The Sword and Laser discussion

What is the most difficult book you have read?

For me the lord of the rings I had to re-read some pages it was very hard to keep up specially when English was my second language.

what about you?

The Bible.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche for fiction (well kinda)
and The Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard for non-fiction
still not sure i understood what the heck either of them was trying to convey.

now I remember Dante is reaaaaaallyyy hard to understand

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Very dry and wordy book

I wasn't able to finish Ulysses by James Joyce, but it's certainly the most difficult book I have attempted to read.
As far as books I have in fact finished, probably A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also by Joyce. I quite liked it, though.

Dhalgren

Man this was a piece of poop

In the fiction realm I'm gonna have to say Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I know it's supposed to be a grand book and all, and I rarely put a book down, but the way it's written, makes me fall asleep every single time I try.

I read some philosophy books that contained equations that illustrates logical thinking in order to pin down abstract concepts. That, I think is more difficult than a physics, chemistry or math book, because of the difficulty of capturing something that is nebulous. That is why, if you ever had a conversation with a philosophy major, you wonder what planet they came from. But the funny thing is, there is a method to their madness, which ultimately can be logical madness. If you disagree, you feel that the person is wrong, but you'll have a hard time fighting the logic of it. A good philosopher is a mathematician of abstract thinking.

As far as literature, House of Leaves is the most difficult so far. It contained a dual story, a Russian nesting doll of a story within a story, placed side by side, with copious footnotes, symbolism and references. Of course, it became my favorite literature. I'm currently reading Only Revolutions by the same author. Which is more difficult for me. I'm going at it at a snail's pace. Leaves, I finished within a week, contributed copiously to the discussion, and wrote a lengthy review.

Revolutions, I've started twice. First, I followed the publisher's recommended reading format, but that did not work for me to comprehend the material. I've discovered my own reading style which is helping me to absorb the material better. The problem is that history and the poetry format is my weak suit, but I'm adjusting to it. I'm enjoying reading each page, ignoring the upside down passage from the other lover, and looking up each historical references on the sidebar. I decided to finish one lover's tale before flipping the book over to finish the other lover's tale.

Amazon has a sample of what both books are like:

http://www.amazon.com/Only-Revolution...

http://www.amazon.com/House-Leaves-Ma...

Of course, I'm now a die hard fan and am looking forward to him spitting out a book a month soon.

Correction, Mark Z. Danielewski's 27 volume of The Familiar series will come out every 3 months.

http://pantheon.knopfdoubleday.com/20...

I tried to read both Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow, which is on the list of the top hardest books of all time. I only got to about page 10, and gave up, with too many words I could not comprehend.

Plato's The Republic is one of the hardest books I've ever read, luckily only had to read bits of it for my Philosophy class, but still complex.

Fiction wise I'd go with Paradise Lost, though once you understand what's going on its really good.

edit: I also really struggled and even (ashamed to say) lemmed The Silmarillion. I'll try it again at some point.

Consider Phlebas it was my first Iain M Banks book and it will be the last. I enjoyed it and glad it had a happy ending but i didnt enjoy the Culture idea or his style of writing.

@Kevin, take a look at chapter six of Finnegan's Wake and read it first. I'm still reading it because I love it, but one day I will get the courage to move on.

Ulysses, hands down. (I would say Finnegan's Wake but I've never managed to make it past the first 40 pages.)

Anathem was a challenge for the first 100 pages or so, but once I'd absorbed the language it zoomed along.

Alex wrote: "Steven Erikson. I loved it the whole way, but it was much harder than anything else I've tried."

I would have to agree at that.

Aloha wrote: " That is why, if you ever had a conversation with a philosophy major, you wonder what planet they came from."

Well you know, philosophy's just math sans rigor, sense, and practicality...

http://xkcd.com/1052/

And almost sadly, I'd say The Silmarillion, and only because I loved LOTR and the Hobbit, and I feel like I should have loved the story of Middle Earth as a whole. But that book was rough...

The Silmarillion. It took me three attempts to read it although I did try it at too young an age. My first attempt was when I finished The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 12 - that had taken me 3 years to finish - I gave up at the end of the first chapter. The second attempt, a few years later, I got about half way through. I attempted it for the third time having read LotR again a few years ago - after the first Peter Jackson film came out - and succeeded but it was hard going.

Another book I would say is The Children of the New Forest. I read it quite happily when I was 8 as I had been reading several books at that age that had been written in older English. But when I tried to reread it several years later I just couldn't get into it as I was no longer used to the style of language.

I had a bit of a hard time with Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. I think it was mostly because it was my first Discworld novel and I wasn't used to the no chapters layout of them

I just can't believe I read Peter F. Hamilton's whole Night's Dawn trilogy. I think on the last book I just wanted to get it done and wouldn't stop if I missed something.

Probably Adam Bede by George Eliot. I read it when I was pretty young (12?) and I forgot half of what was going on and I got confused as to who the characters were. The reason being a lot of them had similar sounding names.

Need to reread that one, methinks.

Sadly, it's all somewhat true.

