Most difficult book you've read?

[norwegian-guy]

The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel. That is some heavy sh/&!

 

[Mad1Cow]

Gonna have to say Lord of the Rings...seriously I'm glad they got rid of Tom Bombadil in the movie, to summon him to help you, you have to chant like 5 pages of rhyme and lymrics...HOW IS THIS HELPFUL!?!
The hobbit I have to say I got through quite easily though and I enjoyed a lot more...which is weird because many people would disagree...PHOOEY to them I say =P

 

[Leon Last Lord Shyle]

well not knowing whether you would consider them books considering they are actually "epic poems" but I am gonna have to go with homers Iliad and the Odyssey.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

'The Quantum Theory of Fields' by Steven Weinberg. Read it on a friend's dare and I still don't understand about 99% of the stuff in it. Did finish it though.

As for fiction, it's a tossup between 'War & Peace' by Tolstoy and 'Crime And Punishment' by Dostoyevski

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

"Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. It was the most disgusting, perverted and simply random thing i have ever read. I know that Burroughs was on drugs when he wrote it and it does show. Still... it had it's moments, even though i wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Well... then there was Twilight. It wasn't a difficult book but whenever i tried to read it i thought of all those things i would rather do than reading it. You know, like clean up my room, take a walk, dig my heart out with a spoon...

 

[Wrann]

Catch-22 its not that the wording is hard but that it changes in timeline and from person to person so fast and rapidly it can be hard to follow it.

 

[L4WLI3T]

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!

Damn you! stop ninja-ing me DX Im currently reading it right now. i can't read it for too long or else i get confused thanks to the eastern-european words.

 

[Saippua]

Roadside picnic was really confusing and I've ever managed to finish lord of the rings.

 

[Toriver]

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.

I tried 3 times between 19 and 23. I got stuck once at Tom Bombadil and once at Rivendell. Those chapters are just sooooo dull! However, on the third attempt I started again and once past Rivendell, I loved every minute of the rest.

Precisely. It took me two attempts to get through it myself. The first time I got stuck at Rivendell too. But then on my second try it just opened up and now it is my favorite book (series) of all time.

As for difficult books...
A lot of the books I had to read for my political theory class would be in the list. Aristotle's Politics and Hobbes' Leviathan are two that particularly stand out to me. I haven't finished it yet, but I am currently reading through the Confessions of St. Augustine, and it's also proving to be a challenge. But I'm more than halfway through, so I should be able to trudge on to the end eventually. I also read an English translation of the first third of the Tale of Genji, and the language used took a lot of getting used to. Not only that, but the original author, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, filled the book with references and allusions to ancient Chinese poetry, because such allusions and references were the common speech and writing conventions in the Heian-period Japanese emperors' court. It would be like a guy from 500 years in the future digging up old copies of Family Guy and trying to watch them. Luckily, the translator provided the original lines from the poems being referenced so we could at least make some attempt at the implications in the allusions. It wasn't so bad once I caught on to it, but after that, I really have no desire to dig up a translation of the rest of it, though.

 

[CJMacM]

Manifold Space. It was a complicated sci-fi book that was pretty good but way too much for my 11-year-old mind to handle. My dad did not know how to pick out good chapter books for kids.

 

[Meestor Pickle]

Battlefield Earth; terribly boring but I wanted to know what happened in the end where it got good, for the last 100 pages or so. Gah

 

[Lieju]

Althalus by David Eddings. I don't think that was hard the same way you mean. I got so bored of it I only managed to read it through with pure stubborness.

Also I don't think I've ever managed to read VALIS, by Philip. K. Dick, all the way through. He is one of my favourite authors, but I don't know, that book kinda.. it bothers me.

I read and enjoy a lot of books most people would find boring, I guess. Kalevala, Edda, Bible, Odyssey. But I enjoy reading them. I've read those kinds of books ever since I was kid because it was, and is, fun for me. I like studying mythologies and stories of old cultures.
I enjoy reading Mika Waltari or Dostojevski or other classics.

A book doesn't have to be difficult or boring to be good and important.

Bible. This is repulsive and so ridiculously violent that it would fail the first part of the "Miller test" (the average Person would find this material to be offensive) if there weren't so many christians out there who like this book and therefore don't find it to be offensive.

Most of those people haven't actually read the book, or interpret it all in very odd ways.
I read the bible first time when I was 8. I enjoyed the old testament for the adventure and the stories, but that's the kind of thing I liked reading. I don't mean to say I agreed with the "heroes" but I liked the stories.

