Most difficult book you've read?

[SwimmingRock]

Does 'tried to read, but couldn't finish' count? That seems a logical conclusion, so I'll go with it: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A collection of Ezra Pound's poetry.

Just TRY reading some of that stuff. The man is a... well, he's an abstract thinker.

Dude, Pound is awesome. Both the Cantos and Personae have afforded me many days of pleasure. Sure, I don't always know what he's going on about (then again, neither did he), but it's a lot more fun to read than most authors.

 

[meowchef]

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy?s prose looks simple and readable at first glance, but it takes a while to get used to his rhythms, the density of his sentences, and his liberties with standard punctuation.

 

[Demonicdan]

Probably The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein, purely because of the amount of similarly named characters who you have to remember. However I love the lord of the rings trilogy and I am reading it again now.

 

[WindKnight]

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

Each chapter is written from the point of view of three brothers.

The first is mentally handicapped, and the sentences run on with little, if any punctuation.

The second is prone to drifting off into reverie without warning, so the scene shifts from sentence o sentence, making things hard to follow.

The third is 'normal', and the writing is normal, but is an intensely hateful and nasty individual.

A real headache inducer all around, but I must admit I did enjoy the final chapter that rounded things up.

 

[ajemas]

In my entire school history, I have always been able to read through and understand every book in its entirety. Even if I absolutely hated the book, I could at least appreciate the message and the literary style.
Except for Jane Eyre.
It is, to this day, even outside of school, the only book I have outright refused to finish reading. It is preachy, horribly written, and simply terrible. It's not even that it's hard to understand, it's that the book is just so God-awful that it simply defies description.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Ulysses by James Joyce. I have never been happier to finish a book

 

[Ashz0r]

Mikhail Bahktin - Discourse in the Novel or possibly A Clockwork Orange.

 

[Last of the Chinchillas]

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

If I had a dollar for every time that book almost made me vomit, it would still not be enough money to make up for how utterly depraved and disgusting it gets. I went through and marked out all the good bits just so I wouldn't have to read the entire book again.

 

[VelvetHorror]

Any Aleister Crowley book.

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

"Heart of Darkness". I actually fell asleep while reading once. AND I JUST KEPT ON READING.

Runner-Up goes to George RR Martin's "Storm of Swords" and "Feast for Crows", because, due to the fact that 2 of my friends had finished both books and kept making me leave the room (IN MY OWN GODDAMN HOUSE) so they could talk about stuff I didn't know yet, I got really tired of it and read both books in the space of about 2(consecutive) weeks. These are both 1000-page books.

Totally worth it.

 

[Kachiporra]

"Martín Fierro" by José Hernández is an awesome book but is written in "gauchesque" poetry and kinda hard to understand

 

[MasterChief892039]

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.

 

[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.