[HN Gopher] Short Little Difficult Books
___________________________________________________________________
Short Little Difficult Books
Author : crescit_eundo
Score : 129 points
Date : 2025-11-18 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| vunderba wrote:
| _> Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my
| life._
|
| I sometimes half-jokingly maintain that _Moby-Dick_ was really
| written as part of an early BOOK-IT [1] reading incentive program
| to improve literacy among whalers by disguising a novel as a
| cetological guidebook.
|
| There are entire chapters devoted to the harpooning process,
| sperm whale anatomy, maritime legal disputes over whale
| harvesting, etc.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!
| quercusa wrote:
| _Moby-Dick_ really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized
| taste of Melville, try _Billy Budd_.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For a salmon-sized taste, Bartleby the Scrivener. Great
| annotated version here: https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/c
| ulturebox/2015/10/herma...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You suckered me into reading the article by mentioning _Moby
| Dick_.
| hearsathought wrote:
| Not unless elementary kids were whalers back then.
|
| > [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!
|
| Talk about nostalgia. Haven't thought about pizza hut and book
| it in ages.
| nluken wrote:
| Nice little article.
|
| Another personal suggestion in this vein: _The Queue_ by Vladimir
| Sorokin (trans. Sally Laird), which consists entirely of
| unattributed dialogue. It 's challenging at first but once you
| get a feel for the rhythm and start recognizing characters by how
| they speak, it becomes a really charming read.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| The Road by Cormac McCarthy is like that. It's best read in the
| pit of a cold winter.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| Great book.
|
| And a counter point, Blood Meridian by the same author.
| Extremely difficult for no reason whatsoever. Terrible book.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > Extremely difficult for no reason whatsoever. Terrible
| book.
|
| Many people believe this is the mythical "Great American
| Novel" we've been arguing about and/or anticipating
| forever. Strong argument for that because it's actually
| very Hollywood, isn't it? It's an absurdly action-packed
| cowboy-horror mashup that's full of gratuitous violence and
| manifest destiny.
|
| I know several people that thought it was "extremely gory
| for no reason whatsoever" and did not finish for that
| reason, but none that thought it was difficult. I was
| surprised TFA mentioned it in that light, because I
| remember Child of God being more of a slog and BM being a
| page-turner.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel
| havblue wrote:
| I just finished Blood Meridian and consulted AI as-needed
| to cover the many, many metaphors. The funny thing was that
| Google AI got a lot of the book wrong, getting the fate of
| some characters mixed up as well as confusing some faceless
| deaths with others. Too much wanton violence to keep track
| of.
|
| The book definitely covers evil and nihilism thoroughly, so
| why would you want to read something like that? Well, for
| every bad decision someone makes in the book, the reader
| has the opposite response of, "oh crap, don't do that!" So
| reading about nihilism doesn't make you more nihilistic.
| While I thought it was a great book it isn't something you
| should just read without consulting outside sources.
| viccis wrote:
| Last time I read it, I did not find it challenging outside
| of some of the more obscure words used (particularly things
| like names of types of buildings and similar mundane
| objects), and my Kindle's built-in dictionary was able to
| define all of those in one tap.
|
| As far as "for no reason", I would say that McCarthy's
| impressionist prose that meanders, leaves out some details
| while focusing on others, etc., is some of the best English
| language prose ever written. It's beautiful and conveys
| affect better than almost anything else I've encountered.
| All the "reason" I needed.
| hearsathought wrote:
| Much of the dialogue is between father and son, so the
| dialogue is easy to keep track of. It is a great book for the
| bleak days of winter. Easily one of the most devastating
| endings to a book.
| ssttoo wrote:
| Let me add also _Blindness_ by Jose Saramago, it has pages-long
| paragraphs and sentences, characters have no names just
| descriptions... it's surprising at first but not hard to get
| into. Amazing book!
