# 10 Most Difficult Books?



## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

A discussion at Publisher's Weekly.

I've only read two of them all the way through (Swift and Woolf). I've read maybe half of Finnegan's Wake, and less than that of The Faerie Queene. I've read bits of Hegel, and in my view Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, and other works (which Hegel attacks) is just as laborious.

What about the rest of you?

The Top 10 Most Difficult Books


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## Benjamin Clayborne (Aug 7, 2012)

Maybe I'm a philistine, but I don't see the value in books being difficult to read.

If the author's trying to communicate something, what exactly is the purpose of making it opaque? Is it that people feel more accomplished having gotten through something difficult? That feels like a phantom achievement, sort of a broken-window fallacy. Rather than learning the author's message and then contemplating it, instead you spend a great deal of additional time _deciphering_ the author's message before you get to contemplate it.

Maybe it's to mimic how life can be difficult and incomprehensible sometimes? Okay, but isn't life itself already bad enough? Why would I want to consciously choose to spend MORE of my life being confused?


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## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

I don't think the value is in them being difficult to read. It's that they have value in addition to (or maybe in spite of) being difficult to read.

Virginia Woolf was brilliant. The writings of hers that I've read can be considered works of art, in my opinion. The fact that they may take some effort to read doesn't detract from that. If they were written in the straightforward, lean manner of today, they'd be the poorer for it.

Finnegan's Wake I'm not sold on.


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## Benjamin Clayborne (Aug 7, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> I don't think the value is in them being difficult to read. It's that they have value in addition to (or maybe in spite of) being difficult to read.



Naturally; I'm not saying that difficult books have no value, just that I don't see the value in something being extra-difficult.



> Virginia Woolf was brilliant. The writings of hers that I've read can be considered works of art, in my opinion. The fact that they may take some effort to read doesn't detract from that. If they were written in the straightforward, lean manner of today, they'd be the poorer for it.



How so? What does the difficulty add to the experience?


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## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

Benjamin Clayborne said:


> How so? What does the difficulty add to the experience?



I don't think it was intentionally written to be difficult. It's just a result of the artistic style. The main thing with that book is that it drifts among points-of-view like a boat on water, and there is a lot of stream of conscious quality to it. It's a pretty neat book, actually. If you removed that element, it wouldn't be the same book anymore.


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## Devor (Aug 7, 2012)

Kant was a chore.  Pretty much any philosopher before the 1900s is going to be rough, both because of style and content (and translation issues).  In terms of fiction that I've read, probably Moby Dick, which is a great story that diverges freuently into long technical lessons on whaling.


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## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

I love _Moby Dick_.

But you can skip the alternating whaling chapters when they come, and not miss any of the story.


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## Philip Overby (Aug 7, 2012)

I think Ulysses should be listed along with Finnegan's Wake (although I've never read it, I've heard about it.)  I had to read Ulysses in university and it was extremely difficult to get through.  

I'd like to add Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson to this list.    (and I love Erikson).


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## Steerpike (Aug 7, 2012)

I love Erikson as well. Great stuff.

Ulysses was a chore. Finnegan's Wake is even harder to get through, if you can believe it. At least, that was the case with the portion I started. I haven't actually read the book. As I'm thinking back on it, "half" might even be a charitable estimate of how far I made it into the book.


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## Feo Takahari (Aug 7, 2012)

I've only even _heard_ of five of these, and I've never read even one. (I've heard of nine of the authors, but four were in relation to other works. I have read stories by Swift, Woolf, and Joyce, but only Woolf's _Orlando_ was a work as difficult as the listed books apparently are.)


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## Shockley (Aug 8, 2012)

I've read Faerie Queen several times now (it was assigned in college, I now read it for leisure) and I don't find it difficult. Not as difficult as say, Josephus.


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## Ravana (Aug 8, 2012)

Devor said:


> Kant was a chore.



I was going to say that no list should include Hegel and Heidegger, yet omit Kant. 

I was also a bit surprised not to see _Gravity's Rainbow_ on the list. 