Sky wrote: "Aloha wrote: " That is why, if you ever had a conversation with a philosophy major, you wonder what planet they came from."

Well you know, philosophy's just math sans rigor, sense, and practicalit..."

Canterbury Tales - it was written in middle English which at times felt like a foreign language.

Most difficult I read by choice would have to be the Faded Sun by CJ Cherryh simply because I found it so long and boring that I had to make a serious effort to not lem it.

The book that I had a hard time reading mostly because there didn't seem any characters I could connect to was Atlas Shrugged. I still haven't finished that book. Maybe I'll go back to it if I'm hospitalized for an extended period of time.

I also had a hard time reading The Great Gatsby. Another book I haven't finished. That was a book I was supposed to read in High School Senior English and never finished. I think it was the first and only English unit I ever failed in my scholarly career.

I have a hard time with unremorseful decadence and I have to have at least one character that I can relate to.

Anything from the super-descriptive Victorian era. (e.g. I don't care about the nature of the dimple on the sun faded side of the crack in the black oak door caused when her uncle, rear admiral Montgomery, slipped while inebriated trying to enter when she was five and...) Just open the dang door already.

The modern day version of that is anything by Richard Powers. (albeit, The Gold Bug Variations was actually pretty good. It's the other stuff.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell took me about four months to read...which was ridiculous. I ended up liking the end of it, but I had to work way too hard to get there.

I'm going through making notes of the "hard" books. I'm in my difficult book phase. I must be getting bored with reading. I want more of a challenge.

I can't think of just one. In my Complexity Theory classes I read some enormous tomes that used poor language to combine mathematics, chemistry, physics and too many theories that they had tentative grips upon. Just figuring out what they got wrong took entire nights of reading. So that could easily be it.

As far as fiction, I don't even know what would count as "hard" at this stage in my life. Challenging fiction, like Pynchon and House of Leaves, is fun to grapple with. Meanwhile I wouldn't call Don Quixote challenging - it's just so redundant that it becomes a chore to read after a few hundred pages.

Fiction-wise, for me it was the The Silmarillion as well. The audio recordings of seminars by The Tolkien Professor were a big help. He has since started another series going through The Silmarillion with a informal group, and you can get those on his podcast feed as well.

For non-fiction, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It's considered a classic book on computer science, and I found it completely unreadable. If you watch videos of the lectures (which are pretty good) then it's easier to follow the text, but it's easily the worst reading I've ever done.

For me it was Peter F. Hamilton´s Night's Dawn Trilogy - the universe he created is so detailed, that he uses a lot of scientific lingo that during a first read is sometimes hard to visualize or understand completely.

André

Some of the things I had to read for English Lit classes were the biggest chores, & I hated Lord of the Flies in Jr High. I only made it through the Dune sreies (1st 6 - 7 books, anyway) by "living in the moment" & not trying to remember/follow who did what to whom in the internal history of the universe. The hardest thing I've read for pleasure was The Silmarillion.

David wrote: "I wasn't able to finish Ulysses by James Joyce, but it's certainly the most difficult book I have attempted to read.
As far as books I have in fact finished, probably A Portrait of the Artist as a ..."

Ulysses was the first book I thought of, but the first POV in The Sound and the Furywas even tougher for me

Kevin wrote: "I tried to read both Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow, which is on the list of the top hardest books of all time. I only got to about page 10, and gave up, with too many words I could not compr..."

ha ha, Finnegan's Wake shouldn't even count as a book! In college we used to grab the book, jump to a page at random and start reading. All our other housemates had to bet a dollar and guess either way if you were actually reading a passage, or just making something up....

Ala wrote: "The Bible."

Me too, specifically the King James version.

Boots wrote: "Ala wrote: "The Bible."

Me too, specifically the King James version."

Definitely not an easy read in many parts, but a good Bible with lots of study notes helps. Holy Bible: Reformation Study Bible: English Standard Version and Life Application Study Bible: NIV are two good ones. The Reformation Study Bible is the best that I know of. The King James Version is practically a foreign language to me, like Shakespeare can be at times. The English Standard Version and New international Versions are much easier to read than the KJV.

Fresno Bob wrote: "In college we used to grab the book, jump to a page at random and start reading. All our other housemates had to bet a dollar and guess either way if you were actually reading a passage, or just making something up..."

Okay, I have some friends who MUST be introduced to this game.

Infinite Jest for me. Hard because of the language, the story (view spoiler)[though that gets easier once you figure out it's going backward (hide spoiler)] and also emotionally tough (there were parts that hit a little too close to home).

But it was well worth it.

I don't really know what makes a book "hard" or how there can be a "list" of hardest books (seems rather subjective) but IJ was easily the hardest I've read, for the above metrics.

Ala wrote: "The Bible."

Agreed

Oscar wrote: "now I remember Dante is reaaaaaallyyy hard to understand"

I found the best (and only) way to understand Dante's numerous pop culture political references was to get a volume with good footnotes. The version I read was The Divine Comedy.