| paulorlando wrote:
| I happened to have been assigned Moby Dick in 9th grade English
| class. Foolishly put off reading it until the night before the
| book report was due. Got about 1/3 of the way through and went
| through life thinking it was boring. Fast forward decades, I'm
| now reading it for real. It hilarious, it's pause encouraging, I
| love it! (And I'm still only 1/3 through.)
| watwut wrote:
| It is very likely that a book funny to adult you would went
| over 9th grade you regardless of reading speed.
| beams_of_light wrote:
| This is a problem I have yet to see schools tackle. A kid in
| junior high school has no mental context for the Russian
| Revolution of 1917, for instance. Having them read Animal
| Farm is a pointless waste of time.
| shuntress wrote:
| Reading allegory is the way start building mental context.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Same with things like (picking at random) The Great Gatsby
| and a lot of literature having to do with adult
| relationships and romance. How on earth is a 16-year-old in
| 2025 going to understand what's happening in Gatsby? I read
| it, wrote some papers and got As on them, but didn't really
| make sense of it at the time.
| threetonesun wrote:
| The Great Gatsby is an Americanized version of a Greek
| tragedy, I don't think it's too hard for a 16 year old to
| understand. It's no "Rabbit, Run", at least.
| teachrdan wrote:
| In addition to being a short classic, I think teens could
| identify with Gatsby being obsessed with getting the
| approval of people who have nothing but contempt for him.
| There's a devastating scene at the end where the
| narrator, Nick Carraway, organizes a funeral for Gatsby
| and literally none of his friends show up. I think that
| might resonate deeply for more than a few teen readers.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| That's more a commentary on 2025 than 16 year olds I
| assure you. In the 90s adult relationships weren't
| particularly mysterious to your average 16 year old.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I was a 16 year old in the 1990s and it was mysterious to
| me.
| layer8 wrote:
| ...or so the 16-year old still thought.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| So you were born circa 1979?
| jayspell wrote:
| I read Animal Farm in 9th grade and it had a profound
| impact me. Hmmm is that you Napoleon?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Poor choice. Animal Farm is way, way more than an allegory
| of one historical event. It's a broadbrush statement on the
| kind of people likely to seize power at every opportunity
| (or if you prefer, the effect unrestrained power has on
| most people), and a humorous jab at authoritarianism.
|
| The other books mentioned (Gatsby et al.) really require
| context, but literal pigs sitting down to dinner with
| powerbrokers is something a 14yo can grasp.
| lucaslazarus wrote:
| Honestly, even getting through 1/3 of it in a night is pretty
| impressive. Certainly took me several weeks freshman year of
| college.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| In grade 9 I had to do a book report that compared two books by
| the same author and I chose Moby Dick and Billy Budd.
|
| My teacher tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted and
| ultimately she let me do it because Billy Budd is very a short
| novella.
|
| To this day, Moby Dick is still my second favorite book of all
| time (with my all time favourite being The Lord of the Rings).
| I only read it once, 20 years ago, for a book report but it
| really stuck with me.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I read it maybe 15 years ago and I just remembere it as that
| book with wale facts.
| wavemode wrote:
| I had a similar experience with the play "A Raisin in the Sun".
| Reading it in class, it was boring and difficult to relate to.
| Watching the play live as an adult, you realize it's actually
| hilarious and heart-wrenching.
|
| Part of it is growing up, but part of it is (obviously) that
| plays aren't meant to be read. There's a lot of detail and tone
| that doesn't really come across properly, and it sucks the life
| out of the story. Not sure why it's such a common practice in
| school.
| vhantz wrote:
| What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
| miltonlost wrote:
| A little bit Ulysses, a little bit knowledge of every language
| ever.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| It took me 20 years to read Ulysses and I still don't know
| what happened in it.
| shagie wrote:
| You might consider visiting Dublin on the week of June 16th
| and partake in the readings and pub crawls... though there
| are other Bloomsday commemoration events. That said, the
| only time I've stumbled across this was trying to find a
| seat in an Irish pub in the early '00s and being confused
| as to why it was _that busy_ that night.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| It's been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I take it
| out and read a couple of pages each time and then put it back.