@Phil: _Ulysses_ doesn't even begin to compare to _Finnegan's Wake_. For starters, _Ulysses_ is written in English.… 

An honorable mention from the poetry side of things: Ezra Pound's _Cantos_.


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## Neurosis (Aug 8, 2012)

I've read some of the books on that list. Most of them were pretty damn dense, but I must say they all pale in comparison to 'Light'. That book was one convoluted read. The Book of the New Sun is fairly hard to read also (but excellent, one of the best fantasy books ever written).


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## Lorna (Aug 8, 2012)

I've read all of Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_ and Heidegger's _Being and Time_ because I studied European philosophy to Masters level. Both books have been really influential on my life. Hegel's idea that the world is the appearance of spirit brought about a really big shift in perception for me as did Heidegger's writing on time and rethinking of the categories of existence. 

I like reading books that question our everyday conception of the nature of reality. I think that's why I'm drawn to fantasy. Without the phenomenologists, Nietzsche and Blake I would never have thought up the metaphysical structure for my WIP. 

I've read some of Spenser's _The Faerie Queene_ but admit to not completing it.

In contrast to Hegel and Heidgegger I'd say Kant's quite easy. If you want something really tough try Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_, Theodor Adorno's _Negative Dialectics_ or the 'Epistemo-Critical Prologue' to Walter Benjamin's _The Origin on German Tragic Drama_


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## Steerpike (Aug 8, 2012)

In thinking about these books further, I wonder how many are actually 'difficult' and how much suffer from intellectual over-analysis and the need to obsess over each sentence. I'm talking about the fiction here.

Take Woolf, for example. That's not a hard book to read. If you insist on analyzing each sentence you might be frustrated with it, but you'll also have missed the point of a work of literature. On the other hand, if you just cast aside any of those anal tendencies and let the text just carry you along, it works nicely. In other words, read it as art not a technical manual.


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## JCFarnham (Aug 8, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> In thinking about these books further, I wonder how many are actually 'difficult' and how much suffer from intellectual over-analysis and the need to obsess over each sentence. I'm talking about the fiction here.
> 
> Take Woolf, for example. That's not a hard book to read. If you insist on analyzing each sentence you might be frustrated with it, but you'll also have missed the point of a work of literature. On the other hand, if you just cast aside any of those anal tendencies and let the text just carry you along, it works nicely. In other words, read it as art not a technical manual.



Quite right. 

The High Modernists aren't really supposed to be read as you might read current era literature. The meaning isn't the point, the emotion, the feeling... hell, the _art_ is the point. I enjoyed Beloved, I'll come out and say it. Not Morrisons best work I suppose, but that book's three stream of consciousness chapters are just about the toughest thing I've read, next to attempting Ulysses. 

You know, the way I see it, the whole point of that style of writting is delving into the very being of a character. Have you ever noted down your thoughts _exactly_? That, like the way we _actually_ converse in real life, is more or less nonsense, but it is that, that Woolf and others were trying to emulate.

Think of it what you will, but what ever you do don't read it as if you have to understand absolutely everything all the time.



I always figured Finnegan's Wake _was_ English


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## Steerpike (Aug 8, 2012)

JCFarnham said:


> I always figured Finnegan's Wake _was_ English



Good points, JC. I think some of the complaints about Woolf and others would be equivalent to looking at an impressionist work from Monet or Renoir and complaining that it doesn't look enough like a photograph.

As for Finnegan's Wake, it is ostensibly in English, but from what I actually read of it, a fair portion seemed to be gibberish


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## JCFarnham (Aug 8, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> Good points, JC. I think some of the complaints about Woolf and others would be equivalent to looking at an impressionist work from Monet or Renoir and complaining that it doesn't look enough like a photograph.
> 
> As for Finnegan's Wake, it is ostensibly in English, but from what I actually read of it, a fair portion seemed to be gibberish



Haha, I know. Again its attempting to emulate something (a dialect and a specifc thought pattern perhaps?) I haven't read it in it's entirety but I was a student of Literature back in the day and we did some lessons on modernist, post-modernist, beats, etc.


