What was the first truly challenging book you've read?

[Anonymous No.16587806]

Before I read Blood Meridian, I read books like they were movies. I would read them for the stories and if a novel didn't have a good story it was worthless to me. When I started reading Blood Meridian, I tried to read it the way that I would read a Stephen King novel. It didn't work. It was confusing and it was hard but it was new territory. I only started to "get it" when I started concentrating on the writing in a way that I never had to, and it became fun. I can no longer imagine reading books that don’t stimulate me in a similar way. Have any of you experienced this “Shift”?

[Anonymous No.16587811]

>>16587806
I can't read Spanish.

[Anonymous No.16587869]

When I was 17 years old I, after having read nothing of literary merit except what I had been taught in school, decided to read Gravity's Rainbow.

[Anonymous No.16587882]

>>16587806
all fiction could be translated to film visually, it would just be increasingly less accessible the more challenging the book is.
Midwit-tier literature like McCarthy could easily be translated to film.

[Anonymous No.16587897]

>>16587806
Moby Dick, same reason as you, more or less.

I'm not American, so I didn't really know much about it before going in, and only started reading it because my grandfather had a very old edition on our attic and I didn't have anything better to do at the time. I was pretty young and had only read YA garbage by that point, so it was the first "real" novel I've ever read.

I was expecting a linear plot, the one everyone knows at this point because of cultural osmosis. Dude goes into a ship, meets a captain, they both go and hunt for a whale, things happen as a result, right?

The very first chapters hooked me like nothing else ever had up to that point. Ishmael's thoughts on why he was setting out for the sea in the first place, how it felt to get paid, why going in an excursion as a sailor was infinitely more rewarding than being a passenger, despite being forced to do arduous work when doing so.

But what really got me was the chapter where he goes into the chapel and hears the priest's sermon about Jonah and the whale. I had never been religious before then, despite being raised in an catholic household, but his re-telling of the story, mixed in with the lesson about how you should properly take God's punishment, affected me on a fundamental level.

>For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.

I know it'd be impossible because of the linguistic barrier, since most people in my country don't really speak english to the degree needed to read Moby Dick, but by god, do I wish it was mandatory reading here like it is in the US.

[Anonymous No.16587905]

>>16587897
It is not mandatory reading in the US.

[Anonymous No.16587913]

>>16587806
I know exactly what you mean, down to the "not reading books if they didn't have good stories" way of thinking. The shift happened only in the last year when covid closed all my local bookstores and because I hate amazon I was relegated to going back an reading all the books I'd pretended/tried to read in high school and uni to seem as though I was well-read. Happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude, really revelatory experience for me and now like you I can't imagine reading a book that doesn't challenge me in one way or another. Gone back to read the Russians and all of a sudden I don't find them tedious and interminable, they make sense. Same with Blood Meridian and others

[Anonymous No.16587941]

"Rupturing the Dialectic" by Harry Cleaver. It's a political book, so a bit different in terms of why it was a challenge to read, but it was the first book that made me stop halfway through because everything just went right over my head. I still don't really understand it as well as I should, but oh well, I don't read politics anymore.

[Anonymous No.16587946]

>>16587869
what made you choose that book in particular?

[Anonymous No.16588062]

>>16587806
portrait of the artist as a young man

[Anonymous No.16588091]

>>16587882
I disagree. I don't think that a visual medium could capture the brutality. I also don't think that a film adaptation could do justice to the long monologues of the judge.

[Anonymous No.16588097]

Clockwork orange when I was 14.

[Anonymous No.16588104]

>>16587869
How "readable" was it? Did you understand most of it? I don't know much about Gravity's Rainbow except that it is supposed to be abstract and hard.

[Anonymous No.16588125]

>>16588104
Not him but it kicked my ass at 21, I can’t imagine reading it in high school.
Not “technically” hard the way Ulysses is, just really heavy and deconstructive in every literary respect.

[Anonymous No.16588157]

>>16587806
American Psycho in HS

[Anonymous No.16588173]

>>16587946
The title just sort of grabbed my attention I guess. I knew going into it that it was "hard" but at the time I didn't quite grasp what it meant for a novel to be hard.

>>16588104
A lot of it went over my head but I immensely enjoyed it nonetheless and it got me interested in difficult literature in general. I started Ulysses a week after reading Gravity's Rainbow.

[Anonymous No.16588458]

>>16587806
I thought A Clockwork Orange was difficult until I read Trainspotting, until I read The Divine Comedy

[Anonymous No.16588464]

>>16588458
They are all 3 indeed difficult though

[Anonymous No.16588641]

Learning this is the ONLY thing there is to learn, OP. Welcome to the infinite staircase.

[Anonymous No.16588647]

>>16587806
IT. I was 10.

[Anonymous No.16588667]

>>16587806
When I read a translation of Crime and Punishment when I was a teenager. Opened my eyes and knew I wanted to read as a hobby

[Anonymous No.16588670]

>>16587806
Just wanted to say that the most challenging books are ones where the writer assumes the reader is knowledgeable in niche fields(eg. The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, etc).Some authors are deliberately obtuse and confusing so when reading those, it’s best to just go with the flow and realize you won’t get everything

[Anonymous No.16588692]

You could say the prose is “challenging” and I didn’t always know what was happening, but I was so enthralled, I didn’t think anything of my confusion. This book made me love reading.

[Anonymous No.16588702]

>>16587869
That happened with me as well, but I didn't get past maybe 30 pages or so. I remember the giant adenoid as being about when I stopped. I just had no clue what was happening so I got bored.

Recently actually read it, at 29.

[Anonymous No.16588722]

>>16588702
That part about the adenoid was the first really big "what the actual fuck" moment for me in the book. That was about when I realized what I had gotten myself into.

[Anonymous No.16588724]

I got 100 pages into Tristram Shandy a few months after I started reading seriously. There was a page with nothing but Latin written upside down, followed by a completely black page. I gave up soon after

[Anonymous No.16590126]

>>16587806
>Blood Meridian
I'm listening to the audiobook right now, what's the problem with it? Just some kid going on adventures inna desert.

[Anonymous No.16590132]

I had the bright idea to read Ada as my first Nabokov novel while 15 years old. It was good but I probably should have just read Lolita.

[Anonymous No.16590334]

>>16587882
unfilmable.

like Confederacy of Dunces- there is no way to do it justice on film.

[Anonymous No.16590359]

>>16590334
Why? What scene? Also, here's your Judge bro.

[Anonymous No.16590427]

Pic related at 16, I had a lot of trouble with the tone, and also remember confusing which character was doing what and so. I don't know, maybe I'm retarded.

[Anonymous No.16590924]

Heart of Darkness. I struggled with the language a lot and I just ended up translating the whole book. It wasn't the most entertaining story but it truly changed me. I've become a mirror image of Kurtz. I am a man now.