Most difficult book you've read?

[Klumpfot]

Both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita were pretty hard to read. The Bible moreso.

Oh, and The Room by Hubert Selby Jr (of Requiem for a Dream fame). It's about a not particularly intelligent person's dreams of petty revenge, as written by that person inside a prison cell. Complete with misspelled words everywhere. It's fairly effective at times, but man is it hard to read.

 

[Extragorey]

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The general plot is easy enough to follow, but sometimes you really wonder what the hell is going on.

 

[nothingdeletemeplease]

Mine would be Crime & Punishment or The Iliad...

But a lot of Stephen King novels are difficult because he can drone on and on and on.

 

[WinterOrbit]

Good lord, Paradise Lost. The poem has a few engaging philosophical ideas and some pretty language (on the rare occasion Milton showed restraint), but the storytelling is awful. Milton does not show enough insight or depth of thought to make this slog worth it. /rant

Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, is dense but totally worth it.

Little, Big by John Crowley falls somewhere in between for me. Every time I was about give up on the book, Crowley would write something so astonishing that I had to keep going. I ended up really angry at him for that. I also still feel like I don't understand half of it.

 

[qeinar]

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.

Allusions makes reading old books a lot harder. : p Also a lot of literature seem to like naming places and then just expect you to know where that was at the time and that you were familiar with that area. o.o'

 

[TheFPSisDead]

the golem by gustav meyrink... i had to read it for a jewish literature and mysticism class in college and it was a complete mindfuck.

 

[qeinar]

Pretty much anything that was originally written in Russian prior to 1989, any competent translation of the original Don Quixote, and Steinbeck's The Red Pony.

Hmm i read DOn quixote, didn't find it that hard to read. Enjoyed the story, it's kinda funny. ^^ i don't really know russian, but it's kinda safe to say that any book written in a language you can't understand is hard.. : p

Also i don't really find the tolkien books hard to read, but it might have to do with me reading trough them in 1 sitting, so i don't have to remember names and such a day later when i get back to the story.. ^^

 

[Reece Stevens]

the oxford standard dictionary

 

[Azaraxzealot]

The Count of Monte Cristo...

starts slow (its intro is longer than most novels these days), but the other 1200 pages are just gushing with pure awesome revengeness!

 

[TheFPSisDead]

Any Aleister Crowley book.

Totally agree. When I read crowley i feel like i am absorbing nothing, not to mention that his philosophies always strike me as complete bullshit. But that's probably because i don't understand.

 

[Koroviev]

"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.

With regard to The Master and Margarita, I think it depends on the translation you're reading. The Ginsburg translation is rather clunky and uneven, whereas the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation is much more accessible.

Edit: I really want to read Solaris. I think we may have similar taste in books.

 

[Koroviev]

Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory and just about anything by Borges (though I think he is more accessible than Nabokov in many cases).

 

[MasterOfWorlds]

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

All four volumes.

It's not so bad once you get used to the language, just have a dictionary handy, because there are words in there that we don't really use anymore. XD

 

[Koroviev]

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.

I think the grievous lack of paragraph breaks results in an illusion of difficulty. I've found that it's easier to keep track of what's going on in the long paragraphs if I force myself to read a little faster than usual.

 

[Beldaros]

A brief history of time.
Homer's Oddyssey, Illiad.
Many greek tragedies.
Wheel of time series by Robert Jordan, (well I'm still reading it) In case you don't know it is a series of thirteen books with size 8 writing, the smallest is nearly 700 pages long, and it's an extended LOTR
The LOTR.
The Hobbit (Not hard, just painful to read.)
Many many more.

 

[Koroviev]

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

With regard to your comments on War and Peace, that seems like a fairly common issue for a lot of people. My advice is for people to familiarize themselves with Russian names a bit before attempting the major works. Understanding the structure a little better (first name + patrynomic (distinct from a middle name) + last name) goes a long way in breaking down the confusion. People should also realize that any given character will be referred to in several different ways depending on the aforementioned structure. For example, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov could be referred to as Rodia (affectionate form; depending on the given first name, there can be more than ten different variations), Rodion Romanovitch, Raskolnikov (which Dostoevsky favors), etc.

 

[Quaxar]

I'd say Plato's Politeia just because it's damn complex philosophical stuff mixed with anchient greek expressions and habits.
It's not a bad read but I still haven't managed to be motivated enough to get past the third book yet.

 

[Koroviev]

I consider myself to be good at reading, but Franz Kafka is just torturous. I can't remember which book of his I read (something about a trial and a woman with webbed hands), but I remember finishing it and feeling like perhaps I hadn't read anything at all considering I didn't understand a single bit of it.

As much as I love Kafka, I can't defend his books for ease of reading. As I've said of Dostoevsky, I think much of the perceived difficulty lies in the fact that paragraph breaks are used much too sparingly. It's like shoving a whole sandwich in your mouth: sure, you can do it, but wouldn't it be significantly more enjoyable if you took it in bites? I'm a fan of Kafka, but I'd much more readily recommend his short stories (of which there are several) than his novels.

 

[Ailia]

Funny, I'm hacking through Atlas Shrugged for the second time on account of the trailer...

I'd have to say the first half of To Kill of Mockingbird. I loved the end to bits but the beginning was plain torturous at times.
And LotR, but they've been mentioned a few times already.

 

[Blindswordmaster]

Toss up between The Scarlet Letter and Dante's Inferno. Nathaniel Hawthorne has fucking ADD.