| Keep thinking I should buy a guide to reading this book but
| never got around to it.
| acclay wrote:
| Absolutely nothing, just let it carry you. I'd recommend a
| skeleton key after going through it the first time if you want
| to go deeper.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The only thing I know about it is that the book is supposedly
| the inspiration for the naming of the quark. I feel as if this
| satisfies any obligation I have regarding it.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
|
| Listening to Joyce read it aloud: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v
| =M8kFqiv8Vww&pp=ygUcam95Y2UgcmV....
|
| I had so much trouble trying to read him before understanding
| the intended pacing. It's more poetry than prose.
| pattisapu wrote:
| Willingness.
| pklausler wrote:
| Your previous readings of Finnegans Wake are your preparation
| for your next one.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a
| book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob!
|
| Ok, this nerd-sniped me. Are we saying this now? Feels like a
| reference. Found it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-
| high-brodernism/
|
| WTF? If the term is about superficial depth wouldn't the bros be
| into like, abridged graphic-novel adaptations of difficult
| Russian classics, and not actually diving into genuinely
| difficult stuff regardless of quality? Shouldn't highbrow
| literary types sneer with greater cleverness or at least clarity?
|
| > I also find it strange to even worry about "pretentious"
| readers or "brodernists" hyping themselves up to read some new,
| huge tome (Schattenfroh this season it seems) in an age when few
| people read anything at all. Reading a very long book always
| takes some dedication, some challenging of yourself. So what?
|
| Ok good, TFA actually does get it
| dhosek wrote:
| >WTF? If the term is about superficial depth wouldn't the bros
| be into like, abridged graphic-novel adaptations of difficult
| Russian classics, and not actually diving into genuinely
| difficult stuff regardless of quality?
|
| --Apes don't read philosophy!
|
| --Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a reading list, or even just a book-
| downloading-binge list, I pulled 18 titles off of this one. There
| are, of course, even more, but if you're doing that then you
| probably already have the McCarthy and Dick titles. Usually HN
| loses on any given day, but with a score like that I doubt all
| the other sites I skim will be able to beat it even together.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Agreed, good list for HN. Especially Calvino, Cormac, and PKD
| tend to be popular with math nerds. Also if PKD qualifies as
| difficult enough, maybe Borges can fit here too.
|
| Not fiction or difficult, but I suggest Calvino's "Six Memos
| for the Next Millennium". It's novella-length lecture series
| for writers/readers, but I'd say it's really a
| critical/creative framework that's as relevant for math as it
| is for myth, or novels, or code.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've been working off of the Penguin Classics list found on [
| Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penguin_Clas
| sics) for the Borges stuff. It's a bit of a slog, and not
| everything is on libgen (I'd guess about 70% is, at best),
| but it was a quick (hah!) way to add a few thousand books to
| my library.
|
| >Not fiction or difficult, but I suggest Calvino's "Six Memos
| for the Next Millennium".
|
| Thanks for the recommendation. Grabbed it too. Now back to
| the Fs in my Penguin Classics list...
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Agreed. I've read about half the books on this list and
| wouldn't consider them difficult. But I've got some new books
| to buy now, which is always a good thing.
|
| If you like Ubik, Martian Time Slip might also pass as
| difficult.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| PKD's VALIS, Transmigration, and Stigmata are the ones
| people usually propose for the postmodern canon. I honestly
| think stuff like this will probably age better than say,
| DFW's Infinite Jest. The Exegesis[1] is less known and
| difficult in a different way since he really lost his mind
| and isn't even _aiming_ for a narrative.. pretty just much
| unedited journal entries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exegesis_of_Philip_K._Dic
| k
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Brainstorming more on this and checked my shelf, I got a few
| more. If not difficult per se, I remember them at least as
| experimental or otherwise postmodern.
