From The Millions:
Whether scholars, creative writers, or citizen book lovers, most readers agree on a canon of certain legendarily difficult books—books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction. This post inaugurates a new Millions series devoted to identifying and describing these most difficult books: ones we’ve read/wrangled with ourselves, ones we’ve known students to struggle with time and again, ones that, more simply, “everyone knows” are hard to read—those works whose mere titles glisten with an aura of rarefied impenetrability.
There will, doubtless, be those readers who look scornfully on our choices (“Psh. These aren’t that hard, you’re just not smart enough to read them“). Indeed, for myself, that is probably true. And to those so brilliant that not a one of these tomes challenged or vexed them more than a People magazine, we tip our hats. This list is for the mere mortals among us—who have found themselves reading and rereading the same paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses to no avail, who have been reduced to tears by Faulkner’sone-line chapter, “My mother is a fish,” in As I Lay Dying, who may have spitefully broken the brittle spine of her first used copy of Tristram Shandy, who use a volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a doorstop and eye it with a wary distrust when she walks past it (for it is fond of stubbing toes).
But this is also a list for those who, after breaking the spine, picked up the wounded volume, taped it back together, and finished that infuriating chapter, and another, and another… until, triumph!, it was finished at last. And, perhaps, now that we think on it again, having finished, could it be that it was worth the struggle? Could it be that in the pain of it was a tinge of pleasure, of value (not to mention pride)?
. . . .
1621: The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
1667: Paradise Lost by John Milton
1704: A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
1747-8: Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
1759-67: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
1851: Moby Dick by Herman Melville
1922-62: The Cantos by Ezra Pound
1927: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
1964: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
1969: The Dream Songs by John Berryman
1969: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
1974: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Link to the rest at The Millions
So my question is … why should I waste my time reading difficult books when there are so many others that I can get engaged in, enjoy, learn from, and recommend to others?
If a writer can’t communicate well, I need a very good reason to read what he writes.
You shouldn’t. Looking at Paul Sadler’s longer lists, above, I see that I’ve finished a handful of those and enjoyed them. But I’ve also bailed out of just as many. If you’re getting something out of it or otherwise think it’s worth it to continue, then by all means do. Otherwise, I have no problem cutting my losses.
Reading is a very personal and subjective choice. I try never to tell anyone they should read something. And I’ve succeeded in not listening to anyone who tells me that.
Two of my favorite books made the list: Anatomy of Melancholy and Moby Dick. I confess that I have not read Anatomy from cover to cover, but I am forever grateful for eBooks because I swear the two and a half inch thick paperback of Anatomy caused arthritis in my hands. I was diagnosed as bipolar over thirty years ago and I have been prescribed every known anti-depressant at various times. But for the last decade, nothing has dispelled my dark moods quicker than a few pages of the Anatomy.
As for Moby Dick, I fell in love with that book when I was about 12 and have reread it every few years since. Each time I read it, something new grabs me.
I’ve dabbled in most of the other books on the list and have no notable opinions, although the sonnet PG quoted in another post today sent me on a search for my college copy of Paradise Lost.
Interesting idea for posts, and it mentioned in the OP it would be the “start” of a series of posts. Interestingly, of the 12 books listed, they only covered 6 of them in subsequent posts, and then the theme seems to have been abandoned.
Now I’m down a rabbit hole…https://bookstr.com/list/12-challenging-books-readers-struggle-to-finish/ has a list which adds
– The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer
– King Henry IV | Shakespeare
– Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace
– War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
– Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand
– Ulysses | James Joyce
– Finnegans Wake | James Joyce
– Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon
– The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky
– The Bible
I would add Crime and Punishment, and two lists in, I’m surprised it isn’t listed.
Buzzfeed did a list of 25 challenging books, with some overlap plus:
– The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
– The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (14th Century)
– One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
– The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)
– Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1927)
– Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943)
– The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (1977)
– Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
– The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
– The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
– Underworld by Don DeLillo
– Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)
– Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (1981)
– The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
– Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)
– The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)
– Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
– The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Bustle.com has a list of 33 with a lot of overlap plus:
– ‘Tender Buttons’ by Gertrude Stein
– ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking
– ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear’ by Jean M. Auel
– ‘Bodies That Matter’ by Judith Butler
– ‘The House of Mirth’ by Edith Wharton
– ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ by Karen Barad
– ‘The English Patient’ by Michael Ondaatje
– ‘The Tale of Genji’ by Shikibu Murasaki
– ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
– ‘Passing’ by Nella Larsen
– ‘The Sound and the Fury’ by William Faulkner
– ‘The Age of Innocence’ by Edith Wharton
– ‘The Making of Americans’ by Gertrude Stein
– ‘Near to the Wild Heart’ by Clarice Lispector
– ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ by Umberto Eco
– ‘Crime and Punishment’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Finally!)
– ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir
Fortunately, our crowd sourcing has no end (Good Reads has lists of 250+ books from multiple difficult books lists), but Publishers’ Weekly has a top 10. Until I realized it was written/compiled by the same person who wrote the OP.
I can think of only one or two that I have finished…Sigh.
P.
An interesting collection of lists but I think we need a much more precise definition of what is a difficult book. With a few exceptions these lists seem to be selecting for length, tedium and maybe reading age but not a real intellectual challenge.
I wouldn’t call Clarissa or Tristam Shandy for example difficult, but I did struggle to finish them and have no desire to re-read them. Chaucer hardly belongs here as most of us will find it difficult purely because we don’t speak the language: a bit like saying War and Peace is difficult in the original Russian if you are a monolingual Englishman.
Dhalgren is not “difficult.” It is a work of mental illness, criminality, and pedophilia boosterism, put into fiction form. So if you liked Mein Kampf….
Anatomy of Melancholy is like a blog gone wild. Any particular point is interesting and fun. (It helps that you can run a search for obscure classical stuff.)
>>So if you liked Mein Kampf…
Great, anyone got tips on getting diet pepsi residue off my keyboard?
P.
I found the first few pages of Dhalgren repulsive and gave up. Hearing your comments, I’m glad I didn’t try to go further.