/lit/ - Literature

my diary desu

the big book of reddit

Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix was soooo long

Julian Rios' Larva
Moby-Dick for something without self-gratifying exercises

>>15825210
The Man Without Qualities
Doctor Faustus

they weren't really hard, but you had to be in the mood

>>15825210
"The Rise of American Civilization" by Charles and Mary Beard. Almost 2000 pages of dry overview history. Very fucking informative, though. Utterly dispelled any notions I had of this country having ever been anything but a playground for the ultra rich.

i guess kafka, the only one i felt like i "didn't get"
but otherwise, i wouldn't describe any of the books i've read as "hard"

>>15825210
Reading Ulysses right now and fucking hell it's hard. The only thing I can compare it to is reading Chaucer in the original without even ever having seen Middle English before.

>>15825210
Beloved by Toni Morrison. It went completely over my head.

>>15825210
moby dick

Ulysses and to a lesser degree Gravity's Rainbow. But, Portrait of the Artist was a breeze!

>>15825210
My first books in a foreign language. I can't remember which one was my first one in English but it was hard af. I read some books in a dual edition in French and it is not easy. I'm currently reading Camus' L'étranger in French and it is definitely not easy.

I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow in high school but stopped a little ways in because I found it annoying to read. More recently I tried reading the Recognitions (and got quite a bit through it still, I still intend to continue reading it at some point) but felt like I wasn't understanding much of what was happening. Though thinking back I do remember some specific things so maybe I wasn't as lost as I thought.

I tried reading Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Problem is I got my hands on an old english version and I'm not even a native english speaker.
So I got very confused early on.

Ulysses.
In the beginning it's like a revelation and the greatest piece of literature you've come across, but it goes on and on and on and on.

>>15825210
V. probably, though it might be because Lynchon is pretentious and haven’t realised it.

>>15825964
>Thus Spake Zarathustra.
>Problem is I got my hands on an old english version and I'm not even a native english speaker
this

also i read dostoyevski's idiot in english when i was 15. idk why, because i actually know russian.

Probably Ulysses. Nichomachean Ethics was hard too.
Idk why people think The Dick was hard unless ESL.

>>15825248
>The man without qualities

Second that. In fact, it's one of the few books I started without finishing it, despite absolutely loving most of it. I remember getting tired to death of a long rambling about Wagner.

>>15825210
Moby Dick and some of the poorly written advanced math texts I had to learn from

>>15825901
>>15825935
>>15826265
>all these posters saying GR
I have this on my shelf and was going to start it this weekend because I wanted to dive straight into good Pynchon, i'll be alright r-right vros? i'm not gonna get filtered 200 pages in?

>>15826604
MD isn't exactly hard in terms of situational comprehension, but the language is archaic/bombastic and Melville packs so much in that it can feel like you are missing a lot. Also chapter after chapter of cetology made me put it down for a month my first read. It's a good check at the door for readers who rely too heavily on plots, because it barely threads one together and yet it's still amazing

>>15826604
>Nichomachean Ethics
That book is boring. That's what made it difficult.

>>15826749
Moby-Dick is more difficult than Gravity's Rainbow. You'll be fine.

>>15826749
Am I the only person who liked the cetology chapters?

>>15825210
Probably Parmenides (Plato’s). I made it through, following about half. But I retained none of it and am looking forward to a second reading soon

>>15825210
Most postmodern fiction

>>15826774
I love them

Aristotle's Organon. I quit halfway through posterior analytics and just read online wikis.

>>15826871
This. I dropped Parmenides TWICE.
It is really sad, because I had no problem with any other dialogue. But I will read it again, properly this time.

Also, I can't understand why people unironically say Moby Dick. It was one of the best reads I've ever head. Very engaging, and I will read it again later this year, or at the beginning of the next one.

>>15825210
Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle.

Blanchot's the writing of the disaster

>>15826764
thanks for the reassurance anon
>>15826774
>>15826883
>>15826929
the cetology chapters are good! I have a cheap edition that only had footnotes in those chapters and they enhanced the read by comparing and contrasting 1800's knowledge with our modern understanding. I took a long break from Moby Dick because I first read it in high school and was used to being engaged by high-stakes plots like LOTR, but I found myself engrossed in Ishmael's crazy commentary and depth of knowledge when I picked it back up and on further reading.
Saying a book is hard doesn't imply it isn't enjoyable. A book may be hard because its dry and boring, or maybe the language is archaic, or the text references many obscure sources that make it hard to fully appreciate the first go around

>>15827565
Seriously?