|
| Pynchon short stories:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Learner
|
| Delilo has many short ones including some of his best:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel),
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americana_(novel)
|
| Haddon's breakthrough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curi
| ous_Incident_of_the_Do...
|
| DFW's breakthrough (maybe pushing it on "short" though)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broom_of_the_System
|
| Ludwig still the reigning champ of short/difficult:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
| erikerikson wrote:
| Knut Hansun's Mysteries was difficult like this for me. I think
| I'm glad I read it but I wouldn't have made it through my reading
| if Growth of the Soil hadn't been so damn good.
| marknutter wrote:
| I've been slogging through Blood Meridian for the past couple of
| months, only taking little sips of content here and there, but it
| finally clicked for me last night and I'm fully engaged with it.
| And man was it worth the effort. The way he paints scenes with
| just the right amount of words is pretty amazing. I'd love to see
| this book adapted onto film.
| nemo1618 wrote:
| Ha, I'm in a similar position, having given up on it after a
| few months of sips. At what point did it click for you?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Maybe this is sacrilege but I find audiobooks help for this
| because the narrator just keeps going with little effort on
| my part. Even if I miss things it's okay, and getting through
| it helps get into it.
| havblue wrote:
| There was that Friends episode where Joey got halfway through
| Little Women thinking "Jo" was a guy and he had to start
| over. Blood Meridian was kinda like that where I realized I
| had lost track of what was happening in a chapter, who was
| killing who for what reason, and had to backtrack. So yeah
| the book makes you feel like Joey on Friends.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| Blood Meridian is one of the few books where I reached the end
| and then just started again right from the beginning. It's
| probably the book I've read the most amount of times and each
| re-read still manages to amaze me.
| jrmcvngtn wrote:
| "Short little difficult plays" - Anything by Ionesco: Rhinoceros,
| The Leader, etc., etc.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading
| "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I
| read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.
| viccis wrote:
| There's always that person who needs to make a knee-jerk
| inferiority feeling into the author's problem. The author never
| made value judgments about people. In fact, he starts by
| pointing out that he thinks those kinds of judgments either way
| are silly.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who
| identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.
| gitarre wrote:
| It doesn't, really. It labels a person a "social media
| poster who identifies as a reader" based on them passing
| negative judgment on difficult books ("fundamentally
| fraudulent") and those who read them ("anyone who would
| read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist
| snob").
|
| Sure, there is the middle part ("books are supposed to be
| fun and the world is so awful why would you want to
| suffer"), but I took the bit about negative judgment to be
| the main thing the author was complaining about.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.
|
| You could read fiction for personal growth and non-fiction for
| fun as well.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Some people find Dark Souls style games fun, I assume this is
| the book reader's version of that. I don't get it, but whatever
| floats their boat.
| gitarre wrote:
| For sure; engaging in any particular difficult hobby (be it
| reading hard books, lifting heavy weights, or playing an
| instrument extremely well) is unrelated to how moral a person
| is.
| tech2 wrote:
| One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become
| fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing
| people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand
| Bascule, or read it "normally".
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Great novel! Love Banks..
| inejge wrote:
| Eh. The only thing I remember offhand of Bascule's orthography
| is "Ergates thi ant", although for some reason the book is the
| rare one where I've effortlessly memorized the names of many
| protagonists (I'm not very good with names, both IRL and in
| literature.)
| dontwannahearit wrote:
| Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, Penguin Classics (1981
| edition).
|
| Extremely tortuous phraseology. But I finished it, with gritted
| teeth at 15.
|
| I have long since abandoned the desire to finish every book I
| start. Life is too short.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source
| of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old
| form of your modern language.
|
| My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais'
| "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both
| books require some motivation to get used to their respective
| languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais'
| prose ; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was
| harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's
| a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I
| ended learning them by rote.
|
| Even translated, some short books from a very different culture
| far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin"
| or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy
| read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.
|
| A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult
| because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are
| strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka
| I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the
| surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Paramo" the
| reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality.
| Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more
| about style tricks.
