What book are you proudest to have read?

[bodswood]

Read as in finished.

For me, it's Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I'm still glowing and I finihed it years ago. Don't ask me to summarise it though.

[Ephemera]

"To Kill a Mockingbird" and "1984", I guess.

They're the only two classics that I've read currently. Until recently, most of the books I had read were recent (last thirty years) science-fiction and various non-fiction books. I tend to box myself in on certain kinds of books and wind up ignoring all the others so it's good to finally start reading some of the classics.

[Ranchoth]

Either "The Republic" or "Einstein's Dreams." And I read "Animal Farm" in a single sitting. (So, not so impressive)

[Freejooky]

gravity's rainbow, ulysses, and finnegan's wake, all in one weekend, all with simultaneously reading reader's guides

[bodswood]

That puts Kant well and truly in his place. Are they all by Joyce? I recognise only the last two, and no I've read none of them, even though I once picked up my Mum's copy of Ulysses (whcih she also hadn't read) and read the first page.

Do you mean 'all while simultaneously reading reader's guide', or do you have another gift that is not granted to us ordinary mortals?

[Annie-Xmas]

I read the uncut version of King's "The Stand" in two sittings, a total of 26 hours.

[RealityChuck]

Shelby Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative History"

[jimmmy]

I read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces by chance picking it up in the library. I told everyone I knew that this was one of the best books I had ever read, that it truly was an all-timer, a work of genius or near genius.

Later I learned that it had won the Pulitzer Prize, that everyone literate recognized it as first rate from the moment it had appeared ... but I didn't know all that when I was going on about it. I often wonder about the effect of hype, herd mentality and group think on me -- especially regarding subjective things like art, literature and film. In this one case I can be sure I liked the book on its own merits in a vacuum and I am very proud of that --- even if it shows that I am/was a bit of hick when it comes to knowing what "everyone" already knows.

[bashere]

Originally Posted by bodswood

Are they all by Joyce? I recognise only the last two, and no I've read none of them, even though I once picked up my Mum's copy of Ulysses (whcih she also hadn't read) and read the first page.

Gravity's Rainbow is by Thomas Pynchon, the second most unapproachable author of the 20th century (Joyce still holds the prize). I made it 100 pages into V, though. Don't sell yourself short; Kant is in a league all his own (I made it about 50 pages into Pure Reason).

Somehow, none of the books I've read seem to measure up after mentioning those two. Voltaire's Bastards is probably the one of which I am proudest.

[plnnr]

The Bible. Not for religious purposes, but as a work of literature.

[Agrippina]

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

[Lamia]

Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. I didn't initially consider this a remarkable accomplishment, until I learned how many people I know had tried and failed. I don't think anyone else I know has gotten through it, or even made it very far in.

[bashere]

Originally Posted by Lamia

Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. I didn't initially consider this a remarkable accomplishment, until I learned how many people I know had tried and failed. I don't think anyone else I know has gotten through it, or even made it very far in.

I'm one of those people. I love Foucalt's Pendulum. I have even stood in the nave where the narrator is hiding at the beginning of the book ( I had to verify this be visiting a bookstore and checking to see if it was the museum I thought it was; this was made the more difficult by the fact that I don't read French). I have attempted the book three times, and never quite finished it. I have come within ten pages of the end all three times, and somehow can't quite go the distance and find out what happens. Great book, though.

[Jimmy from the Bronx]

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

[FriarTed]

The Oxford Annotated RSV Bible w/ Apocrypha in about six months.

[Crafter_Man]

I’m not a big fan of novels. I’ve read less than a dozen my whole life. So I was somewhat proud after I got through all 863 pages of Unintended Consequences. Great novel.

I managed to read every word of Atlas Shrugged. This was a true feat, as the novel is so incredibly bad.

[twickster]

"Remembrance of Things Past," all seven (?) volumes.

Don't remember a freakin' thing about it, though. I think I was too young when I read it (22? 23?), and Og knows I won't have time to read it again till I retire.

[krisolov]

Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Not for fun, for a class. I was ready to open a vein after finishing them.

[FisherQueen]

Say I'm lonely, say I'm sad,
Say that life and love have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
I've read Ulysses!

[DeVena]

Crime And Punishment by Dostoevsky

Started as a dare, but then I got interested in the stories. Yep, it took forever.

[yanceylebeef]

How to Good-bye Depression
This book changed my life.

[fusoya]

Virgil's Aeneid .... in Latin.

