On reading unreadable books.

In this my sixty-fifth year I find I can read books which I formerly considered unreadable. I am currently reading Finnegans Wake and having a lot of fun with it. Perhaps I have just started to stop making sense.

In no particular order, I am considering tackling these next: Juliette by Sade, 120 Days of Sodom, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Left Behind, Dhalgren and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I am aware that these differ greatly in literary quality, to say the least.

I don't feel like I have any agenda in reading these works except perhaps to enjoy liberation from worrying about my personal likes and dislikes.

If you want to warn me against wasting the time remaining to me, this would be the time to do it.

Has anyone else had this experience of willingly reading an 'unreadable' book? I don't consider a book unreadable just because of length and complexity: I have enjoyed War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example (although I never got too far into the Byzantine part).

Left Behind has a wonderful page-by-page critique at Slacktivist:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2011/08/07/left-behind-index-i-posts-1-...
It's been running for 9 years already and it's up to the third book now.

I recommend reading the book on your own first and then reading along with the posts, Fred really shines a light on it.

Dhalgren is brilliant, you must certainly read it. But avoid The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as they are the worst kind of trash.

3: I second your opinion about Rand's "books." I did have an agenda when I read Atlas Shrugged, back when the Tea Party was rising like the bile in my throat, before they became rape-obsessed theocratic anarcho-capitalist caricatures of themselves.

Another "unreadable" book is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young Some Faulkner books have been called "unreadable" as well: Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and The Fury

I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed them for the most part. No, I don't agree with all Rand's ideas (and I'm a green/liberal/democrat type, for the record), but I still found the work interesting and certainly some of what she "preaches" has merit. The one thing I will say about Atlas, is skip/skim his radio speech near-ish the end. It's like a 100(? I forget it's been so long, may have been more than that) page rehash of the entire (very large) book - without the pleasure of reading it "hidden" in the story - just plain ol' political-type speech. Even for someone who fully agrees with her ideas, it's utterly pointless, as you've already gotten this message through the story. It's redundant, way too long, and just irritating that it was included at all.

I can't really think of anything I'd call "unreadable," unless I meant it about something like Twilight or some such, which I'd rather gouge my eyes out before forcing myself near that crud, so I'm no help there, sorry. lol. But good luck on your quest! :)

Unlike Atlas Shrugged, The 120 Days of Sodom was much better written and Sade was far more intellectual rigorous and morally upstanding compared to a morally bankrupt 9th-rate-sub-hack like Rand. Rand simply wrote a Stalinist-style Socialist Realism novel, but switched the roles for everybody, so instead of writing overlong turgid odes to tractors and collectives farms, it is overlong turgid odes to business execes and steel magnates. I for one, would be quite happy in a world rid of both Stalin and Ayn Rand, since one was a sociopathic megalomaniac who had a coterie of sycophants and thugs to do their every wish, and the one ruled the Soviet Union.

The Fountainhead is so overwrought it was clearly written by someone off their meds. Roark is a good architect because he sticks to his guns and he doesn't, er, design buildings with doors that open onto brick walls, or windows that can't open because pillars are in the way. Not to mention a female heroine who is frigid until she is raped. Do yourself a favour, don't read the book, burn it.

I'm currently reading Gravity's Rainbow with an Honors College group that picks one long novel, often considered unreadable, to discuss each semester. Being in the group really helped with understanding the book more for a while, but now I'm ready to just finish the darn thing.

I willingly read hopscotch by Julio Cortázar for an informal book group. I'm pretty sure I was the only one of us to finish it, which was the only satisfaction I got from that particular experience.

Re #8: I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow but quit about two-thirds of the way through, then a fellow LTer recommended The Crying of Lot 49 and I couldn't put it down. Rather surprising that Pynchon's two most famous novels are so different: one is often considered unreadable, while the other is a page-turner.

So how does one determine a novel's "unreadability"?

1. Poor writing -- Atlas Shrugged, Left Behind series, the works of John Ringo
2. Level of difficulty -- Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Ada, or Ardor, House of Leaves
3. Challenging subject matter -- 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette, "The Part About the Murders" in 2666, The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
4. Ow, this hurts my brain! -- Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
5. Really, really long -- In Search of Lost Time, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rising Up and Rising Down.

As pattern-seeking creatures, books like Finnegans Wake and Ada confound us because they are not "about" anything. Most books, for better or worse, are basic transcriptions of reality, rendered in a kind of ornamented journalism. The Wake has trilingual puns and Joyce is on record as saying he wrote it to torment academics.

Ironically, DFRE by Gibbon is surprisingly readable, albeit for those who like the ironic, dry prose of Augustan England. On the other hand, it's incredibly damn long. (I've only read excerpts here and there.)

