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Which challenging book was worth the effort for you?
"Challenging" is up to your own interpretation: length, word choice, writing style, subject matter, etc.
Whatever the challenge, you had to put in more effort than normal to read the book, but you came out on the other side feeling like it was worth it.
What's that book?
What makes it challenging?
And why do you feel it's worth it?
Gödel, Escher, Bach
I think this pretty easily satisfies the requirement as a "challenging" book. Beyond being ~700 pages long, it asks a lot from you as a reader, with puzzles and ideas to play around with as you read; it's the only book I've felt can't be properly read without a pen and paper nearby.
With that said, I wouldn't want to misrepresent it as an unapproachable book. I don't recall if there was any math/logic background one would need going in, but if so it was relatively minimal. The dialogues are fun, and, while some of the ideas presented are a bit mind-bending at first, Hofstadter does an excellent job explaining concepts from first principles and organizing each chapter with intention.
As for why it was worth it, that's a bit specific to my experience with the book. I read it in my 2nd(?) year at university as I was just starting to see the connections between different courses I was taking, and the freedom with which GEB connects ideas from mathematics to art and science and cognition really helped me to break down some of the barriers I had formed between these domains in my head.
I had GEB in mind opening this thread. My very first try was in middle school and it was definitely a bit much for me at the time. I think it was my third attempt, when I was in college, that finally got through. I've been considering giving it another read lately - I wonder what I'd see differently this time.
Do you think it is still relevant? It’s one of the books I have bought and is sat on the bookshelf for lack of time or motivation to read it…
The only parts I would imagine being outdated (honestly, it felt that way when I read it as well) would be some of the chapters around the brain and artificial intelligence. I don't know enough to say whether the ideas presented about the functioning of the brain were up-to-date with the science of the time, but I saw them more as musings designed to elicit ideas and comparisons anyways. As for artificial intelligence, while obviously decades out of date, I actually think it might be a great time to read those chapters to regain some perspective on how far we've come and how far we have to go.
I also confess I derive a certain smug pleasure reading predictions from the past with the knowledge of the now-present.
It really shows you what hucksters the AI people are when they completely ignore Godels incompleteness therom.
Could you expand on this point? I have a layman’s understanding of the incompleteness theorem, but I don’t see the connection.
I know there have been debates about the theorem's applicability to human intelligence. I thus assume similar arguments exist when it comes to ML and AI systems, but it's not particularly clear to me how even the annoyingly bullish AI bros are ignoring the theorem.
Incompleteness says that no matter the system of logic used it will come up short at being able to answer all questions or lead to direct contradictions / paradoxes. The AI enthusiasts seems to think it's just a matter of time before their llm can tell them everything about everything. There seems to be no acknowledgement that logic can't solve every problem.
I've started that book half a dozen times. I've enjoyed what I got through every time, but got distracted and moved on to something else before long.
Reading it with a pen and paper is a great idea, I think I was looking at it like a typical novel and just trying to push through. I'll try it next time, thank you.
Catch 22. One of my favorite books, the first time I read it I would often read a chapter three times. The book often felt like a stroke in the worst way. More than once I would go back and read a preceding chapter after finishing one because (after three reads) I wanted to make sure I could still comprehend something.
That and I read A Thousand Splendid suns while the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan was going on. The book is rough enough but it was hard to get to a somewhat optimistic ending with the feeds on the monitor. Looking at the imagery, the bodies, and knowing that the character kind of hoped things would get better.
I gave my team the day off and finished up work by myself that day.
I also loved Catch 22. I revisited the first half after I finished the book and I did the same with the original Dune.
Up the Down Staircase is a less challenging book that contains similar life insights and tells a good, sardonic, story about a public school system.
I read Catch-22 in high school. It wasn't required reading, but it was on a list that we had to pick from. Definitely one of my favorites. And yeah, I had to do the same. Re-reading a chapter I just finished. Finishing a chapter, then going back to another chapter to make sure I was understanding what was happening since it's not written linearly. But I enjoyed it a lot. I always wanted to re-read the whole back, but I never did. I should.
