Crime and Punishment question

"There have only been a few books that have been a true challenge for me to complete . . .


The Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Ulysses by James Joyce
Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

all of them worth the «trouble»"

The Winter's Tale.
The language, allusions, and material were more challenging to me than any of his other plays or for that matter anything else I've read.

Frankly speaking, I felt really challenging reading my semester subjects like Analog design, Digital design, Quantum physics..etc... I couldn't finish them, not even half in a six month time, whereas I managed to read Anna Karenina in a month. Same is the case with Brothers Karamzov. :)

I take the word "challenging" in a few different senses:
1. I believe one of the early posters in this series mentioned the Bible as a challenging book. It certainly has been for me, as it challenges all readers who do their best to takes its warnings and promises seriously. It can open unexpected doorways and offer life-altering opportunities..
2. Some posters here have mentioned Proust's seven-novel masterpiece as their number one challenge. It was a challenge for me -- to read, to understand, to finish. To do justice to it, I would need to read it again, and this time become more intimate with it.
3. I've read more than half of Dickens' novels, which challenge me to open my mind and heart and see and feel the world with a soul as large as his, to break through the narrow categories of our public life today so as to confront wonders and perils and challenges with a free mind.
4. I can think of a different kind of challenge -- the writers who say, "Come, follow me, absorb my work, I will stretch your experience of art and life. I will show you what it is to imagine and love." Dostoevsky, George Eliot, "Don Quixote", and a certain playwright who worked in England just at the time Europeans began to make the new world their home.

"Tale of Two Cities." I almost didn't get through this long and often time boring novel. But i cannot stand to start a novel and then not finish it. Oh and James The Turn of the Screw. At first i was banging my head wondering if it was a psychological piece rather than a ghost story. I finally decided that it is both. The only thing i didn't get in the story is why James made a four year-old sit in a high chair. It was plain to me that he never been around children much. Love him, though. I think "The Turn of the Screw" was way ahead of its time. It was suspenseful, and almost modern. It reminded me of the works of King and Straub only more meticulously written.

Wow! So many of the ones that challenged me have been noted. I was in 5th grade and assigned Moby Dick. My mother helped me through it.

I wanted to read Crime and Punishment in grade school. It too took me forever. As I Lay Dying was another one.

In college, I decided to read The Hobbit and the Trilogy because everyone was talking about it. I pushed through - but never figured out why people love it so much.

But If I had to pick one, Moby Dick.

Heart of Darkness

Das Kapital, Karl Marx--it's brilliant, but dense.