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## Ravana (Aug 13, 2012)

JCFarnham said:


> Haha, I know. Again its attempting to emulate something (a dialect and a specifc thought pattern perhaps?)



Ostensibly starts from that point, but in fact it is completely idiosyncratic. Here's the second paragraph:



> Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgions while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old issac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were soise sesthers wroth with twone nathanjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.



You can imagine what the spellchecker thinks of that.… I chose the second paragraph, because the first begins in the middle of a sentence—the other half of which ends the book 626 pages later, bringing it full circle. Also, the above paragraph is actually one of the _easier_ ones to understand.

Probably the best way to describe the style is "stream of subconsciousness." The eccentricities are by and large puns, meant to draw connections arising as much in the author's own mind as anything else. Even knowing that, it's all but impossible to untangle without either a copious knowledge of history and literature, or else a concordance, an astrolabe, doppler radar and a guide dog. For instance, "Sir Tristram" combines references to the forbidden-lovestruck Arthurian knight Tristan and the title character of the eighteenth-century novel _Tristam Shandy_ (which, as happens, is regarded as one of the predecessors of stream-of-consciousness writing). "Penisloate war" is punning on the Peninsular War (along with the obvious), which every educated person in the British Isles would have recognized at the time Joyce was writing (I'm not as confident about today), but few Americans would even then, fewer still now. "Armorica" is a real place name, though it's been somewhat out of use these last ten or eleven centuries… and while combining it with "North" automatically invokes the Western Hemisphere, its actual location is indeed across a "short sea" (the English Channel) and is a peninsula. Whereas there is an Oconee River, which happens to flow through a Laurens County, both of which are in Georgia—The one in the Western Hemisphere, that is. Oh, and Tristan was, depending on the version of the story, either from Cornwall (a peninsula, and also across the Channel from Armorica) or Brittany (which _is_ Armorica, or at least part of it). And so on. And that's just parts of a single paragraph. 

In other words, I love it. 

But it's no easy read, that's for sure.


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## Steerpike (Aug 13, 2012)

Ravana said:


> In other words, I love it.
> 
> But it's no easy read, that's for sure.



Can you record an audio version for me, complete with editorial comments?

I like _Ulysses_. I also like _Dubliners_, which is a book of short stories worth reading. F_innegan's Wake_ gobsmacked me (if I can use some slang of my own; properly, I hope).


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## Ravana (Aug 13, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> Can you record an audio version for me, complete with editorial comments?



Depends. How much are you offering for it?


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## Shockley (Aug 13, 2012)

It's important to remember that Joyce wrote through dictation, and the gentleman he dictated to had hearing as bad as Joyce's eyes. 

 That's why there are points of Finnegans Wake where it seems as though a second or third or even a fourth conversation is occurring - they are. There are several instances that we know of where someone entered the room, was speaking to Joyce, and the conversation found its way into the dictated notes. Joyce kept a number of them in the piece, thinking they added a more natural flow.


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## Reaver (Aug 20, 2012)

Anything by Dr. Seuss.


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## Zero Angel (Aug 20, 2012)

Wow, I haven't heard of 9 of these -_-

And I've only read portions of the Faerie Queen that were assigned in my "Arthurian Legend & Cultural Change" class way back in 2003 -_-


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## FatCat (Aug 26, 2012)

'The Idiot' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it hits a brick wall in the middle. Great concept, but it became a chore almost to read it. Never finished either, sadly my copy was destroyed. Note, don't keep books in the trunk of your car, especially if said trunk leaks in the rain.


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## Steerpike (Aug 26, 2012)

FatCat said:


> 'The Idiot' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it hits a brick wall in the middle. Great concept, but it became a chore almost to read it. Never finished either, sadly my copy was destroyed. Note, don't keep books in the trunk of your car, especially if said trunk leaks in the rain.



I haven't read that one, FatCat. It is on my list, however, as _The Brothers Karamazov_ is one of my all-time favorites.


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