[MikeCF]

(10-24-2013 10:05 AM)Starbuck Wrote:  

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.

Zarathustra is hard if you didn't grow up in a Christian home.

I was raised on the King James Version Bible. Had to read that damn thing every day. It sucked but man if you grow up reading that, your reading level will always be higher than other kids'.

Nietzche's work is thus very lyrical and even comical (as you get the allusions more) if you were a Christian kid.

(Nietzsche started off wanted to study divinity.)

[Lights]

undefined

[The Lizard of Oz]

Mike, you may not have enjoyed it at the time, but you cannot possibly have a better preparation for reading and writing in English than reading the KJV every day as a child. You have the deepest and truest cadence of English in your bloodstream. I'm jealous.

[Bill]

(09-06-2013 09:15 PM)sfer Wrote:  

(09-06-2013 08:08 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I believe a strategy for some writers is to make their work so dense that even people who don't understand it will claim to love it so that they can show intellectual superiority to others.

Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

The author of the "Name of the Rose" intentionally made the first 100 pages much harder to read than the rest of the book. If you get past that point, you feel like a genius since it becomes a lot easier to read.

True, the first 100 pages are mostly descriptions of the church which was extemely boring so I started at around page 100. I didn´t play his boring game.

[InternationPlayboy]

Ayn Rand books because of the long ass speeches. They can be unbearable to read.

[Saladin]

My BIG TOE by Thomas Campbell.

Ayn Rand's books are a breeze compared to that.

[Tail Gunner]

(10-23-2013 08:11 PM)Player_1337 Wrote:  

(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.

I am reading his dream-quest stories right now. His word imagery is amazing.

Quote:

All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.

[InternationPlayboy]

Torontokid, I'm not saying Ayn Rand is complicated to understand, I'm just saying those 30 page speeches are just hard to read because they are so boring sometimes.

[Soma]

(10-28-2013 03:13 AM)InternationPlayboy Wrote:  

Torontokid, I'm not saying Ayn Rand is complicated to understand, I'm just saying those 30 page speeches are just hard to read because they are so boring sometimes.

The climactic John Galt speech expounding Objectivism in Atlas Shrugged is closer to 100 pages...

[Lucky]

A few months ago I read The Inferno by Dante (John Ciardi translation) while on vacation in Greece. That was the most difficult book I've read and I'm not sure I would have understood most of it without the helpful notes at the beginning of each chapter. I've never been good at interpreting symbolism in poetry.

[Greek kamaki]

(09-06-2013 03:36 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I'm talking about one that you have to keep backtracking, or maybe you have to go online to figure out what the hell is going on.

The Landmark Thucydides would be mine. I'll probably have to re-read it at some point in the future.

http://www.returnofkings.com/6275/the-la...thucydides

It is very interesting book.For me it is very lively as I have seen the places where the battles have taken place.For a foreigner the too many cities and names may be confusing.
Very difficult are German books like Kritik der reinen Vernunft by Kant or Phanomenologie des Geistes by Hagel.

[Vendetta]

(09-06-2013 06:05 PM)LEMONed IScream Wrote:  

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.

OH MY GOD! Only by reading it you can understand what I mean...

Agreed - one I was going to add. I finished it though and was glad I did (for the two sentences I understood - they were mind blowing! ; )

Quote:

Also catch 22. fuck that book.

Yeah - I have tried to read it several times. It's easy to read, and well written but for some reason, I keep wanting to stop reading it, it's fucking annoying and repetitive.

(09-07-2013 10:53 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

I will stick with a hard book if it is worthwhile and informative.

But if I suspect bullshit - I will just put it down.

Pleasure is an important part of why I read. And if a book is not pleasurable - it better be giving me information that I really want or need.

Agreed - I used to have a policy of "if I started it, I'll finish it" but not now. After reading "Bad Wisdom" by Bill Drummond of KLF fame, I swore to stop that rule. So when I decided to read "50 Shades of Gray" to see what all the girls were finding so fascinating, I stopped before the end. Such a poorly written POS.

(09-07-2013 10:58 AM)MunichSux Wrote:  

All "Market Wizards" book by Jack Schwager - a total of four by now. Google for some of the interviewees ... "Ray Dalio", "Bruce Kovner", "Steve Cohen". Talk about paycheck envy.

Yeah - he is the worst person to be writing these books! He just can't understand why it didn't work for him lol...

(09-14-2013 03:43 PM)Cyr Wrote:  

Scale and Scope, The Dynamics of International Capitalism.
I don't know if anyone else has read this but its a real killer. It would take me about an hour to read 30 pages, because the writing was so dense

An hour to read 30 pages?! Dude, it takes me about a month to read 30 pages, I'm so slow!

