Fiction Books

Seven eves. The author indulges a little too much in technical details. At points, for pages.

Le Morte d'Arthur, by Thomas Mallory, in Middle English.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I enjoyed reading it, but it demanded my full attention to appreciate it.

EDIT: I enjoyed it like hard exercise, a long hike, or landscaping a garden. It's tough, you're tired, but you're also proud.

Julius Caesar's Commentarii De Bello Gallico in Latin. And... yes I did enjoy it. There are some points where translation just cannot capture Caesar's wit. I wish I still knew enough Latin to read it again.

(Why yes I am a huge fucking nerd, how could you tell?)

Ulysses! The Joyce one. Honestly I enjoyed it - for how esoteric and sort of distant it is, the base plot itself is kinda mundane so it's not like the base structure of the book is massively hard to follow (especially if you're familiar with The Odyssey) once you get over the constant writing style shifts. It's randomly funny and weirdly relatable (like being stuck in a conversation with a chatty American) and gives you so many reasons to hate the British. I really like how it's adapted the story of The Odyssey and I think more adaptions of Greek works should be like it - an adaption of the themes and vague plot beats rather than just taking the characters and doing whatever the fuck you want with them, and also should have one guy who inexplicably thinks he's actually in an adaption of a Shakespeare play instead.

I will say though, my copy of Ulysses is one third appendix, which explains out the schema and has footnotes for most of the references that will just go right over your head if you don't happen to be James Joyce and I genuinely don't understand how you could read that book without it. It really turns every confusing reference and story moment into something clear and understandable which elevates the text around it. If I didn't have it I most definitely would've dropped the book

Also I'm nowhere near finished but I've started reading Dream of the Red Chamber (aka Story of the Stone) which is an 18th century Chinese novel infamous for being really long (I think it's like over 2k pages? My copy is divided up into like five books) and difficult to follow with way too many characters in it. It's a big long deconstruction of Confucianism and nobility following a chunk of the heavens who's reincarnated into a failing noble family because he wants to see what it's like being human, only to be treated like absolute shit by his family because everyone see him as a divine blessing and want to use and abuse him as much as possible for their own ends. He spends a lot of time around the women of the house and watches their own tragedies unfold, hence the length and excessive characters. Hasn't gotten too bad yet, but I'm also barely into it relatively speaking.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Rewarding slog but a slog for sure.

Joseph Conrad's book, Nostromo, was a bit dense for me. I did enjoy it though. Not sure if that meets the requirement. There are a few books I've been bracing myself to read that I've chickened out on starting. Things like Cormac McCarthy's books.

I haven’t read it, but reading about it makes me think it would be this book: House of Leaves.

I'm about halfway through Dante's Inferno at the moment.

I started reading it about ten years ago...

I read through Adventures of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn at one point. They were fine, had to google a few archaisms. Not exactly thrillers, but even as a euro, I just felt the Americana, I guess. Charming as a period thing.

On the other hand, I read 1984 and was actually surprised at how engaging it was. Major bummer, obviously, but I expected it to be an effort. It held its own and kept me reading.

Probably Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. It's so damned bleak that I had to force my way through it. It's a great book, but I didn't enjoy it.

Cloud Atlas

It's a postmodern masterpiece, but fucking hell the use of language makes it tough.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky it got a bit interesting after the halfway mark but damn was it dry in the first half.

For a pure joy read there was the unabridged Romance of the Three Kingdoms. For a book the size of an encyclopedia it was a fast feeling read.

I read The Third Pandemic and Sphere in 5th grade, back in the 90s. I had to carry a dictionary with me for them, but I still remember most of the stories to this day.

I learned a lot, but the process of reading them involved a lot of teachers telling me it was too adult for me (probably because they didn’t understand them), so that wasn’t fun, but ultimately I did enjoy the process. It helped make me who I am now.

I don’t find books particularly challenging at this point (I’m now a 600-700 word per minute speed reader, depending on material, with tested 98% retention) but I have to brace to read legal text, or anything that’s written to sound smart rather than be accessible. But that’s just because those aren’t ever fun to read for anyone.

Skinners verbal behavior. Woof.

Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d taken classes in postmodernism and still found it so difficult to focus. I’m not sure if I enjoyed the reading process, but I felt good for having completed it. Took 2 attempts.

Don Quijote in Spanish. Tough to get through, but worth it.

The second, and even more so the third, book in the Ender's Game series.

I looked the first so much I kept pushing through the others, hoping they would get better. They did not.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is a tough book to get through, but extremely rewarding if you do.

I found Blindsight by Peter Watts to be a hard read mostly because a lot of the philosophy went right over my head. Good book though.

Gödel, Escher, Bach. I was only able to read the whole thing because I was in a ship for a month without TV or internet.

• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Vita Nostra by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko

Both are underrated or underrepresented

We Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong is about microbes inside us and animals and I have no idea why I read it, but it was difficult to read because I'm terrible at biology. Still cool though

Edit: Oh, I didn't realise this is the fiction comm. Oops. I guess I don't read any challenging fiction books. Maybe I should rectify that

It would be The Road by Cormac McCarthy, if I could read it, but it's forever above my reading level.

David Copperfield. I read it in one day when I was a kid and had nothing else to do. Bleak House was a slog too, but it had some nice turns of phrase that stuck with me.

And at the risk of insulting a classic, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I get that it's supposed to be a critique on society and inspired by the author's life. I just found it bleak.

Stefan Wul - Oms en Serie. Difficult because my french isn't that great. Interesting because it was adapted as Fantastic Planet. Great book. Wul is weird.