Most difficult book you've read?

[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

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

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...

Same here with the Tolstoy. War and Peace was a damn struggle to finish, it was enjoyable in places but damn was it long and it kept jumping around all over the place making in very difficult to keep up with what was going on. That said I actually enjoy Dostoyevsky's books.

 

[neoontime]

David Copperfield. It was long, I didn't quite understand it at all times, kind of boring, and I had to read it 5 hours per day of it for my spring break in order to catch up on my reading assignment.

 

[Fightgarr]

Very honestly, I found Mervyn's Peak's Ghormenghast incredibly dense and difficult to read. I would read for an hour and get through 10 pages if I was lucky.

 

[CoL0sS]

The name of the rose by Umberto Eco, especially those Latin expressions and paragraphs. Never studied the language. Also it was poorly translated.

 

[FangShadow]

Jane Eyre.

Some call it a literary classic. I call it a pretentious, overwritten chore with a boring story to match.

I'm with you. I had to read Jane Eyre for my honors class. I came close to commiting seppuku so many times just to get away from it. Never again...NEVER AGAIN.

 

[Fetzenfisch]

Immanuel Kant; Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

The Horror, ohh the Horror. One sentence= 53lines, 12 commas. No sense to be found.
It was back in school in philosophy class. Still my favourite subject , but damn it was tough stuff for teens.

 

[Zhadramekel]

'Labyrinth' by Kate Mosse.
It's a really good book but the constant switching between two different perspectives and the whole load of French words in it make it a bit difficult.

 

[darkman80723]

Probably War and Peace. Has to read it for my Russian Literature class back in college.