The Next Best Book Club discussion
Book Related Banter
>
What has been your most challenging read?
date
newest »
newest »
Nabokov's complicated linguistically. Some works he wrote in Russian, and translated into English; but Lolita he wrote in English and did his own translation into Russian. He was trilingual, speaking Russian, French, and English, from an early age.
Susanna wrote: "Nabokov's complicated linguistically. Some works he wrote in Russian, and translated into English; but Lolita he wrote in English and did his own translation into Russian. He was trilingual, spea..."Amen to the "complicated linguistically." And thank you for the double-check on Lolita. Can you picture being able to do that? Writing and translating one direction and then the other? Don't you find that kind of daunting? I always feel lesser in his presence.
Joel, thank you: like Emily I haven't read The House of the Dead, but will order it today. And actually, now that I think about it, Crime and Punishment was a pretty easy read, very compelling. Would love to have been able to read it in the original, but failed attempts even to learn enough Russian to get by on during trips to Moscow persuade me that this is unlikely ever to happen! And Yuliya, how lucky to come from St Petersburg! In fact, I think Lolita was first written in English, then translated to Russian by Nabokov himself, so we can all rejoice in getting the same experience on that one...if only the same were true for Dostoevsky. :)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance.
Voices from the Street by Philip K. Dick. It took me a long time to get into the book.Also, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Haven't been able to finish it so far. It makes me sleepy.
Ed Wagemann wrote: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance."Oh yeah, definitely! I had to read that one in college and I'm not sure if I ever finished it.
Wolf Hall was a nightmare read. If I didn't concentrate I totally lost the Plot and had no idea who was talking. It's a big book to concentrate so hard on each page. Decided overall I wasn't smart enough for it and did not particularly enjoy it.
"He" was Cromwell at least 95% of the time. I found that helped a lot. (And I enjoyed Wolf Hall.)
I knew it was Cromwell, the story was told through his eyes / what he witnessed etc. But I found it hard going. It's certainly a big book to struggle through.
I guess my challenge would be from the 1001 books you must read ... the seven volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. But I joined a group on here that will be reading through these in 2013, so I think that will help.
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot. I tried, but three quarters of the way through I just didn't care what happened to her.
Ginny wrote: "I guess my challenge would be from the 1001 books you must read ... the seven volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. But I joined a group on here that will be reading through these in 2013, so..."Ouch. No thank you. Not sure I have that many years left in me.
Dee wrote: "Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot. I tried, but three quarters of the way through I just didn't care what happened to her."That's not a good sign.
I've started a lot of difficult books and not finished them but I guess the most difficult one that I read and finished was "Strangers in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. I read it because my husband LOVED it and asked me to read it. Not my type of book at all but I plowed through. It took a while and I didn't much care for it but I finished it. I like books that move a little faster then this one did which is probably why I have issues with so many classics.
Stacie wrote: "I've started a lot of difficult books and not finished them but I guess the most difficult one that I read and finished was "Strangers in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. I read it because my husband ..."I read that in my late teens, and was hard-pressed to understand much of it ... but back then, just the alien thing had me intrigued.
I would have to say Cloud Atlas is on my challenging list as well. I have 20 pages left to read. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. it kind of left my head spinning. It's definatly a book that leaves you thinking about it long after you've put it down.I also read Anna Karenina this month and I agree that the name thing made it difficult at times. I remember at the beginning, I didn't realize Stiva was Stephen. I had one of those "wait a minute...what's going on here" moments.
Chelsea wrote: "I would have to say Cloud Atlas is on my challenging list as well. I have 20 pages left to read. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. it kind of left my head spinning. It's definatly a book that l..."I have 60 pages left of Cloud Atlas. Some of the writing style and vocab have been a challenge to read at times and the visual worlds are very different requiring a good imagination ! I have really enjoyed the challenge though. Cant wait to see how its all brought together - I have no idea how it will end. We should talk it over - as it might actually not make any sense ! lol
I'm new to the group. I have been struggling lately with "what to read next!" When I was in my 20s I read a lot of classics. I made it through War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Candide, Don Quixote, Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, Atlas Shrugged, The Count of Monte Cristo, Lolita, Robinson Crusoe and more. Some of those were tough to get through (especially An American Tragedy, as I recall), some classics I never did try. Then I shifted to James Michener, Taylor Caldwell, Robert Heinlein. I couldn't get into The Hobbit and never tried Lord of the Rings.Lately I read When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman and plan to read more of her. I loved Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth.
Guess I found The Silmarillion - the first chapter, at least - pretty tough when I was younger. I hated The Windup Girl, so boring but I forced myself to finish it as I hate not finishing books especially when I pay for them. Will have to check out some of the books mentioned here.
I dunno, but Porius is feeling close to, that I've been at for a few months now. I had resolved to finish Porius before I tackled Death of Virgil, which I found in this thread - there's only so much punishment you can give yourself at any one time. But I've flagged, truly, and I've shelved Porius for a while, even though I'm nearish to an end. It's wonderful, by the way.
May I add: - Come in.
[crash, bang]
- Open the door and come in.
- Sorrrry.
- My brain hurts.
From a Monty Python sketch called The Cherry Orchard. I didn't understand The Cherry Orchard either, and suspect this sketch to be a genius piece of criticism.