(09-16-2013 03:37 PM)cardguy Wrote:  

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.

It's weird, I haven't read fiction for maybe 10 years now as I've been reading books on making money or factual books of some kind. Now, I tried fiction again, so hard to do - I think it's probably a good thing to do though.

I'll add also, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce. Just annoying to read... too clever for it's own good. Or I'm just too thick. Oh, and Ewan McGregor once said it's his favourite book - an obvious and pretentious lie!

[joez79]

I gave up with Conrad 'Heart of Darkness' laborious detail. As an Irishman I had aspirations of reading Ulysseys - (and spelling it correctly) I doubt that will be happening now....

[Mikev75]

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey. I had trouble with the constant changes of tense and perspective.

[scandibro]

I thorougly disliked anything written by Kafka. It is the most depressing, insane, paranoid and straight up weird literature that I have ever read. Do not recommend. It is the writings of a sick twisted mind and I think any attempt to understand it will make you equally crazy.

[Therapsid]

(11-04-2013 05:08 PM)scandibro Wrote:  

I thorougly disliked anything written by Kafka. It is the most depressing, insane, paranoid and straight up weird literature that I have ever read. Do not recommend. It is the writings of a sick twisted mind and I think any attempt to understand it will make you equally crazy.

I agree. I've always wondered why he's been held up as one of the great 20th century writers. Honestly I read Kafka and can almost understand why totalitarian dictators like Hitler and Stalin railed against cultural decadence and modernist art.

Some literature makes you unhealthy just reading it. Try reading Kafka's short stories "In the Penal Colony" and "A Hunger Artist" for example. Kafka in his stories prefigures the absurd performance art that would emerge in the late 20th century.

[Mr. Plow]

In terms of general wording that takes a double take to fully get, I like The Prophet by Kahill Gibran. Not only makes simply sentence hard to understand, but has philosophy wrapped in the stories that I find I understand every couple years when I read it again. Seriously in 10 years I have read it 4 times and discovered something new every time.

[runsonmagic]

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter




The most intellectual dense book I've ever read. I can't even begin to describe it. It begins by deconstructing the premises of propositional logic to show how they are dependent on unprovable axioms using the mathematics of Godel, the music of Bach, and the artwork of Escher. And then it get weirder with dialogues between a tortise and a hare about artificial intelligence and human consciousness. It's just entertaining enough to allow you to understanding the graduate level math being used explain how we think.

This book will make you head hurt and force you to reconsider all your most basic premises. Highly recommend.

[Steve Derekson]

Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

Once you understand it, it can change your perspective on a lot, but even Wittgenstein would brag to his students how nobody would ever get it.

[Biz]

Walden

I had to stop reading after the first few pages. I couldn't piece anything together or understand what I was reading.

I could have gotten through it, but I didn't want to read the entire book without being able to follow it, then finishing it not knowing most if not all of the book.

Its a shame because it's been praised everywhere as a classic and its been on my to read list for years.

[Sawyer]

Heart of Darkness in high school. I wrote a paper about how bad it was for a gentleman's C.

It has since become one of my all-time favorites.

[DjembaDjemba]

The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer.

I read it, and I still couldn't tell you what I read. Just gibberish. I'm sure it was epic, I wish I could understand what it was all about.

[poutsara]

(11-27-2013 12:30 PM)DjembaDjemba Wrote:  

The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer.

I read it, and I still couldn't tell you what I read. Just gibberish. I'm sure it was epic, I wish I could understand what it was all about.

I read the Iliad and Odyssey and yeah, they were hard.

The interesting thing is these were composed thousands of years ago, and were in fact "classics" even in classical Greece. The fact that we are even talking about these epics in 2014 is amazing.

The plays by Sophocles or Aristophanes can be performed today and still get a rise out of a modern audience. This is crazy, when you think about it. Those Greeks were ahead of their time, by about 2000 years. How many other plays from that time can be understood today? Shakespeare (merely 400 years ago) might as well have been writing yesterday in comparison.

[poutsara]

(11-27-2013 12:22 PM)Sawyer Wrote:  

Heart of Darkness in high school. I wrote a paper about how bad it was for a gentleman's C.

It has since become one of my all-time favorites.

Heart of Darkness was good. I read it in high school too. Secret Sharer was similar. I have to re-read.

[poutsara]

(10-23-2013 08:10 PM)Player_1337 Wrote:  

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

I don't know if I understood Paradise Lost. But the imagery was amazing.

What I took away from John Milton was that the evil in the world is often big, grandiose even, while good is small, and easy to miss if you are not looking for it. The idea that 'The Kingdon of Heaven can be contained in a mustard seed", and all that.