I semi regularly get excited, decide to reread it, pick up a secondhand copy, find someone to gush about it to, give them the copy and rinse/repeat.
I am fully aware that I do this.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The sheer length of the book, the depth and time span of the plot, the amount of characters under the spotlight, the number of footnotes (some going on for pages themselves).
It's a real slog and sometimes I felt frustrated but in the end it was absolutely worth it - I was rewarded with a uniquely brilliant depiction of a dystopian North America that is surreal yet believable and deeply funny yet cynical.
I bought it for my 18th birthday because I felt the title was so arrogant (infinite jest for over 1000 pages printed in bible paper including hundreds of endnotes). Either this thing is brilliant or it’s a trainwreck. Turns out ist absolutely brilliant.
Read it instead of preparing for my A-Levels. Learned countless things, started to think very hard about what was right in front of me.
DFW’s work more generally has sustained me through higher education and well paid but boring office jobs.
I can highly highly highly recommend Miller’s “The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace”. On 150 pages the author summarizes DFW ethics in an extremely poignant manner. Brilliant piece of criticism about a brilliant writer.
DFW's The Pale King, compiled by his friend and editor posthumously, was equally engaging. I try to revisit both annually, and at this point, I actually like the Pale King more. It manages to take the concept of boredom and turn it into something you can evaluate and analyze within yourself.
Both books feel ultimately like guided meditations to me, Infinite Jest a meditation on hedonism, joy, and addiction, and the Pale King on ennui and existence within a system that views us as interchangeable cogs.
Malazan for sure. It took me 5 tries (over the course of like 12 years) to get through book 1 and stay interested in the series but once I managed that, it was so good!!
There are entire paragraphs or perhaps even chapters I didn't understand on my first read-through. I'd read the words and understand what the individual words meant, but not what the sentences intended to convey.
It relies heavily on visualization, theatre of mind stuff, and combined with the metaphysical it can be a tad befuddling.
A second read-through makes certain concepts click because they're no longer new and you no longer have to focus on where it's going but what's happening right now.
Great reads and there's never one of them out of reach in case I feel the need to cross the Seven Cities with the Chain of Dogs.
For anyone feeling the same, I'm in the middle of reading the series and there is a chapter by chapter breakdown here that was unbelievably helpful to read along with the books that help pulls out important details and context. The breakdown is sort of a conversation between two authors (I think?), one an Erickson fan and the other coming in completely blind.
I used these slides and found them EXTREMELY helpful, not even for the summaries so much as for the fanart pictures of all the characters. Having those mental images helped me keep track of who was who so much as I read!! Generally I read the first 20% or so of the book, then read the slides & looked at the pictures up to that point, and then finished the book, then maybe glanced at the slides again, and I did that for most of the books in the series.
[edit: clarified cos it sounded like I read slides before reading, which I didn't]
Wow, these are awesome! I'll be using them when I get to start Memories of Ice. Thanks for sharing!
I didn't have too much trouble with Gardens of the Moon, because there are enough characters and concepts that you clearly don't have the full background on that I was able to just kind of let the vibe of the book carry me through the end. Later books definitely rely on you understanding the world and characters a little better (or maybe that was just my expectation of myself) and got a little more difficult for me to push through, though.
House of Leaves. It's one of my favorite books, but it can be tricky to read due to the meta nature. At first I barely paid attention to the footnotes, not realizing that they told another story on top of the story within. Then there's the wild formatting in some places, I had to physically turn the book in my hands to read some of it. There's also an appendix at the back with letters that are lightly coded, to the point I just looked up the translation because I was lazy.
But damn if I don't love it. It's one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had.
Seconding House of Leaves. When I read it, I kept scrap paper and a pen handy so everytime there was a branch point in the footnotes I could mark it. Then when the current narrative through-line ran out I'd go back up the stack and down from the alternate branch point.