I don't know if it was just me or if it was the author's ZOMG amazingly intense vocabulary or his passion for highly descriptive paragraphs and long, twisted statements of reasoning or quite strange and uncommon use of dialogues...
I had to strain my brain a bit and read some lines a couple of times to understand what exactly the situation was playing out to be.
Even though I grasped that it was quite interesting but the book slowed my reading pace greatly and therefore distorted my smooth flow of imagination, made me feel extremely dumb and pathetic and kept an irked me from getting past more than 50 pages.
Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk, brilliant, funny but you need to work for it.
I hated reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman in a high school AP class. I usually love nonfiction books, especially having to do with world history and such, but I had a tough time getting through this one. But maybe that's because my teacher was such a jerk...
My most challenging read was Europe Central by William T. Vollman. It's a series of interconnected (sometimes) short stories about people from Germany and Russia from about the 1920's to the time of the Berlin Airlift, focusing on WWII. His style is very dense and very centered in those cultures' motifs. I think I did pretty well with the Russian part, which I studied in school, but the German part had so many allusions that I was lost. You need to have a solid grounding in myths and legends and trivia and obscure books from each culture. I loved the book, but I finished it wishing there was such a thing as an annotated version.
Dead Souls by frikkin' Gogol... I read the whole damn book through boring salon conversations, even more boring card games in salons, surprisingly simple meals in salons (duh) and Gogol's weird intermezzos where he is talking to himself while we're waiting for the protagonist to be led to the -- oh my, what surprise -- salon. All for the sake of finding out why the main character is buying all those dead souls. Coming up with all sorts of fantastic explanations like that he is the devil or some magician or crazy scientist or death himself or or or... just to find out that he simply needed a big loan from the bank.
-____-
-____-
Eugene Onegin & Autobiography of a Yogi I'm still reading them they are challenging but that doesn't mean I don't like them.
V. by Pynchon is quite difficult (changing the nature of some characters, changing periods, changing POVs -- and hiding it), but exciting all the way. And it leaves questions for your forever rumination, which is best.
My most challenging book thus far has been Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
I've read lots of books in the past year, but the one I'm reading now, Cloud Atlas is by far the most challenging. I'm about 200 pages in and thinking of giving up. Maybe this is one you have to suffer through until you get to the end and have some great moment of enlightenment, but reading this has been like slogging through mud for me. Maybe this is a characteristic of great writing?
Which story are you on? Some parts of Cloud Atlas are really tough to get through and then some are a little better. The first story was the most difficult. I would say it was one of those books that in the end was definatly worth it. It definatly does earn a spot on the most challenging list though- both b/c of the writing style and b/c it's a lot to wrap your brain around.
I finished the part where the guy spent about 20 pages talking about being on a train, the train stalled and stalled again, on and on. Then he's in an old folks home. Before that, a guy was on a ship. There was one part about a reporter and an atomic plant. I'm an avid reader, but this book's doing nothing to keep my interest. I need a thread to follow. I feel like I'm reading Moby-Dick in 11th grade, only I'm more at sea. Maybe worth the effort in the end, but torturous reading. I think I'm not mature enough to stick with this one.
I love cloud Atlas, it begins to make more sense once the characters start to return, with the last chapter definitely been a moment of enlightenment for me :)My most challenging read has been Samuel Becketts trilogy, but that was definitely worth it. So thought-provoking.
I'd say The Idiot is the most challenging thing I've read. I have to admit it took seeing a stage adaptation for me to fully understand what went on.
Joel R. wrote: "Susanna wrote: "Nabokov's complicated linguistically. Some works he wrote in Russian, and translated into English; but Lolita he wrote in English and did his own translation into Russian. He was ..."I'm writing about novel set in Northern Maine, in a bilingual town, French and English, and I'm having a great time imagining the bilingual version someday, as well as the translation into French. So, I CAN imagine such a thing as trilingual writing, though I am, sadly, far far away from that. By the way, Alaistair Reid's bilingual editions of Pablo Neruda are fantastic!
Scout wrote: "I've read lots of books in the past year, but the one I'm reading now, Cloud Atlas is by far the most challenging. I'm about 200 pages in and thinking of giving up. Maybe this is one you have to su..."I'm with you on Cloud Atlas. Not so much challenging as not worth it! (Sorry Chelsea, I've got to respectfully hold a different opinion.) I detest gratuitous violence, and that aspect of the book turned me off at almost every chapter. It never relents. However, I persevered, expecting a huge awakening moment, but I feel the novel didn't go deep enough.
I am unable to get through Les Misérables, I mean, it is a monster of a book.And although Cloud Atlas wasn't a challenge to read, it was a challenge to finish. Not my cup of tea.
Another book that was pretty hard to finish, but I managed was The Count of Monte Cristo.
The Next Best Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Les Misérables (other topics)The Count of Monte Cristo (other topics)
The Plague Dogs (other topics)
V. (other topics)
At Swim, Two Boys (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
William S. Burroughs (other topics)Salman Rushdie (other topics)
It's much easy to read in Russian. I saw translation and it was ..."
I am pretty sure he wrote Lolita in English originally. And that alone is astounding, because almost no book can compare (in my opinion) to the beauty of his writing in that book. I love your teenage reaction ... quite a book to read at that age ... but your analysis was dead on! And ... you just gave me another great idea for a discussion topic. Thanks!