If anything, this thread is useful in locating books that are beyond our normal comfort zone.

>2 Amtep: Thanks for the tip. I think I may enjoy Left Behind as black comedy. I grew up on the fringe of the Bible Belt.

>3 iansales:, 4, 5, 6, 7 I had bogged down in Dhalgren a few decades ago, but will definitely try again. I may read the Rand books regardless just to be able to point out their failings explicitly.

>5 .Monkey.: No, no Twilight for me. I don't think I would find anything either good or worth arguing with there.

>8 SusieBookworm:, 10 Thanks for the reminder about Gravity's Rainbow. I actually finished that, but my eyes glazed over multiple times. That was my younger self, so I will give it another go.

>9 jellyfishjones: I never considered Hopscotch unreadable, but it goes on the TBR list too.

>11 kswolff: Nice taxonomy. To the brain-hurting list one could add Heidegger.

I see nobody has commented on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Being of a heterosexual persuasion, that goes into category 3, challenging subject matter. I snagged a signed copy recently when Prof. Delany appeared at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Based on his comments, I consider it a worthy contender.

I don't bother to read books in category 1: Poor Writing. Unless it's for a project (or you're getting paid) why waste your time?

An unreadable novel I've been seriously considering is Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel, what looks to be an epic-length book of riffs, puns, plays on words and other nonsense by Julian Rios. That falls into category 2 along with Beckett, Ulysses and probably the surrealists.

The third category mostly conjures up such books as The Gulag Archipeligo and The Butcher's Wife - novels and reportage dealing with explicitly real scenarios. A more "fanciful" work in that mode would be Fernando Arrabal's The Compass Stone, which I've long planned to read, alongside the equally phantasmagorical Naked Lunch.

The brain-hurters.... Spengler. He's worth it, I know he's worth it, but damn, he's a tough one.

Length of the work...Proust, Gibbon, and I'd add Durant's Story of Civilization.

Now the question I've never heard asked is...what is the attraction of these tomes? What is the allure of an "unreadable" book? If it's more difficult and/or time-consuming is it necessarily more rewarding? I don't think I've ever read a clear statement on this point.

Dhalgren: The narrative parts aren't too hard but it's best to not spend too much time searching for significance in the poetry or the split-screen parts. Also if explicit off-beat sex is a no-go then Dhalgren is a no-go.

Finnegan's Wake: I challenged myself to read this and did it by reading two pages every night before going to sleep. I didn't find any significance in it, but a surprising amount of humor. By the time I finished it I was tempted to pick up the beginning sentence again (as it starts half-way through the final sentence) and keep going. An effective soporific but at least a little more.

Current unreadable: Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. It's short, but I have been trying to get through it for 3 years. Yet I read serenely through his much longer Either/Or, and learned a lot from it.

I think there's a distinction between unreadable books and distasteful books. And either quality lies in the eye of the reader.

#12 A signed copy of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders? I'm jealous. I've not picked up a copy of the book yet, but I do plan to do so at some point.

For years I've been meaning to read all of the Bible, but I never get very far. I think it hits all five of kswolff's categories :) In addition to the difficulty of the language, there's also the matter of large amounts of assumed background knowledge, some of which has been lost. I think that might be a sixth kind of unreadability.

>15 iansales: Be sure to get the Xeroxed pages of Chapter 90, which the publisher apparently left out accidentally. It is available online, apparently. My copy of that chapter was furnished and inserted into the book by Delany personally (please pardon my gloating).

You can hear what he and Junot Diaz said that night on the Free Library of Philadelphia podcast -- they have had more than 300 'author events' which were taped and podcasted.

> 16 I found it worthwhile to read the Bible in versions for their intended audiences. For example, reading a version of Tanakh prepared from Masoretic texts for American Jews.

Bertilak: See my review of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders for some thoughts on what makes it a difficult read. It's actually not a hard read for anyone who is not automatically put off by sexual acts that repel them, and I think it's safe to say that there's something in the hijinks the characters in Delany's novel get up to that will repel even the most confirmed libertine.

http://www.librarything.com/work/9836383

#4 back when the Tea Party was rising like the bile in my throat Wonderful! My 'simile of the day'!

Speaking of soporific, if you really can't sleep try listening to the Librivox reading of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I kept listening to the same part over and over again because I'd fall asleep after 5 minutes.

15 Be sure to get the Xeroxed pages of Chapter 90, which the publisher apparently left out accidentally. It is available online, apparently. My copy of that chapter was furnished and inserted into the book by Delany personally (please pardon my gloating).

On a similar note:

The Cantos by Ezra Pound -- hits many categories. Also, translations of Pound's 2 "Italian Cantos" are available online.

