The Guardian's Blog, page 241

The world's most difficult books: how many have you read?

Literary website the Millions claims to have identified the toughest books ever written. How many of its top 10 have you read, and which others might be on your list?

Two and a half. I have read two and a half of the 10 most difficult books ever written, as selected by Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg of the Millions after three years' research.

The pair started their quest to identify the toughest books out there back in 2009, looking for "books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction". And I salute them for it – they're entirely aware that people are going to quibble, and use their choices to imply intellectual superiority: "There will, doubtless, be those readers who look scornfully on our choices ("Psh. These aren't that hard, you're just not smart enough to read them.") – and they don't care.

Anyway, they've now picked the most difficult of the most difficult – the 10 "literary Mount Everests waiting out there for you to climb, should you be so bold" – and have laid them out for discussion at Publishers Weekly.

The titles?
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;
and Women and Men by Joseph McElroy.

There are a few other books I might include in the list – Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and if I was going to choose Woolf, I'd go for The Waves. But of what they've come up with, I've managed To the Lighthouse – which I loved, and didn't actually think was all that difficult, but perhaps I was missing something – Clarissa, over a significant period of time, and half of The Faerie Queen. I'm not going to count A Tale of a Tub, because although I did read (most of) it at university, it was in that hopeless, 19-year-old fashion that means I can't really remember it, apart from a few quotes – "books, the children of the brain" – learned for exams.

I'm not sure, if I'm honest, that I'm going to increase this measly total. Will I ever tackle Finnegans Wake? It's unlikely, although I like the suggestion of reading 25 pages a day out loud in an Irish accent: "You'll be maddened, you'll be moved, and you'll be done in about four weeks." I'm tempted by Nightwood, particularly glancing at the fantastically convoluted, bonkers start here. So maybe I can get it up to three and a half.

How about you? Is there anyone out there who has read all 10, and has thus, in the words of Publishers Weekly, ascended "to the being immediately above homo sapiens"?

FictionLiterary criticismPhilosophyVirginia WoolfJonathan SwiftJames JoyceReligionAlison Flood
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Why Jilly Cooper should not let racy Rupert grow old disgracefully

Leading Sire will be Cooper's next racing romp. But do we want to see the beautiful bounder who first appeared in Riders nearly 30 years ago turned into a skirt-chasing octogenarian?

I have spoken before of my love for Jilly Cooper – she is such a hero of mine that, when she phoned my previous place of work to speak to a colleague and I spoke to her just to put her through to a colleague, my hands were practically trembling; my palms damp, in best Taggie O'Hara style. So despite my disappointment that Jump! didn't match up to her finest (Rivals, Riders, Polo, if you're interested – perhaps it was the exclamation mark that turned me off Jump!, Score! and Wicked!), there's still a part of me which is (in Cooper idiom) in heaven at the news that she's currently embroiled in researching her new novel, which will be set in the world of flat racing.

Thanks go to Horse and Hound magazine for alerting me to this, and for the wonderful quotes they've elicited from Jilly, who's been having – of course! – a "heavenly" time researching. "I've been to the Guineas, the Derby, to Ascot and I'm off to Goodwood this week. I've met Sir Henry Cecil and even Frankel. I don't think the latter liked me very much, though, as he tried to nip me," said the novelist, who has "fallen in love" with flat racing.

"I never understood why people liked sprints, but now I do," she went on. "I'm fascinated by the breeding side and the sense of dynasty. And, of course, the men are so charming and dress so beautifully."

What, though, to make of the fact that "Jilly's favourite rascal-in-jods Rupert Campbell-Black once again stars in the new book – working title Leading Sire – with his stallion Love Rat and the horse's offspring Master Quickly"? Rupert, is, of course, "Mecca for most women" – he's variously won the Olympics, taken a GCSE, been Tory minister for sport and won a television franchise. Obviously Rupert, who first appeared in Riders in 1985, nearly 30 years ago, has aged – he's got children these days, an "angel" of a wife in Taggie, etc. But – as yet, at least – he's always remained "as bloody-minded as he is beautiful".

The fact that he's getting yet another outing got me thinking about recurring characters, and how novelists handle them. Some allow their creations to grow older as their series progress – Ian Rankin and Rebus, Dorothy L Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. The Famous Five, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy summer holiday after summer holiday, never getting to an age where they would develop spots or teenage angst. I think that's how I'd like to remember Rupert: as the arrogant bounder who won Taggie's heart in Rivals, and the reluctant father of Polo, rather than as a skirt-chasing octogenarian, his perfect jawline sagging, his blue eyes a little less gimlet-like, his thick blond hair a little less, well, thick and blond.

Jilly CooperFictionAlison Flood
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Reader reviews roundup

In the first week of this year's Not the Booker prize, the reviews for nominated novels are flooding in

August, and the only prize that matters has rolled round again, kicking, screaming, blowing the odd raspberry and generally making a spectacle of itself. While the Man Booker judges champion their favourites in secret, arguing for this book or that behind firmly closed doors, the Not the Booker panel has to do its espousing right out in the front yard - that is, in the reader reviews.

Ewan Morrison's Tales from the Mall - now on the nominations list despite a flurry of controversy over whether it was, in fact, a novel - had been reviewed an impressive 33 times at the point of writing. The book, says lwaddell, "presents a comprehensive look at an increasingly prominent urban space that has been, until now, under-examined in fiction … [it is] ultimately a sad commentary on the current priorities of a society which favours plastic wrapped, infantilised consumerism over neighbourhood and community." LornaJWaite calls it "a dazzling, rigorous analysis of space, place, economics, visual design and advertising but also a compassionate listening and retelling of the experience of working people, gleaned from oral histories and interviews with mall workers," and credits it with "a structural and textual integrity like Scottish granite with a layer of bejewelled quartz." Yowzer! If that doesn't make you read it, I don't know what will.

justwilliamsluck has provided us with a paean to another nominated book, Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child. "The combined narratives of each chapter satisfy on their own in the same way that an unresolved short story can," he says. "The fact that there is not one but several of them and that they all inhabit the same world and share some of the same characters is what actually made the book such a success to me. So good that I read it twice. And now I can't wait to see what Ridgway will produce next. He's joined my list of must-read writers." So, a fan! And he's in good company. This is on my must-read list too.

And finally, what the Not the Booker's for: introducing you to great-sounding books you'd never otherwise have heard of. MerysAch's review of The Heat of the Sun by the oxymoronic David Rain is marvellously tempting. "A friend once told me she felt envious of anyone reading a certain classic American novel for the first time, as she knew they had that wonderful story ahead of them, just waiting to be discovered," s/he says. "The Heat of the Sun leaves me with the same sentiment. Once finished it brings that bitter-sweet feeling of satisfaction at finishing the book, while knowing I will miss the characters tomorrow." Sounds like the perfect summer read.

If we've mentioned your review, mail me on sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you something excellent from our cupboards. More next week; thanks again, meanwhile.

Sarah Crown
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