For me, my hardest read in recent memory is my current read The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I'm enjoying it, but the narrative jumps around spatially and temporally like an ADHD 8 year old off his meds while unstuck in time. It takes me some time to understand what is currently happening in a scene (and when), and then it jumps to the next one, and then the next one before you can get a handle on the second scene.

It will be interesting to compare it to House of Leaves when I get to it later in my reading shelf, as I have heard similar things about that book.

I've lemmed a few books that I found difficult to get through, but that was mainly due to disinterest in the plot. I was honestly too bored by these books that I don't even recall their names.

As someone stated above, the absolute worst were the high school English books we were required to read. Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart, and The Great Gatsby have especially earned my ire thanks to those classes. I would have lemmed them if I could have gotten away with it.

The Bible is on my list to read for the longest time due to its influence on culture. I just finished reading The Recognitions, which contained a lot of obscure references to religion's influence, pagan and Christian. Next on my list is Omensetter's Luck. I have a really nice book on the history of Christianity, A History Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which I would also like to get to along with the Bible. I avoid books with strong Christian references like the plague, such as Canterbury Tales. If I had read it, I would have discovered Hyperion's rip off of it, and would have reacted differently to the series. I think I've developed a stronger reading stomach now, so I'm ready to tackle them.

Zach wrote: "Ala wrote: "The Bible."

Agreed"

It was a real struggle for me to read The Gunslinger. English is my second language too, and many of the words in this book was simply not in my vocabulary, which is why it took me several attemps to finish the book. The following books in the series are easy enough to read (and quite entertaining, too) but it is as if Stephen King has to prove something in the first book.

Hyperion is giving me a hard time too, due to the mixture of made-up words and words unknown to me. I intend on finishing this book though, i love the elements of horror, and all the philosofical and religios implications it raises.

Nietzsche, Volumes 1&2 by that murdered of prose Martin Heidegger, translated by someone I presume was trying, but not succeeding, many ancient greek words and phrases not translated. I can't even remember what the essay I was using it for research on was even about.

Philosophy books are brain meltingly hard at the best of times (I get rather annoyed with people who think liberal arts are the soft option), but even that standard of turgid German prose that one stands out as a terrible nightmare.

There was a Habermas book I had to read for a philosophy seminar, I think it was The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. And I thought Derrida was a chore!

I'm almost 15 years from my philosophy degree and fascination with existentialism, so I'm no longer certain those books were hard so much as needlessly obfuscating.

I have to read Derrida, since he is highly influential in postmodernist art and literature, which I'm getting more into. I'm glad philosophy is a voluntary study for me, since my degree is in art by way of engineering. I guess that primes my mind for understanding the varying angles of philosophical thoughts. On my list to read next month is No Exit. I like Sartre's idea that hell is other people, since it is other people who often try to kill who you are when you don't fit in with their plans for you.

Joe wrote: "There was a Habermas book I had to read for a philosophy seminar, I think it was The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. And I thought Derrida was a chore!

I'm almost 15 years f..."

The Silmarillion. However, it is quite possibly one of the best books that I have read. It took 2 reads to comprehend, and I can still go back, re-read and pick up new things.

A couple of nominees: Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong Luo (famous Chinese historical epic) -- really long and very flat; I'm not sure if that was the English translation or the source material.

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson -- I love the idea of this one -- millions of years in the future, after the Sun has gone out, the last remnants of humanity huddle in a giant pyramid while Horrible Things lurk outside in the eternal darkness -- but Hodgson wrote it in this really awful faux-medieval prose style that's almost unreadable.

James Stoddard actually did a rewrite of it a few years back -- The Night Land, a Story Retold -- that's much more digestible.

Helmholz's "On Sensations of Tone". The physics part was OK but the music part puts me at a disadvantage. My mother was very against music lessons so I only know the bits I picked up at school. So that half of the book is only understood in a vague way. Maybe in another life.

BTW, almost every English teacher will tell you that the savage is the hero in Brave New World. But it was really Helmholz. I argued that in a class I took at University on scifi but the prof didn't agree. While travelling in Europe I found a book by Huxley that actually said that he intended Helmholz to be the hero but that isn't how the public saw it so he sort of gave a shrug of the shoulders. Profs are never around when you want to show them something they need to see. LOL

The Leonard Nimoy TV version of Brave New World leaves Helmholz out completely!

I thought it was obvious because Helmholz gets to go to the island. Bernard does too but, not understanding as much, he has to be dragged kicking and screaming.

Grayson wrote: "The Silmarillion. However, it is quite possibly one of the best books that I have read. It took 2 reads to comprehend, and I can still go back, re-read and pick up new things."

The Tolkien Professor podcast has several episodes covering The Silmarillion. It's a great show.

http://bit.ly/yQhqYp

I just put Three Kingdoms in my to read. I read an excerpt and it doesn't seem bad to read, so I got the eBook.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Kingdoms-...

Joseph wrote: "A couple of nominees: Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong Luo (famous Chinese historical epic) -- really long and very flat; I'm not sure if that was the English translation or the source material.

The N..."