The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic -- Make note of the male and female versions of the book. I have the "male" version, but the differences are minor (a paragraph or two), also luckily available online.

Soporific, you say? Let me direct your attention to Das Kapital, Volume 2. Volume 1, while long and with extended stretches of abstract economic thought, does have the occasional old school Marx at his most polemical and verbally explosive. Volume 2 is long, dry, abstract, and Oh Lord, so so boring. (Granted, like any other academic text, it is useful, but sheesh, it's presented in such a horrendously dull manner. Part of the blame falls to Engels, who edited it, and the other reason is that it was cobbled together from Marx's notebooks after Marx died.)

11: I should recommend Ada to my reading group, then. We're on Gravity's Rainbow now, last semester they read Ulysses, and next semester is House of Leaves. One of the two leaders crushed the other's idea of Finnegan's Wake, though. He was headed towards The Magic Mountain until another member mentioned House of Leaves.

> 15 and 17. Look at us desiring an object infused with mana due to its being touched by a person of power! That suggests another Great Unreadable: The Golden Bough. The abridged version did not work for me. I am waiting for the full 12 volume set to work its way through the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading process by peristalsis. N. B., I learned about these volumes by being a distributed proofreader myself: http://www.pgdp.net/d/walkthrough/ .

> 22 The Magic Mountain would have been a fine choice. I love the Pieter Peeperkorn episode and the thrownness of the protagonist. I haven't read House of Leaves but it sounds worthy.

23: I just picked up an abridged copy of The Golden Bough at a book sale last week. What's unreadable about it?

> 24: The extreme detail. The citations of obscure field observers one has never heard of.

The net effect is like being in a party where everyone else is in a clique and is communicating solely by in-jokes.

25: The net effect is like being in a party where everyone else is in a clique and is communicating solely by in-jokes.

On LT, that group would be the sci/fantasy group. Ugh, what a bunch of navel-gazing wags.

Perhaps there should also be a distinction between "unreadable" and "difficult to finish". I find long picaresque novels easy reading but often impossible to finish. Examples: Don Quixote, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, The Outlaws of the Marsh, Tom Jones. After a while I just start feeling like I get it.

> 27. For me, Don Quixote was putdownable until I read Edith Grossman's translation: she made it come alive. As for Tom Jones I lost interest until I saw the film version, which included the reversal of fortune at the end. This might make it worth reading again.

The picaresque novel is probably the equivalent of the contemporary 15-book fantasy saga: the readers who like them don't want them to end. Would that all writers of such cycles had the wit and erudition of Gene Wolfe. I think Lovecraft was right not to publish his picaresque The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Although it is fun to see him link his previous stories, it does drone on.

For an interesting modern spoof/celebration of the picaresque see Silverlock.

I am undecided about the Poictesme books by James Branch Cabell. For me they are like Necker's Cubes. They oscillate back and forth between arch sophistication and over-preciosity.

27: Perhaps there should also be a distinction between "unreadable" and "difficult to finish". What about books you couldn't even start? I couldn't get past Chapter of Angels and Demons, although I owe it to the fact that Dan Brown wrote a terrible piece of shit. By contrast, I got through all of The Cantos by Pound and In Search of Lost Time by Proust, but both took me two years ... each.

29: Right with you about Angels and Demons. It seemed to have been written by a 14 year-old (with apologies to 14 year-olds).

>30 augustusgump: Yes about Angels & Demons. I would describe it as written by a one-man focus group for people stuck at the level of 14 year-olds.

Does anybody want to start another thread about works written by teenagers? Eragon was highly derivative and ignorable by adults. Luc Besson supposedly worked on an early draft of The Fifth Element when he was 17. That may be a mess, but it is a lively, entertaining mess.

I "met" Christopher Paolini's father on a self-publishing internet forum, when they were just producing the first Eragon book and going round to schools, libraries, etc. dressed as characters and promoting the book. I gently teased him about his boosting of his son's achievement in writing the book. I certainly ended up with egg all over my face! Publishers were desperate to cash in on the Harry Potter phenomenon, and this made his success possible. That's not to detract from the marketing efforts - it was a combination of hard work and fortuitous timing (which will usually trump literary merit), and it was fun to watch it happen.
I'm not going to say anything about the book itself. It wouldn't be fair, as I would never normally read that kind of stuff anyway.

31 : Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan comes immediately to mind.

32: If Paolini continues to be a writer he may end up being very embarrassed at his early fantasy series. It is really really really derivative and overly long and and and... but of course it was written by someone really young.

My son's girlfriend who is 19 has written two novels already, very much high fantasy, and wants me to read them and give her feedback - it is difficult to know what to do - on the one hand I think they are not bad for the genre and could probably be edited into somthing publishable - on the other hand I think there is enough fantasy out there already that is so similar to itself and want her to branch out and try writing something else.