>>15825210
or attempted to read ?
guy debord's society of the spectacle. and honestly i don't know if i'll ever come back to it. it almost feels like it's was very purposefully made unreadable, i've found almost worthless to take some notes from the first parts to decipher the next paragraphs - because in the next ones, he would just continue to vaguely ramble about stuff that would slightly contradict with what i had pictured earlier, and just enough to make the trash boom into shit in my head. and generally feel that i get where he was going - but on the other hand, that it was not complicated because his ideas were complicated, but because he made them into overtly pretentious shit.

and also the debord fans are some of the weirdest and most annoying type of pseuds i've ever encountered kek

>>15827686
to this day it informs most of the literature you will ever read, and is debated by literally everyone, so if you think about it, it's the hardest read there is considering it's basically like staring into a political and religious and literary and linguistic eight-ball

>>15825210
Of Grammatology

>>15825210
Gravity's Rainbow
Moby Dick
Infinite Jest

>>15826388
Maybe knowing russian confused your brain functioning accidentally

Probably not hard but Blood Meridian was tedious.
>fuck grammar
>pull out a word for hoe from the 8th century, have fun pulling out your dictionary every 5 lines even with context clues

>>15828202
I'd have to reread some of McCarthy's stuff but I've seen some people complain about his aversion to punctuation but for instance with the quotation marks I kind of like it and don't remember it making it hard to read. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have a lot of literature from the 1800s that extend sentences to infinity with semicolons and hyphens that make them hard to read for the completely opposite reason.

>>15825210
Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Only 50 pages in and have had to put it down multiple times because I have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.

>>15828057
>>15826764
why are you retards acting like moby dick is difficult

>>15825277
nigger

>>15825277
Ulysses isn't that hard to follow at a surface level, what makes it interesting/worth studying is the 90% under the literal events, of references, recurring motifs, parallels, etc.

>>15828057
IJ is not difficult... I don't understand how you can read GR and Moby Dick but think IJ is in any way hard to follow

>>15825210
Paradise Lost was hard at first, re-read recently and breezed through it though

Translated French and German has fucked me though, I can barely struggle through Camus and Kafka, something about the language puts my brain on sleep mode

>>15825210
Not necessarily hardest in the sense of having the most unintelligible prose (although the style can be a lot to chew on at times), but The Brothers Karazmov is maybe the most difficult to read cover to cover due to its length, density, and numerous subplots. Well worth it, though.

>>15828766
This can help get a lot more out of Paradise Lost

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/intro/text.shtml

Also, Yale has an open course on Milton that can also help increase comprehension and appreciation

https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-220

>>15828780
I read quite a bit of shakespeare in between my reads of PL, and I think it made a huge difference. Shakespeare is significantly easier to follow, and after 2-3 plays any trouble with archaic language is gone.

Antiodipus capitalism and schizophrenia

>>15828806
It's not about the archaic language, it's all of the obscure references to classical texts

>>15825231
i just finished it an hour ago, can confirm

I'm reading Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery now, and it's probably it. Or rather, I feel a subjective amount of personal confidence that it is the most difficult one, since I can't interpret the previous statement as a "formally singular probability statement".

>>15828662
No you're a retard

Clockwork Orange. I'm too small brained to decide the bullshit slang.

>>15825210
Programming text books and biochemistry text books.

>>15826749
GR is generally considered to be one of the most dense and difficult books ever written. Good luck is all that I can say my dude.

>>15829011
The ol' in and out=sex

>>15825210
The Tale of Genji because of Heian Japan's autistic rule about not referring to people by proper names and the translator respecting the original text only referring to people by dress color and station.

>try to listen to critique of pure reason on audiobook
>can't follow anything
>try to read the book instead
>can still barely follow along
Same goes for Leviathan, and probably Hegel.

>>15828831
This gave me a hard time too, although apparantly its written for people in their early teens.

>>15829011
I'm ESL and got it just fine

>>15825210
I'm north korean and 1984 was hard though

Nobody in this thread has read Finnegans Wake

Tencrieff Proust in my opinion.

>>15826774
I found them annoying because they were factually incorrect. They're even incorrect for a lot of the knowledge at the time.