| pklausler wrote:
| I think that English might have fewer opportunities for this
| sort of thing; I found Beowulf to be surprisingly dull in the
| original.
|
| Greek, on the other hand, has lifetimes' worth of good stuff in
| its ancient forms, and can really reward the time spent in
| learning to read them.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Shakespeare is from around the same time period as Rabelais
| in OP. If you haven't read Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, As You
| Like It, they also take some getting used to but are worth it
| in the end.
| pklausler wrote:
| I don't think that English changed as much, but I could be
| wrong. Shakespeare's not hard for a modern English reader,
| given a decent edition with vocabulary hints in the
| footnotes. I got through most of it as a sophomore.
| miltonlost wrote:
| A good middle point would be Chaucer then who had Middle
| English vs Beowolf''s Old and Shakespeare's Early Modern.
| The Canterbury Tales is frequently found in translations
| now, but that's also due to the lack of spelling
| standardization until 17th and 18th centuries in addition
| to just vast vocabulary differences.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure English changed a lot more than French
| from the same period.
| dbtc wrote:
| Check out the spellings in the original folios though:
| https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-
| print/first-fo...
|
| Our school books have all had some (very helpful)
| translation work applied to the original text.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm sure Gargantua and Pantagruel is tough in French, but I'd
| like to recommend it in English translation to people who don't
| speak French where it's just a lot of good fun. Plenty of older
| French works (or a lot less old, like Zola) that have been
| translated to modern English are just good, easy reads.
|
| I'd assume that in French they're tough going for a while until
| you get your head 500 years back. I'm currently battling my way
| through Don Quixote in Spanish and though it's a fun and funny
| (not at all short) read, some of the long twisted sentences
| (and the old words) can be brutal. I'd bet, as above, that the
| English translations are breezy. I'm thinking about trying one
| after I finish this.
|
| In French I'm currently working my way through Voltaire's
| Micromegas (which is short) but it's a hundred and some years
| after Rabelais and the prose is really concrete. Very short
| words and simple sentences. It's the story that's interesting.
| babblingfish wrote:
| The non-fiction version of this would be to read primary sources
| from long ago or written in specialized language. I'm reminded of
| Cal Newport's advice to ease into challenging books by first
| reading a secondary source which explains the nuance of the
| primary source. Something like An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and
| an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn before reading the Odyssey itself.
|
| It's been somewhat disappointing researching the reading habits
| of people who read many books a year. For the reader who tears
| through ebooks on Kindle Unlimited, they mostly read genre
| fiction in a few categories. The same thing has been happening to
| me. I used to challenge myself to read "the classics" but lately
| before bad I reach for genre fiction written at an 8th grade
| level.
|
| For many, reading is just another form of entertainment. Maybe
| call it the hollywoodification of books? While it's far better
| form of entertainment than TikTok or Instagram, the true
| potential is in its ability to make us smarter by challenging our
| thoughts and dieas.
|
| When books are seen as just another entertainment product in a
| saturated marketplace, why chose something which makes you
| struggle?
| csours wrote:
| "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt is interesting to me on the
| difficulty scale. From any technical analysis (like grammar,
| sentence structure etc), it's not difficult at all. It wasn't
| boring to me, and I didn't really get stuck on anything in
| particular, but it still took me two weeks to finish it.
| viccis wrote:
| I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have
| found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-
| fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I
| read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing
| it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was
| a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was.
|
| A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":
|
| Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for
| the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be
| difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into
| thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with
| the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes
| postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are
| longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I
| would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition.
| It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would
| recommend prioritizing reading the _Fictions_ and _The Aleph_
| collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with
| would be " _Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius_ ", " _The Lottery in
| Babylon_ ", " _The Library of Babel_ ", and " _The Immortal_ ".
| If you want slightly more sentimental, " _The Circular Ruins_ "
| is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "
| _Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote_ " is hilarious.
|
| If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a
| "novel", Nabokov's _Pale Fire_ is a great read and a good
| introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator
| can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your
| interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary
| analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you
| might think.
