# What is the most difficult modern English book to understand? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 19, 2012, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745 "2012-07-19T17:12:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Sampsiceramos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Sampsiceramos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampsiceramos)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2012, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/101 "2012-07-28T02:37:04Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > **Fair enough, but I think Hegel is supposed to be pretty tough going in the original German too.** > > Personally I had no problems with Hesse’s _The Glass Bead Game_ (in translation). It may be a bit dull compared to his other books, but I don’t recall it as being difficult to follow. > > ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ > > I haven’t read _Gravity’s Rainbow_, but I found Pynchon’s _V_ pretty hard going. (By contrast, _The Crying of Lot 49_ was quite fun.) > > ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ > Well, that twist only really works after they have been building the tension for the previous 361 pages. 🙂 Philosophy major speaking: Hegel is a dreaded PITA in every language known to man - not only because the man writes in prose that in matters of illegibility is second only to the ever-controversial Heidegger, but also because Hegel refuses to abide by any sort of good compositional taste _de res philosophiam_. _Phenomology of the Spirit_ is, verily I kiddeth ye not, an ontological investigation and proposition of an All-Consciousness made manifest in all phenoms, and Hegel formulates this as a _Bildungsroman_. That’s right, a **coming-of-age novella**! Frankly, _Phenomology of the Spirit_ is in such surreal taste compositionally that it would have passed into the oblivion of irrelevance long ago, were it not so brilliant in content. Still, its style is, when compared to that of Hegel’s peers and even modern works, no less odd than if say, Russell and Whitehead had decided to replace every Q.E.D. with: “Fo’shizzle, ma’ niggers!” ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2012, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/102 "2012-07-28T03:57:41Z")
Is _Inherent Vice_ (Pynchon) a pretty easy read? ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2012, 7:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/103 "2012-07-28T07:43:27Z")
I imagine something like Proust. There was a lot of discussion about how difficult Anathem was due to it using so much original terminology. Someone even torrented a version of it with all the terminology replaced by our versions of the terms to make it easier to read. I did find myself frequently checking the included glossary. ---
**Author:** ![jordanr2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jordanr2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jordanr2)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2012, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/104 "2012-07-28T11:37:06Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > I imagine something like Proust. Surprisingly, given his reputation, Proust is no more difficult to understand than Dickens or Austen - you have to keep track of a few more characters than usual, perhaps, but he’s so good at creating distinctive and memorable characters that this isn’t too hard. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2012, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/105 "2012-07-28T21:14:48Z")
I haven’t tried lol. I could imagine the obstacle being the pure volume. But then I managed to get through the entire Mission Earth dekology (and 60 other books one summer) for a contest. ---
**Author:** ![Noel\_Prosequi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b19c9b/32.png) [@Noel\_Prosequi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noel_Prosequi)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/106 "2012-07-30T01:12:16Z")
Sokal and Bricmont rather famously hoaxed the world of post-modern theorists with a piece called “towards a hermeneutics of quantum gravity” (or similar), and then wrote a book, called variously [Fashionable](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense) Nonsense or Intellectual Impostures, taking to task high profile post-modernists for portentiously but wrongly adopting scientific ideas to their supposed aid. The result is a distillation of extended extracts from the work of such people, followed by a patient explanation of why it is nonsense. It is, therefore, a mother lode collection of impenetrable prose in the Pomo tradition which has the added delight of being gleefully wrong. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/107 "2012-07-30T01:18:23Z")
It’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” There is also the story of [SCIgen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen), which randomly generated a nonsense computer science paper. They took it to a conference, although it seems it wasn’t peer reviewed. ---
**Author:** ![oreally](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/7ab992/32.png) [@oreally](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/oreally)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/108 "2012-07-30T03:04:55Z")
> [@Animastryfe](#): > > Dostoyevsky’s _Brothers Karamazov_ was the first Russian novel I read, and I had a very difficult time with it because of the Russian names, and how seemingly every character has a dozen different names. Dang just when I thought I had one nobody else did 🙂 > [@Svejk\_1](#): > > I’ve been reading William S. Burroughs _Naked Lunch_, which I’ve been enjoying, although I don’t really know what it is about. A famous jazz/rock group. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/109 "2012-07-30T07:00:45Z")
> [@smsaks2000](#): > > Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Brutal… That was my first thought. I’ve read some tough books, but once I put this down, I could not pick it up. ---
**Author:** ![chizzuk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e36b37/32.png) [@chizzuk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chizzuk)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/110 "2012-07-30T07:31:48Z")
Put me down as another one for _As I Lay Dying_. We had to read it junior year of high school and I was practically in tears halfway through from frustration. I think it was a combination of the narrator changing seemingly every other page and the stream-of-consciousness style, which I can barely tolerate even when I understand what’s going on, which I certainly didn’t in this book. I mean, I completely had no clue. Somebody had died and they were dragging her corpse around and that was about all I gleaned independently. After 3 failed attempts, I finally bought the SparkNotes so as not to fail the class. ---
**Author:** ![tullsterx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e9bcb4/32.png) [@tullsterx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tullsterx)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2012, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745/111 "2012-07-30T17:33:05Z")
> [@Laggard](#): > > Read half of the Sound and the Fury and realized I had no idea what was going on. I agree with this one. Just read some of Riddley Walker. . . pretty good. Seems if you just kinda soft focus it and not focus on every word it flows pretty well. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-most-difficult-modern-english-book-to-understand/628745.md?page=5)