[cardguy]

I find it an agony trying to read fiction. My brain just cannot engage with it. So for me it would be a novel or something.

[_GQ_]

Heart of Darkness was very difficult for me when I read it. Must have been 15 or 16.

[MikeCF]

(09-14-2013 04:29 PM)Fisto Wrote:  

Tried to read Genealogy of Morals by FN and put it back on the bookshelf after 3 pages.

Beyond Good and Evil is far more accessible and is a really fun read.

Genealogy is Nietzsche as a philologist (history of knowledge) rather than a philosopher. He is tracing the history of knowledge. That can be tedious, especially if you don't know where he is going.

It was the last book of his I read and it was great once you sorta get, "What is the point of all of this?"

[germanico]

(09-18-2013 10:25 PM)_GQ_ Wrote:  

Heart of Darkness was very difficult for me when I read it. Must have been 15 or 16.

I just read that for the first time just a few months back. I found it, not hard, just complicated, as if the author wanted to obscure it on purpose.

I liked it, but I dont see what all the fuss about it is.

[AnonymousBosch]

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. He cut up existing texts then put them back together in random order, resulting in the type of crap art snobs love to pretend they're intelligent enough to 'get', but are unable to quote a single passage from when challenged.

There's two other books in that trilogy. Never read them. Life's too short.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is the hardest book I've ever read. It is also, without a doubt, the best one.

[CJ_W]

(09-06-2013 05:16 PM)Moma Wrote:  

IT by Steven King or the Hobbit. I attempted those at the age of 12 and just couldn't get through it..shyt was mad boring. Decided to fcuk with Roald Dahl instead..My Uncle Oswald.

If you thought the Hobbit was bad. . .Read the lord of the rings books. . .

For some reason I read them when I was 14 (waaaay before the movies came out) because I had to read the hobbit for an English class, and I liked the story. . .for some reason I was really able to read all three books in a week. . .no joke. 10 years later I tried to read some of it, and I couldn't get past the 3rd page.

The hardest of Tolkien's books was The Silmarilion. . .

Fuck that book. worst pos book ever.

[mr_lucky]

The Ambassadors by Henry James

[mr_lucky]

Joseph Conrad's shit is pretty dense as well

[ralphi]

(09-06-2013 05:43 PM)emuelle1 Wrote:  

A book that I put down, not because it was intellectually challenging but because it was a pain in the ass to read was Catcher In The Rye. For all I've heard about it over the years, it was a huge letdown. I slogged through it for a few hours, then looked up the cliff's notes online. I couldn't identify with the character and got sick of his whining and stupid life choices.

Whaw! I'm a rich kid in the late 40's. I'm so misunderstood at all the expensive boarding schools I get sent to. Whaw! Where are gender studies when we need them?

I remember reading this in high school I think.

The kid had a pretty sweet life as I remember it. Freedom from parental supervision at a time in America when a 15 year old could drink. Tons of petty cash to move about and bang broads. Good looks so that he didn't even need strong game to get laid.

Basically this little douche had a charmed life and couldn't understand it. I think the book was written for two purposes. One being an explanation to the common man why trust fund children become pieces of shit. The other being a warning to privileged children that there is no future in feeling sorry for yourself.

If I'm wrong then I real don't know wtf the book was about. Maybe the author just needed to sell some books?

[LEMONed IScream]

Atlas Shrugged maybe.

[demolition]

The Book of the Short Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's relatively simple to understand the surface-level action, but understanding the deeper level of events and why some things happen is extremely difficult. I'm not sure I'd call it as good as The Book of the New Sun, but it is, I think, a more mature and meditative work.

[MasoMenos]

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was especially difficult for me. I love Miller's writing, his musings, his dark philosophical rants but, man, getting some meaning out of a lot of his prose proved especially difficult.

Plus, it being written in the 1920s/30s makes his allusions and references kind of difficult to follow.

Great, great book though

[CaliforniaSupreme]

I've read some literary works in Latin, that was difficult since I'm intermediate in the language. House of Leaves by Danielewski wasn't too easy either.

[Hannibal]

I downloaded the entire collection of H. P. Lovecraft last year for Kindle format (back in January) and I only just finished reading his collection of short stories, letters, and strange journals.

Got some pretty fucked up dreams from reading it too.

[Quintus Curtius]

(10-06-2013 07:04 PM)Hannibal Wrote:  

I downloaded the entire collection of H. P. Lovecraft last year for Kindle format (back in January) and I only just finished reading his collection of short stories, letters, and strange journals.

Got some pretty fucked up dreams from reading it too.

_______________________

I love his stories. Which ones did you like best? Be honest...!