|
| Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for
| good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of
| a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be
| found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at
| first, but some of them, especially _Seven American Nights_ ,
| _Forlesen_ , and the trio of stories in _The Fifth Head of
| Cerberus_ , are similar to _Pale Fire_ insofar as they are far
| more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of
| scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read
| them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels
| was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from
| his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story
| collections, there 's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I
| would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for _The Island of
| Doctor Death and Other Stories_ , _The Death of Dr. Island_ ,
| _Forlesen_ , _Seven American Nights_ , _Death of the Island
| Doctor_ ), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and
| Other Stories" ( _Tracking Song_ , _The Doctor of Death Island_
| ), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.
|
| If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's
| _The Atrocity Exhibition_. He was influenced by Burroughs (
| _Naked Lunch_ would be another recommendation here if you can
| stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will
| challenge its reader in many ways. It 's very interesting to go
| straight from this into _Crash_ , which covers a lot of the same
| material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash
| with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first
| great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say _The
| Atrocity Exhibition_ deserves this praise(?) just as much, even
| if it 's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political
| stunt pulled using one of its sections (called _Why I Want to
| Fuck Ronald Reagan_ ) belong more to the Situationists' games
| than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies
| just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything
| Baudrillard even pointed to.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't have anything to say about the overall subject of this
| post because I am terrible at reading difficult books but do want
| to chime in to say that Exercises in Style is pretty fun to read
| (it's the same dumb story told 99 times in different ways, most
| just a page or so long).
| arthurjj wrote:
| He's upfront that it's novels only but I really enjoy short
| difficult non-fiction more.
|
| * Exit, Voice and Loyalty - about how organizations and people
| work. Easily the best social science book I've ever read
|
| * Art & Fear - gives a much better model for creating software
| than most books
| tkfoss wrote:
| I don't know about the first one, but Art & Fear is one of the
| lightest books on my bookshelf. Why do you consider it
| difficult?
| nyeah wrote:
| Just picking on the Moby Dick thing. I want to like Moby Dick but
| chapters ~6 through ~85 seem to be extremely boring. The
| Dismemberment of the Whale was by far the most gripping part of
| the book so far. And it's not so gripping.
|
| Am I doing something wrong here?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Interestingly when I hear the author describe different kinds of
| "difficulty" I find myself thinking that some of those don't
| really seem like difficulty. For something like a book, I think
| the main thing that makes it seem difficult is when there are
| parts that are not fun to read (or maybe moments where you
| question the point of the entire read because you pause to go
| "what the heck is even going on here"). If something's fun it
| often doesn't really feel difficult.
|
| In particular various kinds of formal experimentation can be
| quite fun and I wouldn't perceive them as difficult at all
| (especially in shorter form). I read a short story in multiple-
| choice form years ago and loved it. I've read most of Milorad
| Pavic's books, all of which have unusual formal structures (e.g.,
| Dictionary of the Khazars has the nonlinear structure of a cross-
| referenced dictionary or encyclopedia). Some were a bit baffling
| (they also can fall into the "confusing events, surrealist dream
| logic, and elliptical plots" category) but I didn't find them
| difficult exactly.
|
| One of the more common practical difficulties that can add
| friction to a book is a complex storyline with many characters
| who can be hard to keep track of. But this won't make the book as
| a whole feel super difficult as long as the content is worth it.
| War and Peace is a classic example of this, with multiple
| intersecting storylines and a large cast of characters. A
| Suitable Boy is a modern example in a similar vein.
|
| But I think a lot of times when people say a book is difficult
| they just mean either "gosh I actually kind of have to pay
| attention to this" or "this is really long". To me those things
| actually are positive qualities if the content of the book is
| good, since they just make it richer. My favorite novel is In
| Search of Lost Time, which is one of the quintessential
| "difficult" books, but if you get into its rhythm, most of it is
| blissfully engrossing.
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