ETA: Another thing that's hard for me to evaluate is just how derivative her stuff is, since I don't read a lot of fantasy. Maybe in fantasy being derivative is just fine? I feel I don't know enough about the genre to be sure...

Aren't some authors' first works rough around the edges and derivative, barely palatable?

35: Well yeah, just like that symphony Mozart wrote when he was 6 or whatever is not one of the ones that is regularly played today.

#35--in the old days, these early works would either be destroyed by the author or filed away in a drawer somewhere, juvenilia best forgotten.

These days, the author self-publishes the crap and tries to score a book deal similar to E.L. James'...

And, with increasing velocity, our culture speeds toward certain ruin.

John Grisham sold his trunk novel once he was a best-seller, Cliver Cussler did the same. For all we know, The Casual Vacancy may have been Rowling's...

37: And, with increasing velocity, our culture speeds toward certain ruin.

Oh, puh-leese! Even Zombie Matthew Arnold is thinking that's a tad far-fetched. Every time I hear some aesthete declaim yet another baby-step towards cultural ruin, I keep thinking of some LBJ-era press secretary talking about "how we turned a corner in the Vietnam War." At some point, it all becomes static and histrionics. You want to read about cultural ruin? Read the recent history of Sri Lanka and see what happens when everything -- democracy, an independent judiciary, human rights, etc. -- all get sacrificed to fight a terrorist group the government starts resembling. With overpopulation, climate change, and a free market perpetually on the brink of systemic collapse, I'm all in favor of some cultural ruin ... and perhaps a pandemic or two. We need cultural ruin and a species-wide course corrective at this point.

The velocity of cultural ruin is another kind of Zeno's Paradox: for all the sturm and drang caused by alleged cultural ruin, we never ever ever seem to get there. Akin to the way that Howard Camping gentleman kept going on about a so-called Apocalypse being nigh. Yeah, along with that bridge in Brooklyn that's for sale.

I call shenanigans.

Addendum: Instead of using "cultural ruin," I'm all for the term, "the death of popular taste." Because even after the death of the monoculture in the 90s (after Johnny Carson retired and the rise of the Internet), there was still a modicum of "popular taste" in society. It seems like we as a culture have lost that education, because we even had the decency to hold up quality standards to lowbrow standard-bearers like Robert Williams and Mickey Spillane We're in some weird post-9/11, post-Great Recession twilight zone of multicultural non-judgmental-ness, badly veiled ethnocentric racism ("Obama's a socialist!"), and mainstream publishers cashing in on the latest trends with all the reserve of a heroin addict (which wouldn't be so bad if they actually cared to cultivate a decent midlist and not be subject to bean counter tyranny because they are just a price point in a vast corporate conglomerate that really doesn't give a damn about books or publishing).

OK, I'm done standing on the soapbox.

More unreadable books:

The Tunnel by William Gass
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess -- especially if you don't have the edition with the glossary in the back.
Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban

As far as books being unreadable, what are we meaning when we say we "read"? Are books nothing more than linear narrative delivery devices? How important is it that we "get it"? These questions were answered in an introduction to Finnegans Wake Can the Wake be read in a linear fashion? I don't mind picking a page at random and then reading random passages. The Wake is a book, but it's also a puzzle and a labyrinth.

Right now I'm enjoying Ulysses after having failed to read it when I was a teenager. No one would read it for the story because nothing consequential happens, but it finally hit me--and I say this with the utmost respect--that it's like "Seinfeld." ("Seinfeld" was a 1990s U.S. television comedy that focused on daily minutiae rather than traditional storylines.) Much of the interest, humor, and relatability in Ulysses comes from Joyce's astute observation of seemingly inconsequential moments: leaving home without one's keys despite pledging to remember them, making a clumsy joke to entertain a bored class, ducking down to hide from a creditor. Yes, of course, there are bigger-than-life themes too, but they're not what made Ulysses so innovative.

The problem is that some of the incidents, unlike the examples above, depend on cultural assumptions that are forgotten. For example, when Bloom remarks that Dignam was fortunate to have died a quick death rather than a lingering one, he's met with silence; that becomes meaningful and funny only when you recognize that Bloom, being Jewish, doesn't share his Catholic friends' preferance for a foreseeable death to permit atonement and last rites, so ironically Bloom is alienated from the group by a remark he hoped would help him fit in. The cultural notes for Ulysses are therefore quite helpful for getting some of the humor and observations.

The other thing that's helpful is making my peace with the fact that there will inevitably be jokes, allusions, or apercus that I miss, even with the benefit of annotations. After all, I can always read it again; my goal for this go-round is just to enjoy it and appreciate it as much as possible. If I tried to master it on the first reading, I'd neither enjoy nor finish it.

