Out of curiosity I tried to read the first few lines of Finnegan's Wake. Couldn't progress beyond that. How do people who actually read the book make any sense of it? This is not an example as stated in the post, but "most difficult book" made me think of this book immediately.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Fiction Books
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Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d taken classes in postmodernism and still found it so difficult to focus. I’m not sure if I enjoyed the reading process, but I felt good for having completed it. Took 2 attempts.
I have tried to read it three or four times and cannot get past the part about the banana tree and all the banana based food he cooks up. Not a banana hater but for some reason that part makes me kind of queasy and I put the book down every time
It would be The Road by Cormac McCarthy, if I could read it, but it's forever above my reading level.
Stefan Wul - Oms en Serie. Difficult because my french isn't that great. Interesting because it was adapted as Fantastic Planet. Great book. Wul is weird.
Gotta be Finnegan's wake. And it was totally just to say to myself that I did it.
And no, no enjoyment was had in the usual sense of enjoyment. At best, I could appreciate the experiment for what it is.
Outside of fiction, has to be Clausewitz, on war. That is a dense fucking read lol.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky it got a bit interesting after the halfway mark but damn was it dry in the first half.
For a pure joy read there was the unabridged Romance of the Three Kingdoms. For a book the size of an encyclopedia it was a fast feeling read.