This is also how I read Choose Your Own Adventure books in elementary school - I've always been thorough 😅
Are there any guides or supplements to reading this book ?
Even if it’s just stuff like family trees or maps, some series like DARK (tv, not book), have this. I want to read it so badly. It’s on my bookshelf right now.
When I first started reading it, I would put a finger in the book to keep my place when jumping to a footnote or reference or whatnot.
There got to be a point where I had several fingers in several different places and my hand was getting cramped, so I switched to post-its to mark locations that I was jumping around to.
That’s my recommendation for a “guide:” sticky notes as bookmarks that you move around the text yourself as needed.
Man's search for meaning by Frankl and I will bear witness diaries of Victor Klemperer are Holocaust/ nazi memoirs. I learned a lot from both of them. The grim content makes it difficult. Both authors were scholars and there is rigor and sophistication in the content, not just story. Although Klemperer's work was a diary not a treatise like Frankl's.
Shakespeare's The Tempest is one of many examples of pre 20th century speculative fiction. I read it before I was 13, strictly for fun and it helped inspire a life long love of fantasy.
Dante Divine Comedy was worth it as a challenge and a lengthy reflection of about ethics and religion. If I were recommending to most other people I would say that Inferno is the most generally applicable and the Purgatorio is approachable but Paradiso is extremely technical and probably worth skipping. Any modern person trying to read any part of the divine comedy should keep the end notes handy and look up all references. It's not a fast read but it is rewarding. I don't read Italian so I am not talking about the poetry in the comedia.
I was assigned Man's search for meaning for a university course and it definitely caused a lot of changes in me. Ten years later I read it again for myself. There are a lot of quotes about suffering in the book, but for some reason I always remember this one:
Blindness, by Jose Saramago. I think part of the difficulty was the syntax and grammar. Perhaps this is common in Portuguese grammar, but the dialogue wasn't offset by line breaks, as in most English writing. Rather, the dialogue occured in long, unbroken paragraphs with few indicators about which person was talking. In some ways, this accentuated the sense of disorientation that was a key feature of the book, but it was also, of course, disorienting and, coupled with the catastrophic events of the book, making it difficult to finish.
I hated that book! I agree with you about the style being impenetrable, but the worse thing for me was believing the characters. Just prior to reading it, I had read one of Oliver's Sach's books that detailed real life cases of people overcoming neurological disorders. The contrast between the two books brought into sharp contrast how unrealistic and unhuman Saramago's characters acted.
He was less interested in realism than in making a metaphor about society, which is fine if done well. But the metaphor was heavy-handed and my lack of credulity in the characters made me care not a whit about any of them.
I did not hate it, but I did not care at all for the characters either. Once I got used to the style, I found it pretty flat and boring, to be honest. I remember closing it after reading the last page, and just wondering what all the fuzz was about.
Portuguese uses at least as many line breaks as english. That's just Saramago's thing, with the ten page long paragraphs that only contain commas as separators.
“A thousand years of solitude” feels as long to read as its title. My god. I realize I wrote the title wrong, it’s 100yrs, but that should give you some idea of how long it feels.
I have not read “Dr. Zhivago”, but recently read a description of it that seems like it applies to 100yrs:
So why was it worth it ? The form completely matches the content. Struggling through the book. Being confused. This is all part of the main theme “things repeat themselves despite all your attempts to control and understand them. Sometimes fate is just fate” also “life is annoying and long and at times confusing” lol especially when written about !
Weirdly, I love the message of the book now. Hated when I read it (30yrs ago), tried to read it again hoping I’d like it more because I understand it more. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t like it. I’m sad, but realize I have to rebuild my reading endurance if I want the same pleasures from reading long things.
On the flip side. Books not worth the struggle - “the Caine mutiny”.
I’ll be watching this thread to see if anyone mentions “Ulysses”.