>>15829335
It was hard in the most difficult way, which is not rare words or odd semantics but endless sentences with page long comma clauses.

Infinite Jest and as non fiction some part of Intro to Christianity by Ratzinger were kinda hard.
>>15825243
>>15825480
Imagine being filtered by Moby Dick
>>15825917
Really? What's your mother tongue?

>>15829286

I can relate to both ya'll, began reading at 23 and was dumbfounded. Turned to it again at 28 and voila

>>15829137
read hume

>>15825210
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

I just couldn't do it

>>15829397
Imagine being filtered by Infinite Jest

>>15826759
fuckin fight me

>>15826764
Its far easier and neither as fun nor good.

unironically the bible desu

Trodding through the slog that is Infinite Jest made me want to kill myself.

>>15825248
>The Man Without Qualities
Second that, took me 8 months or so to finish it. Brilliant book.
I would say that 'The Critique of Pure Reason' was the hardest for me. Also took me about 8 months to finish.

>>15829622
> fell for the meme

I dont even feel sorry for you

>>15826604
>Nicomachean ethics
I think that only certaisegments are hard, e.g. the ones discussing justice. There's harder work in Aristotle's corpus for sure, e.g. The Organon or Metaphysics.

>>15825210
German translation of the Iliad and Odyssey by Johann Heinrich Voss. Its from 1781 and considered the version most faithful to the greek original, but its hard to read. Its like Faust but harder.

>>15826894
I found Organon hard as well, but mostly just Prior Analytics. You should have kept going, Topics is really good. Which online wikis did you read, by the way?

>>15825210
Where’s Wally in History

>>15829691
>Faust
>Hard

>>15829474
You're wrong

>>15829691
you do know that Goethe is bullshitting you during the parts where Faust explains life to his apprentince?

Timothy Williamson.

If you know of him, congratulations.

hermann hesse the glass bead game.

stopped after the first half because the part where the mc gets to the monastery is boring. the concept and the intellectual cockfighting with music and strategy games of the first half was way more entertaining

What is the best book you've ever read that is also extremely pleb friendly/easy to read?
For me,it's the little prince

>>15825210
I just read Valis by Philip K. Dick and it was challenging to keep the narrative and important points in my head without going insane.

>>15827565
This.
It insists upon itself.

>>15825249
Mary Beard is a fucking retard

>>15829137
Why the fuck do they even make audio books of stuff at this level?

>>15828251
Just wait until he starts rambling about jazz music

>>15825210
Read Crying Of Lot 49 at fifteen. Copy was missing 20 pages. Barely understood it.

>>15825210
A Short History of Decay by Cioran. It's accessible as you don't need to read very much prior to understand it, and it's short, but holy shit you have to read so attentively in order to make any sense at all of some passages.

>>15825210
Physics for scientists and engineers, by Randall D. Knight. Starts off easy but electromagnetism got hard, especially when we hadn't learnt surface integrals but he was discussing Maxwell's equations.

It's probably not the hardest, but it was the biggest learning curve for me personally.

>>15833951
War and Peace

>>15825249
You got hoaxed by those liars

>>15827899
smart nigger

>>15829328
Is it even readable?

>>15834286
I love you anon

beelzebub’s tales to his grandson

>>15833951
Vonnegut

>>15836829


No it's not.

I adore literature fully. And that book is just a masturbatory trot through a master of the English language's mind.

It is insane; amazing, mystic, and not for common consumption.

>>15825210
A book of John le Carre. What a pompous fuck.

>>15825210
Difference and Repetition - Deleuze
Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel

>>15825210
Djinn. My French is terrible. Thus Djinn.

>>15831930
No, he is right. Moby Dick is 'Capital b' boring. GR is both more complex and more fun.

>>15837805
McKenna believed it was the distillation of entire human history and mythology in one book.

>>15825231

>>15825210
Critique of Pure Reason, Cours d'Algèbre (by Renée Elkik), Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus by J-F. Le Gall.
Tried reading Category Theory for the Working Mathematician but I made the critical mistake of trying to do all exercises and to write explicitly all functors and natural transformation down to the object level. Gave up at chapter three. Incidentally did the same with A. Douady's Algèbre and théories galoisiennes.
When you read a math textbook don't fall for the uncorrected exercises meme.

