Most difficult book you've read?

[Judgmentalist]

After being sent a mind-numbing trailer for the Atlas Shrugged movie, I got to pondering long, difficult, and long and difficult books. What's the most difficult one you've ever read, and what made it that way to you?

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt gets my vote. Too many words!

 

[theonlyblaze2]

The Talisman by Stephen King. My dad wanted me to read the book, but I kept putting it down for months at a time. He eventually forced me to finish it, and I gotta say, it was worth it.

 

[knhirt]

The Lord of the Rings just trudged on, and on, and on.
It was a difficult read at the time, when I was eleven or twelve years old.

 

[Volkov]

"The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. It probably would not be too interesting to someone from the States though, simply because it requires some familiarity with the history of early USSR.

A difficult book that you may find interesting though... Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. One of the greatest (if not THE greatest) science fiction works of all time, but at the same time a complete mindfuck. Highly recommend.

 

[Magners]

Ghostwritten, multiple plot threads all going at once there are a ton of characters to keep track of and the writer's style is hard to keep up with at the best of times

 

[PayneTrayne]

Uhm, a few too many actually, but most specifically any kind of literary theory book. Hundreds of pages.

Literary Criticism: Past to Present. Introduction to Rhetoric.

Gah!

 

[Nova Helix]

The Sound and the Fury.

There are college classes dedicated to that book. It has metaphors and references out the ass and jumps around like an ADD kid on a mountain of sugar.

Damn good book though.

 

[Danish rage]

The Stranger by Albert Camu. What a headscrewer.

 

[Crudler]

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.
Go on, you just try and read it. It's not that it's a difficult book, it's that it's a bloody difficult book. The language you can just about get past but it's about a game where the rules of the game aren't completely clear.

 

[Chatato]

Oliver Twist not a hard or necessarily big book it's just for some reason whenever i go to read it I always stop halfway through even though I'll be thoroughly enjoying it at the time.

 

[darth.pixie]

Pretty much anything Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy took some getting used to. It's a very complex writing style.

I also hated reading Divine Comedy in the original italian. Had to for school though.

 

[Yassen]

I'd say A clockwork Orange. The author quite literally created his own slang that he used in almost every sentence. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about for a while (malchick? What the fuck is that?) But once you pick it up by the context then it becomes a bit easier, if you can get that far. Good story though.

If you're wondering, malchick means "male-chick", essentially "a guy". Needlessly complicated slang for the win!

 

[mParadox]

The Lord of the Rings just trudged on, and on, and on.
It was a difficult read at the time, when I was eleven or twelve years old.

Me too! =D *hi five* But it was a damn damn damn good book. Even though I had to reread a few pages to get where I am. =P

 

[Hashime]

Heart of Darkness. It was only 70 pages, but I had to read it 3 times to gleam all the subtle messages and plot threads to a degree high enough to write a paper.

 

[Spaec]

The Fountainhead springs to mind as a difficult book in being 'intelligent' but as 'intelligent' books go it was pretty straightforward. Plus, it kept me interested nearly all the way through.
But I think ultimately it would have to be Thérèse Raquin, despite it being really short. It has a pretentiously dark and dreary storyline told in the most arduous fashion imaginable.

 

[Korenith]

Ulysses by James Joyce. I ended up rereading just about every passage and even then I'm sure I missed so much. Apparently Finnegan's Wake is even more impossible but I might just leave that one for now...

 

[Hader]

It was hard getting through The Fountainhead. I couldn't stand it...

Damn you Ayn Rand.

 

[MrNickster]

Jane Eyre.

Some call it a literary classic. I call it a pretentious, overwritten chore with a boring story to match.

 

[Bobbity]

Ulysses, and Finnegan's wake. The author was trying to be as obtuse as possible, and it was difficult to glean any actual happenings from the jumble of words.