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 Páramo" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Micromégas (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.
> 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.
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).
It's likely I projected the complexity onto the Art & Fear. Reading it every few pages I thought about how what it was discussing applied to creating software. But that's not really what the author intended, it's more the mindset I brought to the book
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.)
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.
Let me add also Blindness by José 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been working off of the Penguin Classics list found on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penguin_Classics) 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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!
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 "Tlön, 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.
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 Páramo" 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.
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.
However, I can hardly read Ancient Greek as a modern Greek speaker!
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure English changed a lot more than French from the same period.
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.
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 Micromégas (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.
> 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!
Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd.
For a salmon-sized taste, Bartleby the Scrivener. Great annotated version here: https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herma...
Wait? That was the moby dick guy?! Loved that Bartley story.
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.
You suckered me into reading the article by mentioning Moby Dick.
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).
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
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?
It's likely I projected the complexity onto the Art & Fear. Reading it every few pages I thought about how what it was discussing applied to creating software. But that's not really what the author intended, it's more the mindset I brought to the book
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.)
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.
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.
I read it maybe 15 years ago and I just remembere it as that book with wale facts.
It is very likely that a book funny to adult you would went over 9th grade you regardless of reading speed.
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.
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.
I read Animal Farm in 9th grade and it had a profound impact me. Hmmm is that you Napoleon?
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.
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.
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.
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.
…or so the 16-year old still thought.
I was a 16 year old in the 1990s and it was mysterious to me.
So you were born circa 1979?
Reading allegory is the way start building mental context.
Honestly, even getting through 1/3 of it in a night is pretty impressive. Certainly took me several weeks freshman year of college.
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".
Great novel! Love Banks..
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.)
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.
Let me add also Blindness by José 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!
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is like that. It's best read in the pit of a cold winter.
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.
Great book.
And a counter point, Blood Meridian by the same author. Extremely difficult for no reason whatsoever. Terrible book.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.
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.
"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.
"Short little difficult plays" - Anything by Ionesco: Rhinoceros, The Leader, etc., etc.
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?
Do you recall in what book or article Newport made that suggestion?
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?
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.
What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
Your previous readings of Finnegans Wake are your preparation for your next one.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Willingness.
A little bit Ulysses, a little bit knowledge of every language ever.
It took me 20 years to read Ulysses and I still don't know what happened in it.
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.
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.
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.
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_Curious_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
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.
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._Dick
I've been working off of the Penguin Classics list found on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penguin_Classics) 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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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
>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!
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 "Tlön, 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.