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old hand
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OP
old hand
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The trend of the 'ergodic' thread in the Q&A forum got me thinking:
Which are the (generally well-regarded) writers/books you find difficult or impossible to read, and why?
I'll kick off with D H Lawrence - all that passion in so few pages gives me palpitations!
And I'm with Jheem in that I have never been able to get through Moby Dick.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Proust's Remembrance.. I found to be turgid and stultifying -- I never got past Swann's Way.
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow -- Every time I pick this up (at least thrice) I get 300 or so pages in and it slides back onto the shelf.
and need I mention James Joyce's Ulysses?!
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veteran
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I read Gravitiy's Rainbow in an intense four-day sitting during college. Loved it. Pynchon's prose seemed quick and easy at the time, about 20 years later I tried it again and only got halfway through it. Proust, him I had problems with, but as wsieber said, it may have been the translation. Stephen King's prose was like daggers in the eyesockets and toothpicks under the fingernails: ooff. I remember Mervyn Peeke's Gormengast being entirely unreadable.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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And I'm with Jheem in that I have never been able to get through Moby Dick
I think the thing about Moby Dick is the frequent digressions from the main narrative, with essays on whales and that sort of thing. The chapters that actually advance the story are not only readable, but surprisingly accessible and even "modern" in their flavor. There is a good bit of wry humor in Moby Dick in fact. Take, for example, this short passage in which Ishmael ponders the plight of a lowly sailor:
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about - however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way - either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, - what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Anyway, if you've read this far, my point is that it is a very enjoyable novel at its heart, but its many digressions become tedious, especially to contemporary attention spans (including mine).
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veteran
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Joyce is annoying and very difficult to read. I feel exactly as I do when I go into a smokey bar with a few intimates and the smoke is scratching my throat and the music is far too loud and there are people talking way too loud. Not just Ulysses either, but some of Dubliners was irritating.
I'm reading George Boole's "The Laws of Thought" right now and his writing is extremely dull and sesquipedalian.
Moby Dick was pretty hard to wade through in some parts. Too the Lighthouse was pretty boring, too. And The Bell Jar.
Possibly the ultimate bore was "Pierre; or, the ambiguities".
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Pretty much anything by Buckminster Fuller.
Though I've read a good much of it, the Will and Ariel Durant History etc is at times mind-numbing in it's trivial detail. Overall though I still recommend it.
Most Russian novelists, with the exception of Pasternak.
Tom Clancy. I do not care, nor have I ever cared, nor could I conceivably in the future care how things work in the depths to which he can devote entire paragraphs, if not pages.
Dickens. I loathe him. Terminally boring. Not to mention maudlin. Oh, did I say boring?
Hemingway. I've never understood what people see in his stuff.
TEd
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Wow, I kind of liked Too the Lighthouse and I loved, loved, loved The Bell Jar, but I'm a girl. For some reason I've always thought of Moby Dick as a book for boys. The last book I started but didn't finish was Flaubert's Sentimental Education. A few years ago Dawson's Creek, of all embarrassing things, made this book sound like it would be a favorite of mine. I was expecting ubercool philosophical bits that I could use for the rest of my life's journey. (Yes, I watch too much TV.) There was too much searching involved in order to find those nuggets.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Come, come now!
Yes, like CWC, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are favorites of mine (also being a girl and all).
Thomas Pyncheon is beyond me. I managed to get through Joyce's The Dubliners and would love to read Ulysses -- with a tutor! Or a key: was it Joseph Campbell who wrote one?
Two books that I know are favorites among many here are Cryptonomicon (I got halfway through that), and Gödel, Escher, Bach (couldn't get beyond the intro to the new edition).
Maybe I just need more mental discipline.
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old hand
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old hand
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I read Gödel, Escher, Bach (well, I probably skipped the really math-y parts) and liked it. May have had something to do with the fact that my grandfather gave it to me when I was in the ninth grade....and as a ninth-grade girl I was impressed with the fact that Grandpa thought I could handle it! And he was right. As for Dickens, I love his work.....but have to be on vacation or I never get through them just due to time constraints. As for unreadables, I tried twice and never was able to finish Don Quixote. [insert soundtrack: I'm Always Chasing Windmills]  Ear worm, anyone?
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veteran
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veteran
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The great thing about Gödel, Escher, Bach is how readable it is in spite of its subject matter. (I've read it closely twice, and still dip into it to look around a familiar neighborhood years later.) Dickins, I have read, and he's quite easy to, but I've never much cared for his stories. I can always hear the wordometer clicking over on every other page, as it seemed he really wrote for money and not for joy. Don Quixote, like a lot of pre-18th century literature is tough-going in patches, but it's rather pleasant read. And good for your grandfather; more children should be given good books to read rather than the trash that's usually foisted on them.
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