of Beckett’s novel should qualify for the same reasons Stein’s should: if you can’t catch the rhythm of it, it’s nearly impossible to read. Once you do, though, it’s not that difficult and actually damn funny. That goes for Stein and Beckett both. I think Everybody’s Autobiography is one of the funniest books ever written, and far funnier than the more popular Toklas.
Likewise Recollections of the Golden Triangle, which can be read like the straightforward Pauline Réage-like porn novel that it sorta kinda is.
Or so I hear.
Would a fair category of books include “The most difficult books that purport to be accessible but actually aren’t”?
I think that’s a different category, though. I’d include on that novels by Trollope and Clarissa and The Man Without Qualities. Those actually are accessible, they’re just long. It’d have been nice if they’d taken the time to define the word “difficult” instead of just treating it categorically like “pornography.”
Anathem by neal stephenson needs to be somewhere in the running, it’s 900 pages that require a dictionary of in-universe words, plus attached logic proofs
You might want to take a look at Finnegan’s Wake before you compare Anathem to it. Fully 10% of the words in Wake were created by the author, and there are thousands of words employed from over 60 different foreign languages. There are university courses that cover Wake at the rate of 50 pages per semester.
Anathem was very good, but it wasn’t even close to being in the same order of magnitude in terms of complexity to Wake.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
Why do I am a look alike a poss of porter pease?
… are you serious?
Anathem is no more difficult than any science-fiction novel. In fact, its in-universe lexicon is SMALLER than the one you need to understand, say, the Expanded Universe of the Star Wars novels. I would hazard a guess that many of what you think were his “in-universe” words were in fact words that exist from THIS universe you just didn’t know. This may be uncharitable of me, but I know I was surprised that a few of’em were in fact real words.
This isn’t to say that Anathem can’t be a slog. Like most of his canon, you’d better be prepared for a plot not to show up until about the 3/4ths mark of the book.
I like Stephenson quite a lot, but I’m a man who owns the complete set of Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas’ and would happily read complete sociological and historical surveys of completely fictional universes. A lot of people don’t have patience with that kind of naval-gazing, and Stephenson isn’t for them. With maybe one or two exceptions; Snow Crash is probably his most accessible work.
Reamde is probably his most accessible, in the sense that a big steaming turd is readily accessible to anyone. That book nearly made me revise my appreciation of his oeuvre (but he’s still the only author I’ve encountered who correctly and entertainingly conveys the mathematical mind, so I’m giving him a pass on this one).
I would say that Snow Crash is more accessible than Reamde. I mean, it is obviously one of those two, with Cryptonomicon running third, but Snow Crash is a lot more ‘typical’ than either of those two. It’s very obviously part of the cyberpunk genre from the get-go, its not a doorstop, it executes well, the plot unfolds with a typical pace, etc. It still has the problem of not ending well, Stephensons’ achilles heel as a writer, but I would say it’s a lot more accessible than Reamde, which spends a couple hundred pages making you think its going to be about this aging programmer being melancholy and semi-Aspergersy, until suddenly it tries to turn into a thriller.
I’ll sign onto that — Snow Crash does pretty effectively avoid setting a high “geek hurdle” like so many of his other books. I would say that Zodiac is similar in that regard.
I just take every opportunity to vent my rage at how infuriating I found Reamde to be. The problem with reading on a Kindle is that you can’t throw the book against the wall — or rather, it quickly becomes very expensive to do so.
Interesting bit of background trivia about Snow Crash: it started out as a treatment for a videogame, which explains all the action scenes.
I found The Random House Dictionary of the English Language hopelessly confusing. Sometimes I think you could read it in a random order and it would make just as much sense.
That book makes no goddam sense. You read about a word, and they use OTHER words to describe it, and then you have to look up THOSE words … I mean, WTF?
The zebra did it.
This won the thread, with assists from the two replies. We can all go home now.
Another reason why lists are silly in general and especially silly for this is that it flattens a lot of the difference among entries.
The difference in difficulty between, say, JR and Infinite Jest is very small compared to the difference between either of those and Gravity’s Rainbow or Dahlgren. And the whole lot isn’t within a country mile of something like Finnegan’s Wake.
It’d be a lot better to make overlapping groups like “books that are difficult due to prose style”, “due to non-linear/non-traditional narrative techniques”, “due to high concept thematic concerns”, etc. So like The Tunnel would go in the first and last group but not the second, JR would go in the first and second but not the third, Beckett’s stuff would probably go in each of the last two but not the first, etc.
So there, literary website. Your piece made to foster discussion could have been more analytic. Or something.
Agreed, + of course the reality of different people having different strengths. The only book on that list I’ve read is some excerpts from the Hegel (and I found Kant harder), but I’ve read several of the other books being suggested here, including Infinite Jest (which I didn’t find hard at all) and Ulysses (which I read in a class devoted to the subject, but could now probably tackle with only occasional assistance from a secondary guide), but I’ve never found the rhythm of Gravity’s Rainbow or any Gaddis, and would actually nominate the most difficult novel to read that I’ve ever read as Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, but I may be confusing difficulty of prose with distaste for what I was reading.
Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is easy compared to his Book of the Short Sun. I can’t believe there isn’t any Faulkner on the list.
The only book on that list I’ve read is some excerpts from the Hegel (and I found Kant harder)
That’s why they picked those particular excerpts.
The difference in difficulty between, say, JR and Infinite Jest is very small compared to the difference between either of those and Gravity’s Rainbow or Dahlgren.
Now I’m really confused. Which of these sets of novels is supposed to be the harder one? Personally, I didn’t find Infinite Jest to be difficult at all; just long. Dahlgren might be a little difficult compared to IJ, but still, that wouldn’t have been a quality I would have immediately associated with it. Whereas I DID think that both Gravity’s Rainbow and JR were substantially difficult in places.
Yeah I fucked up that phrasing. I meant like the reasons IJ and JR are difficult are different than the reasons Dahlgren and GR are difficult, and Finnegan’s Wake is difficult for all those reasons and more. And something like Beckett or Wittgenstein’s Mistress is probably as difficult as any of those but for completely different reasons. That’s why I thought making those reasons explicit would be a good idea.
The relative ease of each book will be different for everyone, of course, and probably breaks down along the “reasons for difficulty” groups a little bit. Fer instance I thought JR was a pretty easy read and IJ a little more so but not bad. But GR was a lot harder going and Dahlgren even more so.
I also didn’t find Infinite Jest that difficult. It’s long, and bops around in time, and in some places (such as the footnotes to the footnotes) I suspect that DFW is just fucking with the reader, but not particularly a hard read.
Wha? _Glass Bead Game_ and difficult in the same sentence? -Really-? Oh, c’mon! It’s a rippin’ yarn! Seriously! And you call yourself an academic? It’s about -you-, man, about -you-!
I loved that book so much I read it twice, and yet somehow I managed to maintain the belief that finishing a PhD was a good idea. Turns out I should have taken my Hesse appreciation as a sign that academia might not have been the right path for me.
If we’re allowed languages other than English, what about the Hypnerotomachia Polyphilia? (Which I only know about because I read a Dan Brownesque mystery about it.)
A highly allegorical novel about a lover’s dream struggle, mostly played out through architecture, including made up words in Italian, Latin, Greek and hieroglyphics.
I though Dhalgren was pretty neat, once you got past the first 2-3 pages of stream o’ consciousness. I loved Gravity’s Rainbow, but let whole chunks of pages pass under my eyes without touching my brain. Kernigan and Ritchie are just fun to read. Man, can some programmers write!
Apparently everything I read is easy.
I found John Hawkes’s The Cannibal rather formidable, despite its brevity.
Back in my “absorb the western canon” days (circa age 14-16) I went through a bunch of these (Glass Bead Game, Dhalgren, Tale of the Tub, Clarissa, Faerie Queen) without noticing any particular difficulty. But it might have been just that I didn’t understand them all that well . . .
People were giving me doorstops one year- I don’t know why. I got both “Death of Artemio Cruz” and “The Vivisector”- not really the complexity, but the sloggitude I felt made them difficult.
The book The Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer is the most difficult book I’ve tried to read. The professor leading the seminar had trouble with it.
Not sure what “difficult” is supposed to mean. The simplest syntax can pose the most difficult questions. (For example, Emily Dickinson or Sappho or Catullus.) Just to plough through the syntax and/or plot turns? Not a very interesting “difficult” list, then. Texts difficult in both senses, and (oddly) not included: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid. After all, they’re awfully good stuff (especially when you treat them as difficult, which they are), and they’ve been kind of influential. (A lot of good conversation over the centuries has resulted.)
There is one book so difficult to read that the vast majority of intellectuals who started it, could not finish. Atlas Shrugged.
I read it, and The Fountainhead, and Anthem, and Native Son. Do you know what I discovered? I don’t like novels that contain 60-page-long speeches whether I agree with the ideology or no.
The other, of course, involves orcs.
What about the one involving borks…Slouching Towards Gonorrhea.
I’m sure it is every bit as well-written and insightful. Of course, the same can be said of The Collected Trollings of JenBob.
Those DW Nominate books are indeed pretty wonky and difficult.
Yea, but it can all be easily summarized in three
well-flogged dead horsestheses.Quite the opposite, I had trouble putting it down. I even liked Galt’s speech.
always delighted to see clute’s appleseed on any list, to get the word out. best sci-fi i’ve ever read.
books like finnegans wake for me are just stupidly, pointlessly difficult (or at least there isnt near enough of a payoff for their difficulty).
for ‘good’ difficulty, for me the exemplars are gaddis, faulkner, broch, maybe pynchon. to whatever degree, sensuous and cumulative world-building.
Try Hermann Broch – The Death of Virgil _