Most difficult book you've read?

[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.

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

I've never been able to finish 'The Amber Spyglass', regrettably, as I found it a difficult read. I was a few years younger at the time, though. Another difficult one was 'The Children of Hurin', which I've also yet to finish.

 

[SckizoBoy]

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

Oh dear Lord... you managed that? I just randomly pick it up (or used to) to read bits and pieces when I'm in the mood for something hardcore about Rome. I find it OK for about a few paragraphs, and then it's heavy going.

My old man's a chemist, so he taped over the word 'Roman' with 'poison' on the spine of Vol 2.

Well of Echoes/Song of Tears saga by Ian Irvine. It's not hard to read... it's just soul destroying stuff. I know it's a cliche for the hero to lose until the last chapter and then win in a blaze of glory, but this series has left me crying for the pain to stop...

 

[Spacelord]

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.

Very much this.

 

[PleaseDeleteMe]

Sophie's world

 

[E-Penguin]

The Silmarillion
that is all.
Seriously odd structure.

I tried to read it trough an entire summer. It was the heaviest read I've ever done. I did not manage to finish it.

 

[Axolotl]

I've read quite a few of the books mentioned in this thread, Imanaged to read Atlas Shrugged in under a week, I've read Dante's Infeno and I've read Kafka.

But they're a light breeze compared to the hardest baook I've eer read. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. My God is that a hard book to read/understand, I was only able to make it past the introduction because I'd spent three years studying ancient Greek.