Dalhgren was so tough I couldn’t finish it.
I enjoyed the Silmarillion but it’s definitely not a book for everyone.
I liked Moby Dick but I have to admit I skimmed though the middle.
I waded through Dante but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it.
I read a couple of versions of the Illiad and the Odessy. There’s a prose version written for younger people I particularly enjoyed.
What I can’t understand is why everybody thinks Phillip K. Dick is so great. 99% of his stuff is unreadable to me.
Unreadable as in “dense and inpenetrable” or unreadable in the sense of Dan Brown?
I assume you mean the latter. As I understand it he is highly regarded for exploring philosophical, political and metaphysical themes in his novels, which IIRc, few scifi writers were doing in his day.
I think I counted nine that I read, including the entire seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. From the link:
It took me about a year. I enjoyed it. Helped that I was somewhat familiar with that time period.
I’ve read War and Peace too and never thought it was all that difficult. It does help to have a basic understanding of the history of that era.
Just curious: why did you read the whole serious when you could have quit after the first book?
Most people I know have sort of a love/hate relationship with him. He had some great ideas and concepts, but he was too poor a writer to express them very well.
When I was younger, I forced my way through the entire “High Couch of Silistra” series by Janet Morris. I kept waiting for it to get good. I was too young to realize it wasn’t going to get good!
(I was also deceived by the cool Boris Vallejo cover art. Gotta be rollicking heroic fantasy, right? Bosh! Boringest stupidest wimpiest nothing of a series ever. Hellissh dull.)
That was when I learned my lesson: if a book (let alone a series!) doesn’t get my interest in 100 pages…to hell with it.
How much more dragging is the un-abridged version of War and Peace compared to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Still, I found the Gibbon work an enjoyable read.
You’re generous. I give any author 50 pages, and if I’m not hooked I put the book aside guilt-free. If the author hasn’t got me by then, I know from hard experience that he or she never will.
I read about half as an english lit major. If moby dick and pet sematart made the list, the rest arent that hard.
*The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion * by Frazer
I found it head-splittingly difficult, especially with its tendency to jump from one diverse cultural worldview to another.
I’ve read both, and didn’t find either boring.
War and Peace does go off on some weird tangents. Tolstoy’s view of history-as-the-integration-of-differentials(people) feels like he’s anticipating Asimov’s “Psychohistory” from the Foundation series, except that you get the impression that Tolstoy believed it, while Asimov didn’t really believe his Statistical Mechanics view of history. Tolstoy’s “calculus of history” leads directly to his “non-great man” theory of history, where nobody, not even Napoleon, really influences events. He goes out of his way to show how Napoleon’s supposed fateful decision were really misinterpreted and really didn’t have the effect everyone thinks. I found all this fascinating, but if you’re more interested in Pierre and Andrei and Natasha, you’ll find this a boring side-discussion.
From this list I’ve read:
Moby Dick - liked parts of it, not the whole thing
Infinite Jest- HATED it! Smug, glib, facile and juvenile. DFW was really far too impressed with himself.
Finnegan’s Wake - Actually liked this once I got a hang of the weird ‘dialect’ prose.
The Sound and the Fury - had to read this for an English Lit class, but was surprised at how much I got into it.
The Naked Lunch - Incomprehensible junk. Beyond over-rated.
Pet Semetary - I’m guessing it’s the kid getting killed (really uncomfortable subject matter) that gets this book on the list. Thought it was a decent pot-boiler, but not especially dense going.
To the Lighthouse - I liked this book quite a lot. I rate it as one of my all-time favorites.
Johnny Got His Gun - Remember reading it, but don’t actually remember much about it. I remember the movie better, it was depressing as hell.
Dhalgren - actually I once started to read this, but misplaced the book and never got around to getting a new copy. As an aside, I will mention that just a few miles away from where I live (Brooklyn, NY) is a small, narrow side-street that goes by the name “Dhalgren Street.” I have always wondered if that’s where Delaney got the name. 
The Silmarillion - Just lots of detailed backstory to the LOTR. Solely for the most die-hard Tolkien fans (like me!) First time I read it, I kept asking myself “What about the hobbits? Where are the hobbits?”
Heart of Darkness - don’t remember this being too difficult. Also, it’s just a novella, not a full novel. It appears in story collections, but really isn’t a ‘book’ in itself.
War and Peace - again, despite slogging through the whole thing, I don’t remember enough to say anything about it. (My advice, read “Crime and Punishment” instead - I liked that one a lot.)
Gravity’s Rainbow - This is another vastly over-rated load of boring claptrap by another author who is so smugly impressed by himself that he forgot to be entertaining. Utne Reader once included this book on a list of the most all-time over-rated, with the comment that it is a “favorite among pin-headed geeks who live in their own mind.” I concurred.
