I’m here for Gravity’s Rainbow. Embarrassed to admit that I’ve started it 5 times and have not finished it. It’s a WTF am I doing reading this thing. I have read and even enjoyed the rest
of Pychon’s work,especially V. However the albatross that Gravity’s Rainbow is to me still haunts.
I personally didn’t think Paradise Lost was all that bad. At least it reads as in English and you can get a feel for what’s going on. There’s nothing particularly tricky language-wise happening there. Finnegens Wake, though. There’s just nothing that I’ve encountered in the same league in terms of impenetrability.
I don’t like this. For example, multivariable calculus is not particularly difficult, but it would be incomprehensible to someone with no knowledge of single variable calculus. Similarly, a textbook for the first two semesters of quantum mechanics is probably not the most difficult textbook a physics major will encounter, but it will be meaningless to someone who has never taken a university physics course.
More generally speaking, this criteria ignores prior knowledge, which may be very easy to learn, that could significantly decrease the difficulty level of the book.
I think it was io9.com that, a month or so ago, had a list of sci-fi books that people claim to have read but really haven’t, complete with quotes from various authors explaining why we should really go and actually read each book. Gravity’s Rainbow was on the list, but they weren’t able to find anyone who genuinely HAD read it to explain to the rest of us why it’s worth it.
Are you sure? It’s not that complicated or difficult to understand. It’s pretty straight forward, actually.
I read a page of Fifty Shades of Gray and I’m absolutely certain I’ll never read second.
I found House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski difficult. The confused side notes, digressions and asides are part of the theme and I’m pretty sure you aren’t even supposed to make sense of it.
Still isn’t Finnegan’s Wake though.
Don’t give up on it - the reveal is brilliant.
You need to skip forward to about page 78 for the porn. It’s still terrible though. Really, really bad. It makes Anais Nin seem good, and that’s a very low bar.
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.
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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.)
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Well, that twist only really works after they have been building the tension for the previous 361 pages. 
I’m embarrassed to admit that, for me, “War and Peace” was almost indecipherable. Of course, when I was reading it, I’d been in chemotherapy for three months and really had no brain left to keep track of all those multisyllabic names. Maybe the characters had been “Smith” or “Clark” I would have had an easier time of it. As for Faulkner, I won’t go near him. I felt stupid enough struggling with W&P.
I’m glad to see someone else mention “Fifty Shades of Gray.” I know it doesn’t really qualify as the hardest book to read, but certainly ranks near the top of the Worthless Books to Read list.
What!! :eek: I first read *Zen and the Art . . . *in a single night, unable to put it down. And I read it again (something I very rarely do with any novel). It was a major best seller, too. I don’t think I was the only person who really liked it.
I’ll admit to not having attempted many difficult books. I read Joyce’s Ulysses when I was in my 20s. It was a struggle and there wasn’t much reward, but I finished it and convinced myself at the time that I understood it fairly well. Finnegan’s Wake is incomprehensible to me, the most incomprehensible book I have attempted to read. There are parts of it that are a pleasure to read, I mean sentences or at most paragraphs, pleasurable just for the wordplay and the rhythm. The quote that poster FinnAgain uses for a sig is an example of this. It’s fun in a Gertrude Stein kind of way. I just have been unable to absorb any meaning out of any consecutive paragraphs or pages.
Infinite Jest, while difficult, I found understandable and rewarding enough to have reread.
I’m convinced that I have become a somewhat lazy reader in my late 50s. I still read a lot, but challenging fiction is too much work. I guess this means that my plans to read some important old classics in my old age will probably not work out.
Oh yeah. I have a copy, barely cracked it because it’s so intimidating. And I am an obsessive person who needs to read and understand every word.
Oh, and to nitpick (multiple posts):
The book is Finnegans Wake
The song is Finnegan’s Wake
It’s easy to remember. The title that rapes the rules of grammar is the work that rapes the English language. :dubious:
Or you never been to Mississippi. 
:eek:
Does anybody remember the old 50’s movie “The Young Lions”?
In the flick, Montgomery Cliff plays a Jewish corporal who is being hassled by his company sergeant. The sergeant spies a copy of “Ulysses” in Cliff’s footlocker, and yells at him “that’s a dirty book-get rid of it”.
It always made me wonder how an army DI/sergeant would have known anything about such a weird book as “Ulysses”-much less browbeat a private for having a copy.
No, that’s actually pretty accurate. Ulysses was at the center of a major censorship controversy so many people who had never read it knew it was a “dirty” book.
My response would be: “You would throw out a book about the guy who helped win the Civil War? Commie!”
Or alternatively, the book about the guy who spent 20 years at sea due to hubris.
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. It’s one of my very favorite books, and has helped shaped my world-view, but it is extremely allusive and abstruse and thus challenging. Doesn’t help that it starts in medias res with a narrator who may or may not be experiencing a psychotic break. It’s worth slogging through, though, and there is in fact a decent plot.