I found the following books very difficult to read:

Foucalt's Pendulum. I thought this would be my cup of tea, but I found it extremely dull.

Something Happened!. A remarkable book, which I gained a lot from reading, but it's so desolate that I wouldn't repeat the experience.

Pynchon's V. There are very few books that I don't really understand, but I have to admit that I had little clue what was going on, and after a while, I didn't care.

I thought Moby-Dick was great, and as far as I recall, I enjoyed The Fountainhead.

I can't get on with Nostromo, but I'll give it another go in a couple of years.

42: I also enjoyed The Fountainhead, but I was a high school philistine ... and a virgin. I really can't apologize for the idiocies of my youth.

Unreadable? What say all to Revelations in the Bible?

I think this thread is most helpful/interesting when posters list why something is unreadable, citing kswolff's categories.

1. Poor writing -- Atlas Shrugged, Left Behind series, the works of John Ringo
2. Level of difficulty -- Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Ada, or Ardor, House of Leaves
3. Challenging subject matter -- 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette, "The Part About the Murders" in 2666, The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
4. Ow, this hurts my brain! -- Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
5. Really, really long -- In Search of Lost Time, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rising Up and Rising Down.

It's important. For instance:
Something Happened! is a painful book (and funny...Love that: In the office in which I work...), I guess that goes under Challenging subject matter... So it's good do know that someone found it disturbingly depressing

But Ridley Walker and A Clockwork Orange are great narratives that mess with language and society and brutal subject matter and are just awesome, thought provoking books. So, yeah, they hit #2,3,4 , which are GOOD things when they are really working. That is when depressing fiction can actually be uplifting as amazing art.

The Bible may actually hit all 5 categories at different times.

Eragon Gossip: I never read the book. But I know of one of the screen writers who worked on that movie--i believe it was worked on by 3 sets of writers. He refused to finish the book, pronouncing it unreadable and an insult to the fine movies and legends that spawned it. I believe he had his partner summarize and annotate the book for him.

In re: the Bible and different categories:

Chana Bloch's translation of Song of Songs is highly readable and actually quite sensual, verging on the erotic. On the other hand, the KJV Song of Songs is clunky, allegorical muck: the Jacobean committee de-sexualizing the content and putting in the Procrustean bed befitting the English Reformation

On that same note: unreadable but oddly compelling:

The Book of Mormon -- the tales of Native American descendants of ancient Hebrews written in Joseph Smith's cod-Jacobean prose. As Mark Twain opined, "Chloroform in print."

The Urantia Book -- covered in Strange Creations by Donna Kossy -- is a bizarre hodgepodge of eugenics, extraterrestrial race-theory, Biblical history, and intergalactic bureaucracy written in the language befitting a battalion of tax lawyers. All fitting into a taut 2000 pages.

Another one is The Book of the SubGenius: Not necessarily unreadable but a labyrinth of parody, satire, images, and text.

How about The Book of Kells?

And people have been trying to decipher Codex Seraphinianus and The Voynich Manuscript for quite some time.

And back to Pynchon, one of the coolest things about The Crying of Lot 49, apart from its trenchant expose on the evil of postage stamps and mail monopolies, is how it actually works as a mystery. On the surface, it is Pynchon's most "accessible" novel -- sidebar: How do the terms "accessible" and "unreadable" match up with each other? -- yet, unlike every other genre mystery/thriller/conspiracy novel out there, the book gets more mysterious with each successive chapter. And it's less than 200 pages long.

Another unreadable one: JR, by William Gaddis, and the 700 pages of unattributed dialogue. Not necessarily unreadable, but the reader does have to pay more attention than usual.

What about...

" The lordling skimming the girdle-tracks; the lord clenching the fist, bruising the skin | with delight, hewing at the flower of the teeth, | smiting with cestus, driving home; the lord walking on wings the breathless path, the star-smiter, | the foaming gulf of waters, dogfish smiter on the creeping flower; | the lord, smiter of the horse-hide (or the surface of the rock), the dog climbing the path, the dog emptying with the foot the water-pitchers, | climbing the circling path, parching the wine-skin, | the tall jars, the high-stemmed vessel, climbing the circling path, the solitary rocks; | the lord clasping to the breast the pillars; the dog holding and seizing the pitchers."

... which is apparently the text of the Phaistos Disc, according to FG Gordon, 1931.

Re: 44 'Something Happened! is a painful book (and funny...Love that: In the office in which I work...), I guess that goes under Challenging subject matter... So it's good do know that someone found it disturbingly depressing'

For me, it wasn't exactly the subject matter, but its treatment. It's repetitive and unrelentingly bleak, the literary equivalent of a looping gif showing someone being executed. From that point of view, I think Something Happened! was pretty audacious: it's about as far from 'entertaining' as I can imagine. But it is mesmerising, and that made it both unputdownable and neverpickupagainable.