This is exactly how I felt about House of Leaves - the maze of footnotes you have to navigate will give you the same feeling of being lost that the characters feel as they get lost inside the house. It doesn't seem all that profound now, but 20 years ago when I read the book (in my late teens) this realization hit me like a freight train. I need to give it another read.
Perhaps with some of these books you have to just accept your brain won’t get it all on the first pass and you may have to go back to find something you didn’t find relevant at the time or couldn’t remember.
My stupid adhd brain doesn’t let me move on though lol so I get frustrated and quit.
You're exactly right, when reading a lot of dense fiction you sort of have to put mental placeholders when you hit things you don't understand, and as you go the gaps will start to fill in. My gf couldn't get through Dune because she isn't good at that, and it starts off throwing around all these terms that it doesn't explain.
That was my experience with Anna Karenina. I think it's at least partly a translation/obvious in Russian thing, but I often lost track of which person we were talking about.
I can't add it to the list because the library took it back when I was about halfway through and I haven't touched it since.
Moby Dick had these insane paragraph-long sentences, I kept getting lost and going back to the start of the sentence.
It was all worth it for Chapter 94: A Squeeze Of The Hand, in which squeezing whale spermaceti puts the protagonist into a deliriously euphoric mood. It was hilarious :)) Excerpt below:
I read Frankenstein recently and it also had lots of looong sentences that occasionally spanned multiple pages (at least with the scaling on my e-reader). Shelley was very fond of semicolons.
Also, I love that excerpt lol. Moby Dick has been in my TBR pile for a while and I think it's time to move it to the top
The Trial by Franz Kafka. Frustrating in the extreme... I can remember yelling at the damn book from time to time as I read it. And the ending. Oh man, I fumed about this book for weeks afterwards. Its message has stuck with me, however, more than the vast majority of books I've read.
Frustrating in a different way were the two books by Mervyn Peake that I've read, called Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Peake was in love with words, and he could describe the contents of a room for several pages. Most readers don't have the patience for his writing, and I don't really blame them, but if you ever find the rhythm of his prose, it is rewarding. Another part of his writing I find unusual is his use of tension in the plot. It builds so slowly, you're barely aware of its existence at first. It builds throughout the novels though, with no relief... rather like a snowball rolling downhill until it becomes an avalanche at the end.
Mervyn Peake is great. I've only read Titus Groan so far. And yeah, his style is very idiosyncratic. I love the world he weaves, though. So unique and rich. I was thinking about picking up Gormenghast soon.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Very challenging subject material and no quotation marks in the dialog, which takes extra effort to figure who is or isn't speaking.
Same here. I listened on audiobook, so I didn't have any challenge with writing style. But, it was so anxiety inducing I felt afraid to continue reading, and had to take ling breaks to steel myself for whatever might be next.
Terrorist Assemblages, by Jasbir Puar. She’s hard to read, but absolutely so, so worth it.
Terrorist Assemblages talks extensively about the concept of “homonationalism,” which, to diminish an extremely complex and multifaceted theory, is the idea that some groups get folded into acceptability at the cost of others. An example would be how Ellen Degeneres, a white pseudo-masc (but still identifiably female) lesbian, with a white blonde high-femme wife, is “acceptable” to a normative audience, but a Black (or brown) gender-nonconforming trans person will basically never be afforded that privilege.
This book gave me the language to understand so much of what I was seeing around me about what kind of queer folk were permitted to be a part of society, and which were not, and why. I’m not giving the text its full due respect: it’s really about brown bodies post-9/11. (Her second book, The Right to Maim, is excruciatingly relevant to the current moment.)
Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. Didn’t help that I was reading it in the original and my Russian is a bit rusty. However, the main issue I had with this book is the protagonist. He is awful! In the first few chapters I felt like I’ve never read a book where I hated the protagonist more. It isn’t much of a spoiler to say that Rasskolnikov is just a terrible, terrible human being.
