Most difficult book you've read?

[vingtcinq]

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell.
It is very beautiful, yes, but I just couldn't grasp what was happening or who was who. I found myself thinking, 'What? There's a bajillion more pages of this?' a few pages in.
Hopefully I can pick it up later..

 

[Erja_Perttu]

Heart of Darkness. It was only 70 pages, but I had to read it 3 times to gleam all the subtle messages and plot threads to a degree high enough to write a paper.

Man, I did a paper on that book too, it ended up as half my grade in college. It's a damn great novel though, well worth the hard read.

OT: the Gormenghast trilogy, honestly, I couldn't get past page 17, when it was still describing the dust on the floor of the room it had been describing for 17 pages. Bah!

 

[ChocoFace]

War And Peace? There's just so much stuff that could be left out.
Also a book about psychology i have that i try to read sometimes.

 

[Ca3zar416]

Would have to be Alice in Wonderland for me. I just felt so trippy every time I attempted to pick the thing up it took me a couple of times to actually sit myself down and read it.

 

[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.

I suspected as much, recently, when I watched the film The Last Station, about the last years of the life of Leo Tolstoy.

But do you agree that it's a very intricate piece of writing that belongs in a topic like this?

Probably it does.

 

[Koroviev]

The Hunger Games.
God is it boring.

I mean honestly, a book about teenagers killing each other for sport in the post apocalypse, and the killing part doesn't even start until page 170 something. And even then the main character is a little wimp and runs away.
Plus, it's just so... dull.

It sounds like a shameless ripoff of Battle Royale.

 

[Klitch]

The Hunger Games.
God is it boring.

I mean honestly, a book about teenagers killing each other for sport in the post apocalypse, and the killing part doesn't even start until page 170 something. And even then the main character is a little wimp and runs away.
Plus, it's just so... dull.

I just read all three books of the that trilogy last week and thoroughly enjoyed them. I thought the setting was interesting and the concept of mixing together post-apocalyptic political struggles with a coming-of-age story was a rather novel approach. The writing style was pretty simple and engaging, despite the fact that the protagonist was annoying at times. To be honest my biggest problem with those books was that they were a little shallow in terms of plot, so you saying that The Hunger Games is the most difficult book you've ever read blows my mind.

By the way, how is it wimpy for a teenage girl to hide from a group of thuggish teenagers equipped with swords, axes, and bows that are intent on killing her in the most brutal method possible? I'd call that pragmatic and intelligent, not wimpy.

 

[Lazy Kitty]

Most difficult book I've read?
I've yet to read a book which I'd classify as difficult.

 

[Bravo 21]

well, im midway through Paradise Lost by Milton, and I have to say, it kind reminds me of when I used to play Runescape, some fun stuff, and a fair amount of grinding, just because well, no Quotation Marks, really long sentences and old english, just a lot of stuff

 

[Blemontea]

I had to read the original Last of the Mohicans in 9th grade... I wish to burn every copy i see for the troubles it caused me...

 

[wammnebu]

The Incoherence of the Philosophers by Al-Ghazali

philosophy so dense its a mental singularity, even Plato looks like Stephanie Meyer compared to this guy...interestingly its about how philosophy doesnt make sense,

no debates there, Mr Algazul

 

[littlewisp]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson for me just. . .I loved it to death, but I could only handle it in small doses. The plot wasn't that convoluted, the writing style was easy to follow. It was a thick book, yes, but for some reason I just could not steamroll through it. It makes me feel stupid.

 

[SturmDolch]

Non-Fiction: The weird database textbook I got for my database course. It was also my only source of information outside of the internet, since my 70 year old Asian prof had the worst accent I've ever heard. And I hang out with a few Asians. One of them didn't get into my University because he didn't speak English well enough, yet it was better than my profs.

Anyways, the book had terrible grammar, was loaded with useless information, and most sections were introductions to the next section. And not in a good way.

Fiction: The Catcher in the Rye was hard. I couldn't get past the first three pages. I really don't like books written in accents. Maybe I could get it if I tried again, but I'd rather read to enjoy a book, not just to say I read it.

 

[WolfThomas]

Probably the Reavers by George Macdonald Fraser. I love most of his work. But it's a comedy of sorts set in Elizabethan England, it's filled with old pop culture references and English specific jokes, character are often written phoenetically and it's bordering on Monty Python-esque ridiculous-ness at times. I enjoyed some parts but I eventually had to quite as I kept getting bored as I didn't understand stuff and found some stuff hard to follow.

That and a non-fiction book on infectious diseases in the 20th century. The first half was good reading about ebola and other stuff. But when it got to HIV/AIDS it got really tedious, it was written chronologically so a lot of early chapters was musing on what it could be and the whole politics of it got dragged out for a long time. I quit when they were still calling it GRID (Gay related immune disorder or something).

 

[Mr.Mattress]

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...

Gosh, you Ninja's me! Also, I almost got into the book when he started breaking down until he told Phoebe that he wanted to be a "Catcher in the Rye"... He seriously just wanted to be a baseball player in a Rye field?!!!! WHAT THE F*** MAN!!!! WHAT THE F***?!!!!

Worst. Title Drop. Ever.

 

[hazabaza1]

The Hunger Games.
God is it boring.

I mean honestly, a book about teenagers killing each other for sport in the post apocalypse, and the killing part doesn't even start until page 170 something. And even then the main character is a little wimp and runs away.
Plus, it's just so... dull.

I just read all three books of the that trilogy last week and thoroughly enjoyed them. I thought the setting was interesting and the concept of mixing together post-apocalyptic political struggles with a coming-of-age story was a rather novel approach. The writing style was pretty simple and engaging, despite the fact that the protagonist was annoying at times. To be honest my biggest problem with those books was that they were a little shallow in terms of plot, so you saying that The Hunger Games is the most difficult book you've ever read blows my mind.

By the way, how is it wimpy for a teenage girl to hide from a group of thuggish teenagers equipped with swords, axes, and bows that are intent on killing her in the most brutal method possible? I'd call that pragmatic and intelligent, not wimpy.

Okay, for one, I meant it difficult as in bad. I've read A Brave New World, so I'm not thick or anything.

Second, that was a joke, and while I've only just got to the bit where she hides in the tree, she doesn't really seem like she's going to do anything. Just expectations.
Plus, that bitching about Peeta is just... gwargh.

 

[I Max95]

Macbeth, its shakesperre its supposed to be difficult

though i feel its will soon be surpassed by the Piano lesson another play by...wel i forgot his name but nevertheless its god awful right now to me i wish i could stop reading but unfortunatly im being forced to read it
is it racist that the worst part of the play to me is having to read the characters' annoying drawl (for those who dont know its about an african american family in pitzburgh in the early 1900s)

 

[ScourgeOfHell]

War and Peace, most definitely. part of my brain hemorrhage may have resulted from the ridiculous size of the thing, and the other part, from my dogged determination to finish the book, despite having absolutely no idea, what was going on.

 

[Mogule]

The Hungry Caterpillar.

The result? I've never read another non-necessary book. Ahh...so much extra time to do other things.

 

[Judgmentalist]

'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.

...

I'm sorry, you have to turn the book around?

Why does that idea sound so cool in theory, yet I feel as if there's this lurking monster hiding directly behind it, waiting for me to fall into its trap? It sounds like a cave mimic, presenting a front of adventure and interest with the latent threat of a bone-crunching death once you commit.

All in all, it sounds fun. Like waxing.