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Who is the hardest read?

ions

ions

New Member
Not including reading something that isn't in your first language of course. Who is the hardest to read? Is it Shakespeare? Joyce? Faulkner? Melville? Conrad? Kafka? I've heard some suggest Dickens is hard to read. Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? I've seen a few confused by the style Saramago used in Blindess.
 
For me, Umberto Eco is a difficult read. I don't often have long periods of time without some kind of distraction. I find that his books are very difficult to put down and pick up. I ususally end up reading the same few paragraphs over and over again. He's a great writer though, so I suffer through it.
 
Aristotle

The Nichomachean Ethics is one helluva hard read. The others you mentioned never really bothered me - maybe because I can easily find some undisturbed time (I'm so grateful I live alone :p)

I read Oliver Twist when I was 13, I think, but that's the only Dickens I've ever read. It did strike me as somewhat dry and in the best 13 year old style I probably breezed through many parts of it - I have no memory of doing so, but knowing me I probably did :p

Am reading Dostoyevsky now and while his language isn't exactly something one can speed-read, it isn't what I'd call hard. Though advanced it is still fairly straightforward.
 
mehastings said:
For me, Umberto Eco is a difficult read.
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Conversely, I found Eco to be an easy read, once I'd settled into Foucault's Pendulum. The one I looked at, read sixty pages without a clue as to what was happening, was Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.
 
ions said:
I've heard some suggest Dickens is hard to read.
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I'm a member of this crowd. Not that his writing is hard to understand or digest - it's just that it is so darn boring! At least IMHO ;)

I've seen a few confused by the style Saramago used in Blindess.
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Again, me. I didn't like the lack of speech marks in the book - I was sometimes confused as to who was actually doing the speaking, and even sometimes if they were speaking at all!
 
One book I really had trouble with and didn't end up finishing was Tess of the D'erbevilles (sp?). I forget who the author was, but I think it was Thomas Hardy. I just found that there was too much that was unsaid. I did try to read it many years ago, though, so perhaps if I tried again now I might get it and be able to actually finish it. My friends who have read it tell me that it is great and can't understand why I didn't like it. I guess I just like to be told exactly what's going on rather than be left to assume so much.

I didn't find Tolstoy difficult to read, but I did find War and Peace took me a long while to read because there was just so much in the essay-type parts to digest and think about.
 
I don't like writers who use what I call 'dictionary' words all the time. One or two, fine, but not on every page and paragraph. I think that some writers want to show off their vocabulary over their writing skills. If that makes any sense.
 
Stewart said:
Conversely, I found Eco to be an easy read, once I'd settled into Foucault's Pendulum.
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I think that I would feel the same if I had a chance to read for more than 10 minutes with a guarantee that I wouldn't get sent out on a call, have to answer the phones, or have the boyfriend/dog harassing me.
 
I would have to say Karl Marx. I've started it twice, but never finished it. I've cheated, though, read the ending, but it doesn't make sense. Marx makes the rules, and Marx says "YOU HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE DARN BOOK, WOMAN".

Marx is the man.
 
Actually, since I just realised we're not talking about fiction. I would like to say that the hardest read I've ever come across is the two book volume (Science and Theosophy) on my shelf, named Isis Unveiled, by Madame Helene Petrova Blavatsky.
 
Mmmf, generally I find that many philosophical works qualify as hard reads. One, because there's the thoughts and concepts to sort out, and two, because most philosophers strive to be as precise in their wordings as possible and thus end up having very long sentences with more subclauses than is easy to keep track of. I think it was in Aristotle's Ethics I ran into a sentence that took up half a page - it was a bother to decipher, but for philosophy I'll do it gladly :p
 
-books whose characters speak in dialects that I have to "translate"-this is fine if it doesn't go on for the whole book. As I get older, I find I have less patience for books that make me work. After all, I'm not in school anymore (thank God) and I'm reading for pleasure most of the time.

-books where people use phrases in a foreign language and the author doesn't bother to translate for us. Sometimes I look it up; others I just skip it but I'm disgruntled and it kind of ruins the rest of the book for me.

-like CDA, I don't like too many "dictionary" words either!

-and books that lack punctuation such as quotation marks when people are speaking, I'm sailing along and suddenly become aware that I'm reading a conversation and have to go back and figure out who is saying what and what's being spoken and what's not. It gets to be too much trouble to keep reading. I've seen more and more books use this style-what, is it getting too expensive to print quotation marks?
 
At the risk of revealing my retardation...


I would say that Thomas Wolfe Look Homeward Angel was, if not the most difficult, at least the most painfully displeasurable book I have attempted to read.
 
Dickens is hard for me to read. I got about half-way through The Old Curiosity Shop and had to quit. I had no idea that a paragraph could be 300 words long but only have two sentences! As far as philosophy goes, I haven't read any of that...yet.
 
LOL Miss Shelf, you'll find that the style with a distinct lack of quotation marks existed back in the day as well. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto has some of the most confusing direct speech sections I've ever seen, but once I got used to it I greatly enjoyed the book - it's hilarious.
 
regardless of when the style was first used, I didn't notice it increasing in popularity till fairly recently. I enjoy Paddy Doyle's books, and it took me a while to get used to it, but I still prefer quotation marks-I'm lazy. :)
 
Miss Shelf said:
-books where people use phrases in a foreign language and the author doesn't bother to translate for us.
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So you'd rather read "James blushed when he realised his faux paux, which means mistake." ?
 
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