[Hannibal]

(10-06-2013 07:24 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

(10-06-2013 07:04 PM)Hannibal Wrote:  

I downloaded the entire collection of H. P. Lovecraft last year for Kindle format (back in January) and I only just finished reading his collection of short stories, letters, and strange journals.

Got some pretty fucked up dreams from reading it too.

_______________________

I love his stories. Which ones did you like best? Be honest...!

The Shunned House was pretty awesome. I liked the scene where the author's uncle melts into a pile of flesh colored goo and then he goes apeshit and decides to dump gallons of acid into the hole in the ground where he found the ground giants elbow.

I also like Dagon because I realized that one of my favorite bands of all time, Nile, lifted a quote almost directly from the text in the song "von unaussprechlichen kulten".

Dagon quote:

Quote:

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind -- of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

The Rats in the Walls was a story that started out good and ended up ridiculous. De la Poer completely loses his mind over the rats that he ends up eating one of the guys (I think it was Norrys) who tried to help him out. From the point of view of the main character it seems like an odd supernatural thing happened where he learned that his family in the old Exham Priory castle-mansion would enslave/harvest people in the caves under neath their mansion, when in all likelihood he's just delusional.

There's a bunch of other stories I liked. One of them was where there was this family on a mansion on top of this large hill who simply "disappeared" and then all kinds of goofy shit started happening around the country side. There was a scene where the author's traveling companion looked out the window of a run down shack during a thunderstorm for about an hour, and then when the storm ended the author touched the guy on the shoulder and asked him if he was alright. When he did that, the guy fell backwards, only to reveal that his face had been completely eaten off. It was later discovered that the family "devolved" into subterranean monkey cannibals.

Then there was another one where the author went on fantastical journeys when he was passed out on drugs and the story ended when a group of ruffians threw his unconscious body off a bridge.

[Quintus Curtius]

Lovecraft's brand of horror is great...a weird mix of gothic horror and science fiction. My favorites are "The Shadow Out of Time", "The Music of Erich Zann", "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Rats in the Walls", and "The Picture In the House"...all great.
Good horror is not easy to do.

[Bad Hussar]

The Rosetta Stone at the British Library.

[Tail Gunner]

(09-10-2013 05:39 PM)gandt Wrote:  

Oh boy, I just remembered a goodie from when I used to major in English Lit in university:

Paradise Lost - John Milton

Quote:

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608-1674). It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification.[1] It is considered by critics to be Milton's "major work", and the work helped to solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of his time.[2]

This is one complicated piece of writing with depth of meaning that you wont believe.

I concur. I cannot think of anything that comes close. Even literary geniuses complain of its difficulty. I would suggest an annotated version with footnotes that contain verse-by-verse explanations.

[Cyr]

Just finished the Wealth of Nations. Its a good book and is certainly hard to read, but Im not sure how relevant all of the ideas still are.
I think it was more of a mental exercise than informative in and of itself.

[Player_1337]

I've read my fair share of epic poems, but Paradise Lost is a doozy.

[Player_1337]

(10-06-2013 09:09 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:  

Lovecraft's brand of horror is great...a weird mix of gothic horror and science fiction. My favorites are "The Shadow Out of Time", "The Music of Erich Zann", "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Rats in the Walls", and "The Picture In the House"...all great.
Good horror is not easy to do.

If anyone has any questions concerning Mr. HPL- I'm your man.

[Starbuck]

(09-18-2013 10:32 PM)MikeCF Wrote:  

(09-14-2013 04:29 PM)Fisto Wrote:  

Tried to read Genealogy of Morals by FN and put it back on the bookshelf after 3 pages.

Beyond Good and Evil is far more accessible and is a really fun read.

Genealogy is Nietzsche as a philologist (history of knowledge) rather than a philosopher. He is tracing the history of knowledge. That can be tedious, especially if you don't know where he is going.

It was the last book of his I read and it was great once you sorta get, "What is the point of all of this?"

This, start with Beyond Good and Evil if you want to get into Nietzsche.
Human, All Too Human is good as well because it contains mostly aphorisms..after that you can try and tackle Zarathustra, but I'll admit I`ve managed maybe a third of it over a couple months.

As for the topic, I found Atlas shrugged to be quite repetitive and even inane at times. It is a book with very little intellectual depth in my opinion, the prose is alright but the characters are poorly done and dont get me started on Objectivism....

I also absolutely hated The Brothers Karamasov, although I consider Dostoevsky´s other works brilliant literature. Not sure why, but it might be because of the religious aspects which are hard to relate to in the 21st century. There just seems to be no life in there.

[Arg expert]

La Vita Nuova, from Dante (Alighieri). Beautiful, though, but dark.