[Fiver]

When I was 13 or 14 my parents gave me The Unabridged Jack London for Christmas. It was all of London's Arctic and sea stories and novels in one volume, 1143 pages.

It sat unread on my shelves for twenty-plus years. Every time I reached for it I recoiled, because dude, it's 1143 pages!

I finally got serious about reading it in 2001 and finished it last year.

I still get a flush of satisfaction now when I glance at its spine in my library.

[Quercus]

I managed to read every word of Atlas Shrugged. This was a true feat, as the novel is so incredibly bad.

I'm not sure whether I admire you for being able to do this, or pity you for all the needless pain. After two pages, I could pretty much tell what was coming and bailed.

I am proud in a twisted way of having the bloody-mindedness to read all of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind At least, I think I read it all; I may easily have blacked out for a couple hundred pages here or there without missing much. If nothing else, it'll give me something to talk about if I ever meet Neal Stephenson. ("Hey Neal, not only have I read your first book, but I read the book it was based on!")

[Terminus Est]

War and Peace. My effort was aided when they started showing the Russian movie version on TV. Still took a while: The original movie was about 8 hours long and the TV version cut into weekly 1.5 hour episodes (plus commercials). So that took about 2 months to show the whole thing. I started reading the book about a months before it started showing on TV, and was still reading it long after it had completed.

[ErinPuff]

Les Misérables unabridged.

[robgruver]

What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson.
Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice

As for Interview, I am proud I finished that piece of crap. My girlfriend at the time was all about Anne Rice and wanted me to read them. I finished Interview while I was working nights as a security guard during college. I couldn't belive that this book was that big a stinking pile of turds.

My apologies to Anne Rice fans, but *shudder*.

[CalMeacham]

War and Peace by Tolstoy, which I read just for the heck of it. One day I'll try Joyce, or maybe even Kant. For now, I'll just say that if you're drunk, or just have a contact high, try reading just the chapter titles from Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. My mother and I fif this and we were breaking up. You can get the same reaction reading the chapter titles of the Niebelungenlied ("How Gelpfrat was slain by Dancwort")

[Chronos]

I somehow managed to finish Battlefield Earth, too, but I'm not exactly proud of it. What can I say? I was desparate for something to read.

A couple that I am proud of, though: The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and Euclid's Elements. We were assigned a few short selections from Boethius in high school English, and I thought it was fantastically rational for a philosophy book, so I finished it (and got some extra credit when I alluded to it in a later assignment). As for Euclid, it was sitting on our bookshelf as part of the Britannica "Great Books" collection, and I figured I might as well give it a go-through. One of these times I plan to slog through Newton's Principia Mathematica, too, but not yet. And I'd love to read Galileo's Dialogues on the Two Chief Worldsystems (the book that got him arrested), too, but I haven't stumbled across a copy.

[Voyager]

The Gulag Archipelago, all three volumes, as soon as it came out in paperback.

I don't think it would have the impact today, though.

Oh, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when I was in second grade - but more because of the shock value than the quality of the book.

[robgruver]

Originally Posted by Chronos

I somehow managed to finish Battlefield Earth, too, but I'm not exactly proud of it. What can I say? I was desparate for something to read.

I am actually a big fan of that book. Hubbard, Scientology, the movie, and everything else he has ever written can suck an egg, but Battlefield Earth was a brilliant book.

Hey, they had Scotsmen. Can't go wrong with a horde of Scotsmen.

[jackelope]

Ulysses. Start to finish.

Twice.

[stately plump buck mulligan]

*cough, cough*

Why yes, how'd you guess?


Also: V. Easily in my top three favorite books, ever. I feel like a bitch recommending it to people because everyone wants a quick read. But I savored every moment of it.

Still haven't tackled Gravity's Rainbow or Finnegan's Wake. I should make them my goals for this summer. Along with curing the common cold and reversing the greenhouse effect.

[The Asbestos Mango]

The Bible- I"m on my second trip though.
John Julius Norwich's three volume history Byzantium.
Lord of the Rings
Illuminatus

Oh, and I just started St. Augustine's City of God last night.

Dishonorable mention- I've read the first eleven books of the Left Behind series, and will be reading The Glorious Appearing and reporting back to y'all sometime soon. Hey, somebody has to take the bullet for the SDMB, and I have a fairly high tolerance for... well whatever it is, I have a high tolerance for it.