But that’s exactly the point of the book! This is deep, challenging, philosophical literature. The point is to examine Rasskolnikov, his misguided motivations, and just how costly his transgressions were to himself and to society.
I read it about six months ago, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since then. It really is a work of art. No wonder it’s been a best seller for about 150 years. Highly recommended!
The Recognitions by William Gaddis. An absolute beast of a book, but right up my alley. It's quite long (~400,000 words); features Joycean-style dialog (never references who's speaking); highly allusive to all kinds of arcana and esoterica as well as a good chunk of the Western Canon; and about a quarter of the way through it stops referencing characters by name altogether, you have to use context and other clues to figure it out. Gaddis's style is just difficult with his complex, dense syntax.
But it's just an incredible piece of literature, and it keeps getting more and more relevant in this day and age. It's a book about duplicity in all its forms: forgery, false identity, plagiarism, counterfeiting, good old fashioned lying. It's a retelling of Faust featuring an art forger as the protagonist. It's also a loving parody of the late 40s-early 50s bohemian scene in Greenwich Village. There's a lot: characters and plot lines weaving through each other. All about the nature of truth: how we create it, and how it breaks down.
I thought the characters were so distinctly written that by the time they're no longer referred to by name it's fairly easy to still keep track of 'em. but, I dunno.. maybe a meta-narrative on.. err.. recognition.. and, if you can distinguish someone (.. or, something) on their merits.. do you need attribution?
i just came up with that and am totally reaching, so probably hogwash (and this admission itself an act of cowardice, for I don't dare attempt a true act of criticism, lest I be laughed out the room).
oh, boy.. the ending was pretty damn cool, as well! it's been a while, so I forget his name, but I kinda saw the protagonist as a mad scientist by the end.
Not hogwash, lol. I think you're pretty spot on. In the end it's not all that hard to figure out who's who. But forcing the reader to figure it out themself definitely fits right in in a book about truth-making.
Sorry @Carrie, I thought about doing Ulysses but I'm pretty sure I previously said in weekly reading thread that I would give my thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow and never got around to it, so here goes!
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is one that has a reputation for difficulty but was absolutely worth the effort. Much like Ulysses, there is a combination of beautiful writing and a lot of very low brow humor.
One of the elements that Pynchon is famous for is constant digressions and parentheticals, and this book is no exception. In one chapter we see that a woman in a room is secretly being filmed. Then we learn about that character's backstory, involving a sort of Hansel and Gretel themed BDSM trio. Then it pivots to a story about her great grandfather, who had been individually responsible for the extinction of the dodos. We then learn about how the woman escaped her old life and got here, and the character who got ger out mentions an intelligent octopus his agency has been working on. We then learn that that octopus is the one holding the camera and filming her! If that sounds a little hard to follow, it is.
The narrative is very complex, and with so many characters and plot threads it can be hard to understand what exactly is going on and why at times, but even when the book is at its most obscure there are laugh out loud moments to keep you going. A good example of this is an early episode where a character finds himself needing to swim down the toilet in a jazz club, a la Trainspotting, and there is a drawn out passage of him examining the various turds. It is unclear until later that this is a character being drugged and interrogated, but the whole passage is super funny and keeps you turning the page.
This isn't a book I'd recommend for everybody, not really because of its difficulty but because of its content. There is a lot of disturbing sexual material, including pedophilia, and some that is just disgusting. This novel was selected by the Pulitzer jury in 1974, but no prize was awarded that year because the Pulitzer committee found it to be obscene. I also have raved about the humor, but I do think you have to have a very juvenile sense of humor to enjoy a lot of this.
That being said, this is one of the best books I have read, and if you're thinking of reading it and are put off by the difficulty, I would recommend just diving in! If you are put off by the content, I would recommend some of Pynchon's other work more. Mason & Dixon in particular is a terrific experience as well, challenging in its own right, but a lot more upbeat than GR.
Well god damn, now I want to read Gravity’s rainbow.
