A couple of years ago, the literary website The Millions began a series it called “Difficult Books,” in which readers were asked to name the books – fiction, poetry and non-fiction – that they found to be most challenging, frustrating, abstruse to read.
The reasons for this difficulty might include the books’ “length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction.”
This week, the two curators of the list, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, came out with their list of the “Top 10 Most Difficult Books,” which appeared on
the Publisher’s Weekly website.(Full disclosure: I own one of these titles. In hardback. Have had it for years. Was fascinated by the idea of the book. Read maybe a dozen pages. Not sure it’s going to make the move to the new house near Richmond.)
In any case, here’s the list:
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy
One would expect “Finnegans Wake” to make the list – the book’s linguistic experimentations pretty much guarantee that most people will find it difficult to read, although I know of at least one person who’s made it through and thinks it’s marvelous and funny. Good for him.
And I remember as a youngster seeing a paperbound copy of Richardson’s “Clarissa” on the top shelf of a bookstore – a tome thicker than most Bibles.
Two titles that probably could have been included on this list are “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon and Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren.” I managed to get about 50 or so pages into “Gravity’s Rainbow” before giving up completely (all I remember of the experience is the opening sentence – “A screaming comes across the sky” – and a whole lot of talk about bananas).
And “Dhalgren” – a mammoth slab of post-apocalyptic post-modernism – was well-nigh impenetrable. Ten pages was more than enough for me.
So – what’s the most difficult book you ever read? If you made it through to the end, was it worth the effort?
