Indeed. Or why not go the extra step and just replace it with Beowulf in the original old English?
Finnegan’s Wake was not that hard for me, but I think having even a cursory background in Gaeilge makes a huge difference. The rythym and some of the words or syllables are Hiberno-English and often just the way things sound in my head when I’m trying to translate a sentence or phrase.
The Canterbury Tales was similarly easier for me than for my classmates. One commented recently that it was absolutely fitting I should end up in a job which requires in-depth knowledge of US Federal Regulations. LOL!
Pet Sematary was more haunting afterwards than during.
Books I was relieved to see on the list: (because it made me feel less alone in my difficulties)
The Unfortunates
The Silmarrillion
Anything by Gaddis
If they were going to include things on the basis of psychological or emotional torture, I can’t imagine how they could leave out the Patrick Melrose novels. I, for one, will never be the same. Sophie’s Choice was horrible, but not nearly as traumatic for me.
Nothing by Ayn Rand on that list? It took me 4 tries before I was able to make it through The Fountainhead…and I only accomplished it in the end because I took it along on a cross-country flight.
Heart of Darkness? Really?
The hardest book for me to slog through was Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.
It is so poorly written it made me angry.
mmm
I haven’t read Heart of Darkness, but I did have to keep pushing to get through Conrad’s “The Secret Agent.” It seemed utterly devoid of meaning. Conrad took something as interesting as a plot to blow up the observatory at Greenwich…and made it dreary and boring.
In high school, I tried reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and had to stop. It was ostensibly in the English language, but the words just didn’t seem to mean anything.
I had the same experience with Aristotle (can’t remember which book.) This is English, isn’t it? Why doesn’t it make a damn lick of sense?
Sophie’s Choice was about the Holochaust? I remember it being about pandering to a female readership with a beleaguered yet otherwise 2-dimensional protagonist, and her stock company of domineering father, the cute but hopelessly ineffectual Horn-dog, and the Daemon Lover. Standard woe-is-me porn, made especially offensive in the next decade when Tutsi mothers had to give their babies up to be killed so they themselves could be spared to serve in rape camps. As bad as 50 Shades is, at least it didn’t exploit real human tradgedy in order to give bored beach readers a good cry.
Lydia Davis and Mary Gaitskill are my favorite contemporary authors. They are not difficult to read but I do think the emotional states described are complex. You don’t need to be an EXTREME READER to understand them, just someone who thinks about inner life/lives.
I do find Bolano difficult! Also Tolstoy. Russian novels are hard for me because I would rather really get into the head of one character than try to remember the names of 100 characters.
A few of these (Heart of Darkness, for one) were required reading in high school.
I’ve read the following in their entirety (the ones with an asterisk more than once).
Finnegans Wake* (one of my all-time favorite books)
Moby Dick
Naked Lunch*
House of Leaves
Dhalgren*
The Silmarillion
Heart of Darkness
Gravity’s Rainbow*
Underworld
I’ve read selections from Canterbury Tales, but never read it complete. I’ll correct that someday. *Tristram Shandy *is the only thing on the list that I tried to read but gave up on.
Is this a wooosh?
I’ve read War and Peace and The Silmarillion multiple times.
My contribution to this is actually one of my favorite books, Ada by Vladimir Nabokov. While individual pages are very readable due to Nabokov’s literate and playful writing style, the weight of the tome, and trying to do to many things at once which results in jumping around a lot, and unlikeable characters means that it is difficult to read through all of its many hundreds of pages. But still, I have also read this multiple times, since it’s the best incestual multi-narrator speculative fiction Russian family epic ever 
Yeah, I tried to make it through Heart of Darkness, and it was so utterly boring that I didn’t understand what was happening. When the plot was actually explained to me, it seemed sort of cool. It must have taken some effort to make such a decent plot so boring.
My 11 year-old (now 12) daughter read The Silmarillion a few months ago, so go Sophie!
At least I managed to finish Kant and Newton. Here’s a book that completely defeated me: “In the Days of the Comet,” by H.G. Wells.
Was it her own choice?
Yes, she wanted to make it through all the LOTR books. When she said she wanted it, I just got it for her and didn’t mention anything about it being difficult.
And she learned from it… we are now being instructed in various lineages and histories. In the sort of outraged detail only a 12yo can bring - “You didn’t know that — was related to —?” “Daddy, there’s no dwarf called Boring!”
Does reading the entire Twilight series count? If only because I can’t understand how I managed to make it through that crap. That was fucking painful. I wish it were possible to unread a book. 
I read Wuthering Heights and absolutely loathed it. Ditto Atlas Shrugged. (I even managed to get through “The speech”)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Thackery’s Vanity Fair is one of my favorites.
Five, I’ve read five of those books. When younger I went through a phase where I wanted big books. I was reading quickly and just wanted it to last longer! I think I peaked with The Alexandria Quartet! It was awesome.
My dad and I read the Divine Comedy together this summer. Well, no wonder we never bothered covering all of Paradiso when I took a class on Dante in college: nothing happens! Sure, souls stand around and discuss philosophy and theology, but the Inferno could have been an action movie, it’s so packed with thrills. Centaurs threaten you, you ride through a river on the shoulders of a giant, harpies chase you, rocks fall, demons fight in midair, there are scary animals everywhere, you meet all kinds of crazy people, it’s awesome. Paradiso is a snore, Beatrice is kind of mean, and lots of times Dante just goes, “Oh wow, it was so amazing it just defies description, you know?” and leaves things at that. What a let-down.
E: I read Djuna Barnes’ “Nightwood” in college, too, for a class on Modern, Post-modern, and Post-Colonial Literature. …I don’t think I understood it very well, but I don’t remember it being torture to read, certainly not enough to leave an impression as “one of the most difficult novels of all time”. Not when the class also had to read “Heart of Darkness.”
Missed the edit window and maybe I should read the whole list before posting, but I finished Blood Meridian this summer, too, and it is simultaneously one of the most gorgeous novels and most grueling I’ve ever read. The middle section is nothing but long descriptions of landscape and hellacious behavior described in two sentences. Anytime the gang encounters a dog or a child or a harmless person, you know that they’re going to end up brutally murdered in the next paragraph and the action will move on like it was nothing, and oh, here’s another 3 pages on the landscape. Good thing that man can write like an angel and make you want to read the book out loud to your dog just to savor the language, or you’d never finish, and you’d miss one of the best endings in all of English literature.
Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” gave me the same trouble. It took me years to be able to finish it, and I hated it most of the time, but after the slog was over I could look back and appreciate the brilliant moments for being by far some of the most brilliant brilliant moments I’ve ever encountered. It’s now my favorite Russian novel.