The Canterbury Tales - I agree. Don’t f*** wi’ da Wife of Bath. She’ll beat your ass!
The Divine Comedy - True story, I was inspired to read this book by the X-Men comic book. In one of their annual issues, the X-Men and Dr. Strange took a tour of a magically constructed simulacrum of Dante’s account of Hell in “Inferno.” I read the whole thing in sixth grade (about age 12.) I Impresed the Hell (PNI) out of my English teacher, but of course ALL the social criticism and symbolism was way over my head.
And as for books that I am surprised were not mentioned:
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Again, I liked it, but a lot of folks say they can’t get through it.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - something I liked when I read it as an impressionable 16 year old, but imagine doesn’t hold up well.
The Christian Bible - I mean, seriously, have you actually READ this thing? Talk about confusing, complicated mess! Only folks who’ve never read this could insist on taking it literally.
I’ve never understood the hate for this book. I loved it. However, I was fortunate enough to have read it in a class for Latin American literature, taught in English by a Colombia scholar who was a huge fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He taught us all the little in references, and he was a great teacher on top of that, and I was fascinated by the whole thing. I never stopped to consider what it would have been like if I’d just picked up a copy on my own, so I admit I might have been less than enamored if I had.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think he was a Panama scholar, but naturally that entailed a lot of Colombia.
I got through it…but hated every damned minute of it.
I didn’t have any of that context; I had only the book itself. So, certainly I’m missing a lot that might have redeemed it for me. But, sheesh, the thing made no sense at all. It was plodding and dull and tedious, and, worst of all, it was stupid. The characters were all dolts. Even the magic and miracles were stupid ones.
(I did love the “imitative fallacy” in the extremely long sentence, which mimicked the style of a shrewish wife complaining about her husband. That was funny!)
Yeah, the more I’ve thought about it over he years, the more I’ve realized how lucky I was to have read it in that context. Apparently if you are Colombian and read the book in Spanish, it makes a lot more sense, because they’re gaga over him there and know all about him. And about Colombian history, of course. The town in the book was based on his own hometown, the main house in the book was based on his childhood home, and they all know it, because the house is still sort of a mecca for Garcia Marquez fans.
Examples: The main characters were all named after metals – gold, silver etc – and exhibited qualities commensurate with those metals’ properties. A passage near the end deals with a group of intellectuals visiting a brothel, and one loses a manuscript he had been working on. It turns out these were real-life friends of Garcia Marquez, and he was taking the piss out of them; for years afterward, the one who lost the manuscript had to keep denying in interviews that no, he really never lost a manuscript in a whorehouse. 
Someone should publish an edition with lots and lots of footnotes! I’d have been a lot happier if the point of some of the plot elements had been explained!
I think the translation I read was actually a good one. I never felt anything against the language, the words, the flow, the “poetry” of the book. It was just the narrative elements. The plot, the events. There never seemed to be any point to it.
A friend of mine writes self-consciously in Marquez’ style… And I don’t like his stories either. The same problem: something miraculous happens…that seems to have no use, no point, no purpose.
I guess I’m just a slave to narrative!
Faulkner - The sound and the fury
Dickens - The Old Curiousity Shop. Started this one a half dozen times and only get 25 pages in before quiting.
Conrad - Heart of Darkness. Was so bored by the time they headed upriver that i quit.
Updike - Rabbit Run. I somehow read Rabit Redux first and loved it. I can’t get past the second chapter of Rabbit Run.
The list seems to be an odd mix of tough to read because of the language and tough to read because of the subject matter. A lot seem to be tough because the subject is so damned depressing.
I’ve only read a few, having been turned off by high school English lit where we were forced to read *Johnny Got His Gun *, Faulkner and Dante, and don’t plan on trying many of the others. High school English teachers have a sadistic streak.
That’s a good way to put it. The ones I’ve read:
*The Sound and the Fury
Geek Love
House of Leaves
Canterbury Tales
The Divine Comedy
*
I am astonished that Geek Love made the list. All the other books I read were read for school, and not ones I would have likely picked up on my own. But Geek Love was enjoyable and I wouldn’t even call it emotionally draining. Sure, it had a strange premise, but we’re not talking about anything that would bring tears to anyone’s eyes.
Also, I agree that At Swim-Two-Birds would have been a good book to include on the list. And personally, I’ve found anything by Shakespeare hard to get through, so I would have liked to see him on this list, but I know a lot of people who find his work easy-to-read and highly enjoyable, so maybe that wouldn’t be an entry that would ring true for a widespread audience.
I’d be interested to hear more about how Infinite Jest come across as facile. Smug and self-important are charges I’ve heard before, obviously, but glib and facile, no.