If you are the Giant Bookslayer that I think you are, can you tell me if you’ve read “House of Leaves” ? I really want to do that, but have tried 2-3 times and can’t really get into it.
I wish there were like - children’s versions or simpler versions to get into these books ? I suppose I wouldn’t like that either, book club is probably my best bet to be forced to power through. Guides to accompany the books like the ones they make for complicated Korean dramas.
I own it but have not gotten around to it yet, I'm very interested in it though!
Interesting. I found Mason & Dixon much more melancholic than Gravity's Rainbow, though I would say less challenging a read (not that it's without its challenges, of course). Really beautiful moments throughout, peppered with lots of wackiness (...and.. quackiness 🦆). My favorite Pynchon I've read, thus far!
Lord of the Flies
I read it at a very impressionable age. My parents made me read it since I was dealing with some very similar interpersonal dynamics as they discuss in the book. To this day, I hate that book, but I don’t regret reading it. It had a huge influence on my outlook and world view. I also think it played a large part in me building my own ethical standards, which I think everyone should do.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, every sentence and every word I felt like I had to highlight.
Flowers for Algernon, I too went to a special school and keenly felt the blossoming of my mind. However, one of my biggest fears is the eventual diminution of my mind as I age.
Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's not a particularly challenging read, but it takes a while for the key themes to really hit. This is my default example of a book that initially felt like a bit of a chore to get through, but which I'm really glad to have read.
Not very original, but Blindsight by Peter Watts. I love how Watts deals with characters that are completely messed up and beyond the human condition. I find his books calming and reassuring. Perhaps I'm the first person to say that about Peter Watts.
A Little Life by Yanagihara. The book is tough in several ways: it touches som very hard topics, is very slow-paced and the book is just super long on top of that. It felt like a marathon, but I’m glad I finished it.
I’ll never recommend it to anyone though - I think you need to find the interest for that book yourself.
It's been on my bookshelf for ages. I never got around reading it. Would you care why you felt that it paid off in the end? I just finished my current read so maybe I'm inclined to pick it up.
Well, I can try.
Without spoiling too much, the book touches on some hard topics like self-harm. I personally know someone on my family who suffered from this in a period of her life, and for me the book was very insightful and relatable way to understand some of the dynamics that might be the cause of this mental struggle.
Also, I think the characters go through some of the most beautiful and realistic arcs I’ve ever read. The book was just beautifully written and that is also one of the reasons I liked it.
And even though the story was slow and very detailed, I was eager to know how the book ended, and I think that is a good sign.
I’d recommend reading a chapter or two. If you like the writing and the overall feeling, I think you will enjoy the rest of the book, even though the story is quite depressing.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
It falls into what I think of as the rarer scifi genre of "I think this is what Asimov or Bester were going for", in that it's trying to imagine a future society and the implications of all those differences by telling a story. I largely think it succeeds and is significantly better than either of them in terms of narrative. It does very little hand-holding about how society and social interactions work leaving a kind of puzzle for the reader to solve as the story goes on. It's also just dense with concepts and really nice prose.
I also liked how it's just Earth based. I like Space Communism in Star Trek, I like Space Capitalism in The Expanse, etc., etc. But it's nice to also have a sci-fi story that has a much more "space is hard" approach to futurism and mostly stays planet bound. I got gifted the book originally and didn't look to much into it but apparently it's the first of a (finished?) series. I should get on that.
Captivity by György Spiró because, in addition to its length (which, I guess I don't really factor into the "challenge", much), it was.. well.. boring. Written by someone who was clearly well acquainted with the time period of the early first century (or, at least, faked it convincingly) and really wanted you to know it. The main character, while quite pathetic in a somewhat endearing way, just.. didn't hold my interest, much. It was mostly entertaining in a way in which you felt like a historical tourist.. Spiró really could set a scene. that said, I remember it ending on a sad note... so, 3/5, for me.
EDIT: shit, I just saw the title again and the subtext was "worth it", not just "challenging". Well, my review still stands.