What is the most difficult book that you've read from start to finish?
gravitation by wheeler
>>8174797
Ada.
>>8174797
catcher In the rye
i havent read since highschool though.
it wasn't difficult to read, it was just so fucking boring and I didn't care about anything that was happening.
naked lunch
>>8174797
some social justice shit i had to read for class probably
>>8174797
George Eliot - Middlemarch probably, but I'm baby
>>8174809
What was so difficult about it? (I haven't read it, but am still interested.)
>>8174797
Either Milkbottle H or The Cantos.
Not literature, that's for sure.
>>8174797
Postmodernist doorstops generally don't appeal to me.
The Unnameable was hard to read at times, so was Perec's Life. Loved and finished both of those though.
>>8174818
I read it now in English and it is very easy to read and follow imho and english is not my native language. What's difficult about it?
>>8174818
Cather in the Rye is a particularly easy book to read.
>>8174886
its filled with violent grotesque shit like somebody ripping a guys cock off and then fucking the hole, that bored you?
for myself, I dunno about most difficult, and its not a book, but Meno was a real slog
>>8174994
If there was ever a movement that could benefit from cohesion and concision, it's PoMo. I'm still waiting to discover something akin to Flaubert's Trois contes in mid-20th Century American literature. Closest I've come is Gaddis' Carpenters Gothic and Hawkes, but the latter is still too on-the-fence to have a real following.
>>8176906
I think he isn't talking about literary difficulty. Yes it is easy to read, but Holden is so infuriating and nauseatingly angsty that it makes the book a chore for some people.
Finnegans Wake.
>>8174994
Beckett's trilogy was more of a challenge for me than any of the pomo doorstops I have read.
Munkres' Topology is a strong contender for Most Difficult, as well.
>>8174954
I'm not OP, but the language is complex and slowed my reading down. It's also an epic story, and traverses so much ground. I think Nabokov's prose takes some time to warm up to as well.
>>8176994
it's not that it is boring it's that he is so transparent in intention and unnuanced in execution, the very definition of try-hard
Don't get me wrong I like Burroughs, those first couple dozen pages of Naked Lunch where he is dealing in all that great slang and cheeky maneuvering, that shit is great. And The Junky's Christmass, that is effortless and effective
>>8177799
There was ANOTHER "FUCK YOU" ON THE WALL!!!!!
>>8174797
Atlas Shrugged.
Keeping all the different characters straight was hard; unlike with LOTR, there's no supplemental material to consult.
Slogging through the endless political diatribe - if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.
>>8174886
you know, the first time I tried reading it, I couldn't get into it. Then a year or two later, I picked it back up and couldn't stop reading. He's now my favorite author.
Take this as advice or a warning, w/e