But I was quite shocked when I learned there actually were people who believed that stuff was real.

 

[Johnmw]

Anything by the Marquis de Sade.... more for subject matter than style.

Bible. This is repulsive and so ridiculously violent that it would fail the first part of the "Miller test" (the average Person would find this material to be offensive) if there weren't so many christians out there who like this book and therefore don't find it to be offensive.

Most of those people haven't actually read the book, or interpret it all in very odd ways.
I read the bible first time when I was 8. I enjoyed the old testament for the adventure and the stories, but that's the kind of thing I liked reading. I don't mean to say I agreed with the "heroes" but I liked the stories.

But I was quite shocked when I learned there actually were people who believed that stuff was real.

The book of Job has some especially disgusting parts, yay for gang rape...apparently...

 

[Scarim Coral]

Reading any Shakespeare books without looking up the info or someone who knows it telling what it is about can be hard.

 

[cerealnmuffin]

House of Leaves would probably be the most difficult thing I've ever read.

It's a book about someone reading a book about someone analyzing a movie that doesn't exist. That coupled with the footnotes referring to another footnote referring to a part of the appendix that doesn't exist.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVED reading that book, and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone who likes getting that uncomfortable chill you get when you think someone's watching you.

It was just a bit of a mess trying to sort out which way to hold the book to read that specific one footnote (turns out it was mirrored.)

I loooooved House of Leaves. It is one of my favorites. Have you read his followup 'Only Revolutions'? That book makes House of Leaves seem like Dr. Suess in difficulty.

'Only Revoultions' features two different tales written in stanza poem form, but to read the other tale you have to literally flip the book over. The thing is you don't understand anything that is going on UNLESS you read some from each section, flipping the book back and forth etc etc. (It is recommended every 7 pages). To complicate matters worse, the two stories are very very similar but each one has a piece to understand what the other was talking about. I read the entire book and still have a very shaky handle on what was going on.... and for me House of Leaves wasn't terribly hard.

And a sidenote, for those of you who have read House of Leaves, give a listen to Poe's CD Haunted, she created this great concept album inspired by HoL. I think she and the author were married or something at the time.

 

[katsumoto03]

Twilight. I was reading it to prove a point and I couldn't finish it. The main character's bitching about how terrible her life is made me have to read in in five page bursts over months.

 

[MagicMouse]

I read Pride and Prejudice in my High School Brit Lit class.

Bleh.

Oh, and I also threw "The Heart of Darkness" into a wall it was so bad.

 

[cerealnmuffin]

I read Pride and Prejudice in my High School Brit Lit class.

Bleh.

Oh, and I also threw "The Heart of Darkness" into a wall it was so bad.

=( I really liked Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, hehehe guess I'm a weird one. Now I do agree with Jane Austen stuff, sooo boring and I'm supposed to be the target audience =P.

I should add ummm a couple with 'Only Revolutions'. The runner ups are 'Almost Transparent Blue' by an amazing Japanese author Ryu Murakami (Japanese version of Chuck Palahniuk). The book is sooooo pointless; it's about characters who fret away their twenties on illegal substances and go nowhere... which is the point of the book... but I don't need to read a few hundred pages for that. Now his other book Coin Locker Babies was awesome.

Also 'Gravity's Rainbow'... really messed up stuff in that book that I would get banned for mentioning. Anyone who has read that would shudder at the mention of General (or was it Colonel) Pudding.

 

[Batfred]

I also read an English translation of the first third of the Tale of Genji, and the language used took a lot of getting used to. Not only that, but the original author, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, filled the book with references and allusions to ancient Chinese poetry, because such allusions and references were the common speech and writing conventions in the Heian-period Japanese emperors' court. It would be like a guy from 500 years in the future digging up old copies of Family Guy and trying to watch them. Luckily, the translator provided the original lines from the poems being referenced so we could at least make some attempt at the implications in the allusions. It wasn't so bad once I caught on to it, but after that, I really have no desire to dig up a translation of the rest of it, though.

Speaking of translations, Monkey from the original Mandarin can be hard going at times. A good read though if you battle through it.

Only a slightly related tangent, another classic is 1984. However to fully enjoy it you need to read 20 pages of appendices on the change and use of language. DULL!! Nearly put me off before I had even started.

 

[dday4you]

hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. the begining is like:
ughh