How did this thread get so long with no mention of Infinite Jest?

Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books. I didn't find it unreadable at all, although I must admit, that after reading it about 5 times, I do skip John Galt's speech which is towards the end of the book. The book stands as a good story on its own.

I didn't find that I enjoyed The Fountainhead as much as Atlas Shrugged. Although I enjoyed the character Howard Roark, I didn't find the other characters as developed as those in The Fountainhead.

I found The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce to be VERY unreadable. I don't even think I will try to tackle Ulysses. I just couldn't get into the stream of conscciousness. It's not that I couldn't follow it - perhaps its that Stephen Dedalus's thoughts were just NOT that interesting to me.

I also had trouble finishing To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I have rarely ever not finished a book but I think I read Woolf's book right after Joyce's book, and I just couldn't stomach reading two books that I disliked so close together. I'm not sure what turned me off about this book. I guess it was another one that just didn't pull me in for some reason.

I know that many people love the book The Cider House Rules by John Irving but that did not interest me either. I do usually enjoy novels with such good characterization, but Homer Wells' life just seemed to go on and on.

I did like A Clockwork Orange although truthfully, I listened to the audio version instead of reading it. I thought it was very though provoking, and I enjoyed the look at a possible future society.

My goodness. Atlas Shrugged interesting but Stephen Daedalus not?

From the Grauniad this weekend: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2012/nov/03/10-most-difficult-books-in...

Not so, iansales. ATLAS SHRUGGED is one of those books you either love or hate. You, obviously, hated it, but that doesn't mean it's "the worst kind of trash." You can't say that just because you didn't like it. The book is a classic because many people did like it.

Your saying it's trash is as if I said that ANNA KARENINA is trash because I didn't like it. Now wouldn't that be an idiotic thing to say?

52: It's unreadable because Rand's style is completely indistinguishable from Stalinist-ere Socialist Realism she so decried when she wasn't mooching off the Social Security system, chomping down diet pills like M & Ms, and wandering around Manhattan with her entourage of unquestioning bootlickers and sycophants. That and the ditzy broad had no concept of how the English language worked. If I wanted a decent argument against government-run transportation monopolies, I'll just watch The Aviator again instead of subjecting myself to Rand's weapons-grade stupidity and childish temper tantrums. In summary, Stalin missed one and the world is worse for it.

#52 I've only read The Fountainhead and I can say quite objectively that it is indeed a rubbish book. I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but Rand's odious philosophy is enough for me to avoid the book. And I continue to find it astonishing that intelligent people actually admire her, her philosophy and her books.

54: Hence the paradox, how can be intelligent and admire Rand? Then again, the act of admiration is not linked to reason. It is an irrational reaction based on the admirer's enjoyment as an inferior being.

Then again, I don't want this thread to devolve into a "We hate Ayn Rand" rut. We have a discussion thread explicitly devoted to giving bad writers a well-deserved kick.

Let's talk more about JR, Gravity's Rainbow, and Absalom! Absalom!

52: By that yardstick, Fifty Shades of Gray is a classic.

48: Did you find IJ hard? I found it a joy to read. Long, certainly. But not really difficult to read. A little hard to keep straight, I suppose, since it's so long and involved - but it is not meant to be kept straight and has red herrings in there in order to make it deliberately unclear, so I guess I just didn't mind that much.

I loved in the bio of DFW that I just finished reading, that he had wanted it to be subtitled "A failed entertainment" because it was not all wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow but left a lot of open ended plot holes for speculation - by design.

How about At Swim-Two Birds or other Flann O'Brien?

Chaucer in the original is kind of difficult.

What about novels written in self-consciously archaic prose? Examples: Mason & Dixon by Pynchon and Argall by William Vollmann.

58-

The Third Policeman wasn't difficult. Phantasmagorical, witty, entertaining, Kafkaesque...

I haven't read Swim yet, but that's a complex narrative structure so it's probably a bit more challenging.

Yes, Mason & Dixon was a struggle for me. I wasn't quite sure why I continued reading; I couldn't say it was any kind of pleasure.

Anybody else read The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus? One of my favorite books, but nearly impenetrable.

Speaking of impenetrable, earlier this year I read The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault. Not an easy read, since it was the history of "medical perception," not necessarily a linear medical history. Although I did enjoy his take on the history of the stethoscope. Invented because prudish doctors didn't want to put their heads too close to the heaving bosoms of sickly womanfolk.

