Most difficult book you've read?

[Fanitullen]

The Bible. Long like you wouldn't believe, and most of it was, to be honest, quite boring.

Seriously, check out the tabernacle chapters. Page after page after page describing how to set up a tent.

 

[Judgmentalist]

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

I know this pain. I've been attempting to finish Anna Karenina since 1997. I get a little bit further every time, though...

 

[The Rockerfly]

Lord of The Rings. I was about 15 and I thought, "the films were good, chances are the book is even better"
I have never read such a drawn out book, constantly talking about the scenery. yes Tolkin I get it, you want to set a scene but you could leave a little bit to the imagination

 

[War Pony]

There's something about Catch-22 that makes it difficult for me to read. I've tried four times now but I keep putting it down, forgetting about it, finding it later and completely forgetting about where I left off. I don't know what it is about the book, but I just can't finish it.

Also, Shakespeare's butchery of English starts reading like a second language after too much of it, making anything of his start to become tedious after a while.

 

[Mallefunction]

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Clockwork Orange.

Just trying to understand the slang in both books is impossible...god DAMN!

 

[jawakiller]

Dante's Inferno then I realized I was reading it in latin... The second hardest is probably Machiavelli's The Prince. Talk about some deep reading. The third is easily Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Holy fuck, I got like three pages in and I was done. Almost as bad as the movie. And I didn't finish that either.

 

[Layz92]

A Clockwork Orange.

Just trying to understand the slang in both books is impossible...god DAMN!

Yeah I did take some getting used to. On a side note did you read the American (I think) 20 chapter one or the full 21 chapter version? I prefer the complete version personally.

Anyway, I would agree with The Lord Of The Rings, geez that's a hard slog on the history of a rock that is irrelevant to the story at hand. My true vote however would go to the Deathgate Cycle by Margarette Weis. An ocean of detail that is actually pretty impressive and interesting but damn hard to grind all the way through.

 

[Jark212]

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. I need to read this book for school some odd years ago and I included in my summery paper half a page of why I did not like this novel...

But everyone is entitled to their own opinions...

 

[newuseforvintage]

Oh, god, the unabridged Dorian Grey!! That book is a nightmare, he'll spend chapters talking about the 'subtle shine of the light from the dew of the grass'.

 

[Purple Shrimp]

The Silmarillion ugh

 

[Anarchemitis]

The Book of Ezekiel in the Bible.
Man, he is just unrelenting. No wonder Jerusalem got it worse than Sodom in the 6th century BC.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

Lord of the rings not for complicated language but for sheer overuse of adjectives.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

What...the fuck. The first Dune was an enjoyable challenge, required some pondering to figure some of the messages out, but the next two, especially Dune Messiah was just one big ball o' esotheric what-the-fuck-ery. I'll probably have to read it 2 or 3 more times to properly understand it.

It doesn't help either that English isn't my first language. Children of Dune gave us the most hilarious word for an erection though; beastswelling. Who thought it was a good idea to let a 9 year old boy, despite having a million-year-old mind, have an erection and orgasm anyway? That shit was gross...

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.

Long, yeah, but I didn't find it very difficult to understand or read. I found it quite easy to understand what Rand tried to tell us, even if she took ages to do so. Apparently it's not even nearly as drawn out as Atlas Shrugged.

 

[Elexia]

"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner. I swear it gave me brain damage as well as psychological trauma.

It is entirely written in free-association-style writing, very little if any punctuation and entirely in thick Southern U.S. drawl.

Being an Australian, trying to get it to make sense in my head (and tying to read it while envisioning the accent) was hell.

Worst part was when this boy drills a hole into a makeshift coffin his mother's sealed into (he wants her to breathe) and drills right into his decomposing mother's head.

And an entire chapter consists of the words "my mother is a fish", which pretty much sums it up.

 

[Zuljeet]

"Lolita"... I can't get past the fact that the protagonist is essentially raping a child throughout the story.

 

[lapsed_pacifist]

Geoff Chaucer. That's some tough reading.

 

[espada1311]

i dont know, ive only started reading it, but i must say, "A Clockwork Orange" is really difficult to undrstand with the vocabulary change maybe im just not used to it

 

[qeinar]

"Mordet på maskinbygger rolfsen" by Maurits Hansen.

not a overly long book, but the language in that book was kinda hard to follow.. especially since i had to look up al the german, french and latin words he used.

it's on of the first crime stories ever written by the way, it was written before "Murders in rue morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe. (I like Poe's story better though )

The reason the book was hard was just the old language used in it i guess. if i were to pick up a newer translated version of the book it would probably have been a lot easier. : p

Also noticed some people were putting forth bad books here, and well i have one i nearly gave up on (would have if the other ones were not really good books..) and that is "The land of mist" by sir arthur conan doyle. The professor challenger stories were so great, then i picked "the land of mist" up and oh my god, it was bad. o.o' It kinda estroyed the character for me when I read the last 2 professor challenger stories: "the day the world screamed" and "The disintegration machine", which both were pretty awesome.

 

[Judgmentalist]

i dont know, ive only started reading it, but i must say, "A Clockwork Orange" is really difficult to undrstand with the vocabulary change maybe im just not used to it

No, no. I think pretty much anyone who's tried to read it feels that way. It's overgrown so badly with Russian-esque lexicon that it flows, as a favourite critic put it, "like a river of bricks". Exceedingly hard to follow only because of that.