[AwSnappity]

Crime and Punishment. We had to read it for 10th grade English, and I was the only one of my classmates who made it all the way through, albeit with Cliffs Notes.

I am also proud that I made it all the way through American Psycho without vomiting. I did recoil in phantom pain, and I was bored to tears during the album review chapters, but I never vomited (which I was nervous I might do).

[Cockatiel]

Jane Eyre. Really long, florid language, and strange plot. I finished it in a week. Without Cliffs Notes .

[fluiddruid]

The Divine Comedy. In one 24 hour day. No, didn't sleep much, but Paradise did take an ethereal, hazy quality for me, which was actually pretty neat.

[igloorex]

Wordsworth's "The Prelude"
Churchill's unabridged "A History of the English Speaking Peoples"
Beowulf in the original.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

David Brin's Earth.

No big deal, you say?

It started out okay. Interesting plot (artificial black hole falls into the earth and begins to devour it from the inside), but after about 75 pages, it began to bog down. Then it got painfully (it literally hurt my brain to read it) slow and boring. Still, I was determined to finish. I read it off and on over a three week period, rarely reading more than 3-4 pages at a time.

When I finally finished, I wanted to find Mr. Brin and punch him the nuts. The ending was unsatisfying and definitely not worth the effort.

I'm proud of the fact that I didn't go insane.

I had never read his stuff before and I probably just picked the wrong book to start with.

[bodswood]

Originally Posted by jimmmy

I read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces by chance picking it up in the library. I told everyone I knew that this was one of the best books I had ever read, that it truly was an all-timer, a work of genius or near genius.

Later I learned that it had won the Pulitzer Prize, that everyone literate recognized it as first rate from the moment it had appeared ... but I didn't know all that when I was going on about it. I often wonder about the effect of hype, herd mentality and group think on me -- especially regarding subjective things like art, literature and film. In this one case I can be sure I liked the book on its own merits in a vacuum and I am very proud of that --- even if it shows that I am/was a bit of hick when it comes to knowing what "everyone" already knows.

This has happened to me more than once. When I first started reading movie reviews on the Internet, I liked the stuff from a fellow on an obscure Chicago (!) newspaper called Roger Ebert (the fellow not the rag). Mmm.

[Miller]

I've done Crime and Punishment.

Er, so to speak.

Moby Dick.

I love Salman Rushdie, but I still had to struggle with Satanic Verses. Well worth the effort, but not something I'm going to try again any time soon.

Like Lamia, I should apparently be prouder than I am for finishing Focault's Pendulum. Although my attention was definetly wandering for the last chapter or so. Still, I didn't think it was that hard. I was defeated by The Island at the Edge of the World, though.

I haven't even tried Ulysses yet. I'm just happy that I've got a pretty good handle on The Dead.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Can't say I agreed with much of it, but it was certainly compelling.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, elsewise known as Blade Runner. Only Philip K. Dick novel I've managed to finish.

I took my screenname (somewhat obliquely) from The Canterbury Tales. Modern English translation, though.

[Improv Geek]

Jane Eyre

I read it to impress a girl... but she wasn't impressed. Oh well.

Oh, and I was in 6th grade.

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by bashere

I'm one of those people. I love Foucalt's Pendulum. I have even stood in the nave where the narrator is hiding at the beginning of the book ( I had to verify this be visiting a bookstore and checking to see if it was the museum I thought it was; this was made the more difficult by the fact that I don't read French). I have attempted the book three times, and never quite finished it. I have come within ten pages of the end all three times, and somehow can't quite go the distance and find out what happens. Great book, though.

If it makes you feel any better, you could read those last ten pages and still not know for sure what happens. The book concludes with the narrator apparently finding some peace with what he believes to be his fate, but it's not clear whether he's actually right about what's going to happen to him.

[5 time champ]

Will & Ariel Durant's 11 volume Story of Civilization, twice.

I finished Crime & Punishment but it could have just as well been the original Russian for what I understood of the book.

[Lissa]

I recently finished The Tale of Genji. I'll admit, it was hard, slow going. I'm not much for fiction to begin with, but I really wanted to read it because of all the historical detail.

I found it a rather painful reading experience. First of all, none of the female characters have names-- just vague nicknames, some of which are very similar. Sometimes people are known by their titles, which change as the story progresses. There are dozens of characters, so this gets pretty confusing. I kept having to refer back to the chart in the front of the book.