The Guardian put Under the Volcano on that list of "difficult books". While I've yet to read it, I've loved the Lowry I've read so far.

I've heard some of Will Self's books fit the bill. Umbrella and The Book of Dave, for example.

The Soft Machine and other cut-up experiments.

I've always thought full-blown surrealism actually is unreadable, either in prose or poetry.

No mention of Gertrude Stein yet?

The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl are enormously challenging books. Trying (and failing) to read the former scared me off of Henry James for quite some time.

64: Haven't read any Stein since I was forced to read an essay of hers in my college lit class. Not easy to digest, but that doesn't it mean it isn't rewarding.

Blake's epic poems like Milton and Jerusalem

And for work that is horrifying and brain-scalding, the works of Peter Sotos He writes from the 1st person POV of serial killers, child rapists, and SS guards. Makes Sade look urbane and restrained.

Here's a quote from the latest essay anthology by Umberto Eco:

"I am perfectly aware of my passion for Hugo. Elsewhere I have praised his sublime excess: and excess can turn even bad writing and banality into a Wagnerian tempest. To explain the fascination a film like Casablanca, I have noted that that while a single cliche is kitsch, shamelessly letting fly a hundred cliches makes an epic; and I have noted how the Count of Monte Cristo might be badly written (unlike other novels by Dumas, such as The Three Musketeers) and may be rambling and verbose, but it is precisely because of these defects, taken beyond reasonable limits, that it reaches that Kantian vision of the sublime, and justifies the hold it has had, and still has, on millions of readers."

Thoughts? Reactions?

Hmm, sounds like dangerous floodgates opening; the less banality and bad writing the better.

I think that allowances tend to be made for the "excess" of earlier (say 19th century) novels because they were an emerging form. But people who are seriously interested in reading and writing don't accept this type of "excess" in contemporary literature.

BTW, i thought that The Count of Monte Cristo was a better, and better written, novel than The Three Musketeers

I think maximalist writing has its own kind of charm. I don't think because something is purposely written in a florid style, that it is automatically bad writing. Sometimes that kind of writing is very effective for a certain kind of mood that is evoked in the reader.

The style should suit the story.

Everything in deference to story.

70: Indeed. Or to turn a phrase, "Style is substance."

Pictures of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses: http://www.retronaut.com/2012/10/marilyn-monroe-reading-james-joyces-ulysses/

A couple things. By "unreadable books," what are we implying/presuming about the reader?

Is there such a thing as an Ideal Reader? It also brings up the concept of "reception theory" in literary criticism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_theory

And is there a generic Snob Reader and what are his/her reading behaviors? Since, above all, it is the reader that renders a book unreadable.

If there weren't "Ideal Readers", I think I would've given up writing long ago.

Reading and Guilty Pleasures:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/reading-and-guilty-pleasure/?ref...

"If I think that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” is a magnificent probing of the nature of time and subjectivity and you think it is overwritten self-indulgent obscurantism, we both have a right to our opinions. So doesn’t it follow that each opinion is only relatively right (right for me, right for you)?"

The only flaw I can see with this line of reasoning is the overwhelming need to be Right. Taste and objective qualities aside, it seems like the stuff of ideological turf battles. It tends to simplify a tricksy process (reading). Yes, Proust and Joyce are intimidating Modernist doorstoppers, but there's also the simple reactionary (as in "reacting," not meaning an ideological reflex) pleasure in the words themselves. That's also what I got from Barthes's magnificent little book, The Pleasure of the Text. Too often, Great Literature is equated to a regularly scheduled teeth-cleaning. Painful but necessary for your Minimal Cultural Literacy. As opposed to likening reading Proust to smoking opium, a dizzying, intoxicating process. Or if it isn't equated with Education, then one approaches the classics with a reverence that is borderline religious and off-puttingly fanatical. "Proust is a genius, people who read Grisham should rot in Hell!" Ugh, sorry, I'm glad you have such wonderful hobbies, but get up off my grill, yo!

I guess, for me, some intimidating books, along with some more populist fare, like Rumpole and Warhammer 40K tie-ins, are exquisitely pleasurable to read. The key factor is pleasure. Books become unreadable when there is more effort than pleasure, whether it is Angels & Demons or The Cantos. And if it is more effort than pleasure to read, then why are you bothering to read it in the first place?

@58 Chaucer is only difficult because it's written in a dialect that is out of use. His actual subject matter is quite accessible, and even *gasp* low brow. That would make any book I attempted in Spanish fit in this category - except the picture books. My Spanish is good enough for picture books.

I'm thinking this thread was originally more about accessibility than readability. And yes, as we become better readers, we should be able to return to books we found inaccessible before. I personally would find the Left Behind series unreadable but perfectly accessible. Speaking of, our school is carrying the junior Left Behind series. ??? I'm sure the kids will find it a bit different from The Hunger Games.