>>15838468
You're wrong

>>15834312
Mary Beard might have been a retard in your eyes when she was alive, but I'm betting you're referring to the BBC historian.

>>15836699
Shut up, kike.

>>15830959
Compared to modern books, especially in german, its definitely not an easy read. No idea what its like in burgerspeak or whatever shithole language you speak.

>>15831951
At least try to make your point using coherent sentences please.

>>15839267
Aight I just looked up english Faust quotes and its literally made so retards can understand it. The german original is Hegel tier difficulty compared to the burgerspeak translation.

>>15829379
>>15828226
Comments above seem to make a point about sentence length and complexity making a work much more difficult to read. I think works of this nature pose a more considerable challenge than works which are simply dense in terms of characters, sub-plots and information. I didn't have trouble with War & Peace, Karamazov, even Infinite Jest so much. For some reason it's the works that tend towards long sentences with multiple clauses that are the most tricky. At the lower end, this is something like Saramago or Proust - I no longer find their sentence structures an obstacle to a considerable degree - but writers that tend to really long sentences with endless streams of clauses like Krasznahorkai and Matthias Enard seriously slow my reading speed. A novel simply having longer sentences on account of being archaic isn't hard in itself, but Tristram Shandy was very hard and not because of its self-reflexiveness/recursivity. Gerald Murnane takes recursivity to the point where it's unbearably repetitive, some readers have told me, but I don't find him frustrating to read or difficult to follow.

>>15825210
Duncton Wood. A more plodding tale I've never seen.

>>15827788
Based

>>15835040
I read this in a first year English uni class. For Pynchon I'd consider Lot 49 pretty straightforward really.

>>15829691
wanted to read iliad and oddyssee as well in german. is voss really the best? which version did you buy? i dislike anaconda so i dont know which to get

>>15833951
stoner

>>15839290
what?? we read that in school when i was like 16 and everybody in class managed to read it and enjoy it. its still a good book that many people can easily understand

>>15825210
Tristram Shandy

>>15840007
>compared to burgerspeak
If you are german, go compare english translations of faust to the original. It is orders of magnitude easier. Also, this entire shit started with me saying that the version of the Iliad that Im reading is comparable to Faust, but harder to understand. I never claimed that understanding Faust itself takes 150IQ.

im having a 'hard' time reading the sailor who fell from grace with the sea atm. i really like the prose, but all the boat stuff goes over my head.

im about the start Part 2, hopefully i can follow a bit better.

>>15825210
Phaedo.

See>>15840107

>>15834312
He's clearly referring to the book Charles Beard wrote with his wife you fucking idiot.
You're talking about a Mary Beard who doesn't even write on American history.

>>15839974
Voss seems to be the closest to the original greek text. I compared some different versions, the newer ones are more easy to read, Voss however sounds more authentic and true to what you would imagine the original text would read/sound like.

The Republic.

I'm going to have to reread it at some point when I have more wisdom.

>>15829692
Some Wikipedia and Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy

>>15839230
>Waaah! he called my dick boring.
>You are wrong.
No u.

>>15825210
I found "Gravity's Rainbow" difficult to get through just because I had no idea what the hell was going on for most of it.

>>15825210
The Parmenides dialogue

>>15841335
Nigga just say difficult.

You could pick any of Aristotle.

I read all four books from Tad Williams's Shadowmarch series and I struggled with them like I have struggled with nothing else in my 40 years of reading. Each volume as long as the whole LOTR, and packed with a multitude of different gods that all had different names in the different languages of the world, and their stories kept continuously changing as the books progressed and it all turned out to be important at the end. The books were prett good in hindsight, with a genuinely epic ending, but that hampered my reading experience. Keep a spreadsheet with all the god's names if you ever read those books, seriously.

For some reason I also really struggled with Knights Templars by Katherine Kurtz, which is a kind of historical fantasy horror novel. Not bad at all but I just couldnt keep going.

>>15841342
My point is that what made it difficult to get through was the plot, not the style.

>>15834286
kek

Fiction ? Lezama Lima's Paradiso (in french translation). Way harder than all the Musils and Pynchons.

>To The Fucking Lighthouse

Holy hot shit what was even going on here?? I got two chapters in and I couldn’t figure who was who, who was saying what who was thinking what or if anyone was actually saying anything or just thinking of saying something. Do they ever even end up making it to the lighthouse??

Seismic plastic analysis of concrete structures.