Most difficult book you've read?

[VulakAerr]

I found The Iliad pretty difficult to get through. The meter used in it makes the actual sentences kind of awkward and unwieldy.

The Silmarillion was also very difficult, mostly because of the sheer number of words in it.

I'm slightly surprised to see people struggling with The Lord of the Rings. It's really a very easy book and almost uniformly well-written.

Additionally, Shakespeare did not mangle the English language. It was actually he who helped create it. He has contributed more vocabulary to the English language than any other one person in history.

 

[ReservoirAngel]

"No Country For Old Men" ...my GOD was that a task and a fucking half.

Also "The Lord of the Rings", just because of the language and the vaguely rambling quality to its prose.

Oh, and you can't go wrong with non-fiction to bog you down: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution."

 

[Athol]

Its gotta be the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

 

[sniddy_v1legacy]

Steven Donaldson - Lord Fouls Bane

And the entire series after that....I think partly I picked it up first time a little too young, at around 13 and also the depth of the material and the protagonist's action and reasoning's...One of the few books I physically had to put down and say no....I'm not going on with this yet

Still one of the best things I've read currently working my way through it again books 1 - 9 as I just got 9....but I had to work my way up to it via Raymond E Fiest's latest 2, the entire wheel of time, oh and Game of Thrones....it's not the kinda series you plunge into after not heavily reading for 6 months or so

 

[Antwerp Caveman]

War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy
Nitpick: The first few pages has you learn a lot of names.

Also: Dante's Divine Comedy.

Best/hardest book I finished:
God is not Great. How Religion Poisons everything. By Christopher Hitchens

 

[Gaiseric]

The Divine Comedy. The wording was very odd.

 

[Woem]

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Rafael Núñez, a psychologist.

 

[Woem]

The Divine Comedy. The wording was very odd.

That really depends on the translation. The one by Henry Francis Cary is the oldest (and it's the one you'll find online, for free) but it's absolutely horrible and the Christian Church took this translation to enter some motivations of their own in the story. Not good.

 

[Gaiseric]

The Divine Comedy. The wording was very odd.

That really depends on the translation. The one by Henry Francis Cary is the oldest (and it's the one you'll find online, for free) but it's absolutely horrible and the Christian Church took this translation to enter some motivations of their own in the story. Not good.

My copy was translated by Allen Mandelbaum.

 

[Gunsang]

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Longfellow translation). And...

Catcher in the Rye...

I hated the main character because he was a elitist brat who was masquerading as as a deep realistic character with complex thoughts and emotions when he was just a total douche, and he was nearly impossible for me to connect with on any level.

this. For those reasons. I've gotten to page 30. I want to finish this book, but every page is excruciating. I can't stand that kid.

 

[infohippie]

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It was just so mind-numbingly tedious. The most boring, godawful book I've ever read.

 

[octafish]

I've read Gravity's Rainbow and I loved it. It had some troublesome passages but it was very rewarding. Ulysses on the other hand, I haven't read it all only sections. Damn you Leopold Bloom!

 

[thewinner194]

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. That man does not know how to finish a sentence.

 

[Blitzwarp]

The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. I read it a few years back when the LOST creators mentioned it had inspired some parts of the show. It's an amazing book, but damn is it hard to read.

 

[elvor0]

I dunno, I've never had any books that i've found difficult to read, I've always loved reading and had a fairly wide lexicon, the only book that's difficult to read would clockwork orange, and that's only because you have to keep flicking back and forth between the page and the slang glossary..ugh.

On LOTR, I read it when I was 9, and it wasn't too difficult, but thinking back on it now, it was in DIRE need of an editor, christ tolken can talk alot but never actually say anything.

 

[ImpofthePerverse]

A English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. At first it's not so bad, but in the translation I read each character had at least 2 or 3 different names (usually a common mans name, a family name and a respected name) which when a single character could be refereed to by all three names on one page made it rather difficult.