I also had to start from the beginning a few times. I'm a person who reads multiple books at one time. Genji is not a book conducive to this style of reading. After a break of just a day or two, I had forgotten who's who and what their relationships are, and I'm usually a person who can remember what she reads easily.

Thirdly, the book had no plot to speak of. It mainly consited of the romantic liasons of Genji, and meandered through his life story-- unfortunately not a very interesting one. Other than briefly pissing off the Emperor, Genji does little of interest, except for his strange Lolita relationship with Murasaki, which actually made me a bit uncomfortable as I was reading it.

So, I'm justly proud in having worked my way through the thousand-plus page bulk of it. It will probably be one of the few books I do not re-read, though.

[kalex]

I made it all the way through Infinite Jest, twice. You actually sort of have to, since the end of the book happens just before the beginning. 300+ pages of footnotes. Some of it was utter bullshit but some was genius.

[commasense]

Originally Posted by Freejooky

gravity's rainbow, ulysses, and finnegan's wake, all in one weekend, all with simultaneously reading reader's guides

Okay, well if we're not being whooshed here, I maintain that if this is even possible, it wouldn't be possible to get much out of such an experience. Unless you are Joyce himself, or a genius of equal standing.

Ulysses was the book I first thought of when I read the OP. I studied it over the course of several weeks in a preceptorial in college. I'm thinking of re-reading it. But I'll have to re-read The Iliad first, of course.

Originally Posted by stately plump buck mulligan

*cough, cough*

Why yes, how'd you guess?

For the benefit of those who haven't read Ulysses, buck's handle is the first four words of the book.

I read Kant's Pure Reason and Practical Reason, although I'm not particularly proud of the fact. I remember one or two points from them (categorical imperative, right?), but I can never remember the difference between a priori subjective judgments and a posteriori synthetic perceptions. (No, no, please don't explain it. Please!)

I enjoyed Les Miserables too much to be proud of reading it. Great book. Same for Crime and Punishment.

Divine Comedy: Been there, read that, hated it.

Moby Dick: Not on my list of great novels, unless you cut out all those interminable chapters on the anatomy of sperm whales that interrupt the flow of the real story. Maybe not even then. For drama, Billy Budd is far superior.

I never finished Foucault's Pendulum or War and Peace.

Two things I'm really proud of: reading the complete written works of Galileo. If you start off with Galileo's Daughter, I guarantee you will want to read the master himself. And he's not as difficult as you might expect. He wrote for ordinary people. Chronos: Don't wait to stumble across him: go out and get it!

The other thing I'm pretty proud of (reminded of it by mention of Foucault's Pendulum): while reading The Name of the Rose, I came across Eco's description of the tower library-cum-maze. I wasn't sure that what he described was physically possible, so based only on his verbal description, I made a drawing of it, and confirmed that it was indeed possible. (I was mightily impressed by his powers of description.) Only after I had completed my drawing did I find the drawing published in the book. The two were identical! Yay me!

[flamingbananas]

All 5 of the Harry Potter books in a day and a half.
The Catcher in the Rye. Most people my age only read magazines, so reading a classic like that is an accomplishment for me. It also earned me extra credit points in school

[audiobottle]

I didn't realize that Focault's Pendulum was that hard to finish. I loved it and The Name of the Rose and I think I'm going to pick up Baudalino tomorrow. Finnegan's Wake on the other hand... my god. I picked up a copy at my dorm library sale a few years ago (50 cents!) on a whim after reading Cecil's column on it. Unfortunately, due to my habit of not using bookmarks, I kept losing what page I was on since I couldn't use the plot or even characters to identify where I was. I think the furthest I've gotten is about 50 pages in. It's fun to read out loud though.
I read about a third of War and Peace in 6th grade because my mom made me. I had no idea what was going on. I got the abridged copy and tried to read that, and eventually ended up skipping hundreds of pages at a time so that it'd be done quicker.

[JoeSki]

Confederacy of Dunces: I'm impressed I actiually finished it. I thought this book was crap, and resembled a script to a really lame sitcom. However, I do understand what another poster was talking about when he mentioned picking up a classic and loving it without ever having heard about it. Same thing happened with me and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Executive Orders: This is not only the biggest book I've ever read (1300 pages), it's one of the biggest novels I've even seen. With having said that, it was an ok book, nothing special.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin: It was a 700 page history book, and I read it all, not for school, not for a dying relative, but because I was interested in the guy and wanted to learn. For that, I felt good about myself.

Coming soon to this list: Dancing Wu Li Masters