I'd go for Dhalgren. I loved it and either didn't understand it completely or understood it perfectly well. My synopsis "You can do anything you want in this burned out city, but when a black man gets together with a blonde girl... "

kswolf - I do love your Ayn Rand rants. It makes me want to go around chanting Ayn Rand whenever I'm around you just to see what barbed criticism will come out of your mouth. Not that I'm ever going to read Atlas Shrugged. Too many books. Too little time.

76: Yeah, don't waste your time with Ayn Rand I read it at the time the Tea Party was in ascendancy in God's Murrica. I read it for the same reason atheists read the Bible. To quote it back to fanatical foamheads while demolishing it like a Soviet tank division in WW2-era Berlin.

Hey, if you like my rants, check this out:

http://coffeeforclosers.wordpress.com/category/atlas-summer/

It's a chapter by chapter vivisection of Rand's "masterpiece." Well, some people do love Atlas Shrugged, then again, some people still think The Phantom Menace is a good movie. Let's let the intellectually deranged have their say too. If it weren't for them, the tinfoil hat-making industry would instantly collapse.

:) 77 Thanks for the link. Love the illustrations.

>11 kswolff: This thread has had me looking at all the big, supposedly difficult books in my life and wondering if I would classify any of them as "unreadable." And I've decided that I don't think so. The only thing in kswolff's list of the attributes of an unreadable book that I find relevant in my own reading life is the first: poor writing. All the others, which have to do with difficulty of style or subject or length, don't really come into it as "unreadable" for me, because I often find even the struggle to understand its own reward. And some supposedly difficulty books, like To the Lighthouse or Moby Dick, I found to be "easy" reading in that I quickly fell into the story and was borne along, smooth as silk. If it weren't for mundane issues like the need to eat or sleep, I might not have looked up from the moment I started the story to the moment it ended.

Yet even the "poor writing" criteria deserves some kind of caveat. Because I read a great many books I admit freely are not great writing. Or even good writing. So I'd have to say that when I think of what makes a book "unreadable" for me in terms of poor writing, I really mean this:

1) the book is boring. And by boring, I mean, it evinces a certain tediousness of spirit and mediocrity of substance. I don't mean it has too much data and too little story. I am a person who has actually read Braudel's three volume work "Civilization and Capitalism: `5th - 18th Century" so I have an insane tolerance for extraneous data. But I can't abide a hollow heart. If I find that I am merely skating across the surface of the story because surface is all there is, I drop the book.

2) the book is badly done. Editing mistakes will make a book physically unreadable for me. Spelling errors, bad punctuation, obviously unintentional typographic problems, poor design choices, etc, knock me right out of whatever I was trying to read. In my business I deal with many many self published authors, and I can not tell you how many of times I've refused to read a book because it was set entirely in a display font.

But other that these two things, I have a hard time classifying any book as "unreadable," even the books I struggle to understand. Sometimes I go on neighborhood walks, sometimes I go on ambitious mountain hikes. Sometimes I waste an evening making Boeuf Bourguignon, sometimes I make a grilled cheese sandwich. And sometimes I'll read Austen, and sometimes I'll tackle Faulkner.

I totally agree with your #1 and #2. Those are what make a book unreadable for me. Sometimes an odd continuity error will make me throw the book into the "get rid of quickly" pile. A factual error in a historical fiction piece or non-fiction piece will get a book in the pile quickly too, although in historical fiction I may give them two or three errors. It's not that I'm a stickler for detail. This kind of error makes it difficult for me to "suspend my disbelief" and if I can't do that, I won't enjoy the book. As for errors in non-fiction, I'm sure you all know why that goes in the "dispose of" pile. An error means I can't trust the author/editor and I'm sure there's enough erroneous information in my brain already that there isn't room for more.

79: 1) the book is boring. And by boring, I mean, it evinces a certain tediousness of spirit and mediocrity of substance. Couldn't have said it better myself. That was my biggest kvetch against Atlas Shrugged "Who is John Galt?" A public speaker whose tediousness is monumental. I was by turns bored and outraged at the book. Once I was able to get past the odious and adolescent "philosophy," I want to slash through the book with an editor's blue pencil. Ironically, I thought there was a decent story to salvage amidst the dreck and redundancy. Atlas Shrugged would probably be a spellbinding 350 page book. Then again, Rand, like her doppelganger and spiritual descendent Joseph Stalin, wasn't one to take editorial advice when she could just bully her alleged inferiors into fear and submission. Uncle Joe would have been proud, doubly so, since her "philosophy" is instrumental in destroying modern global capitalism. "Why would I need nukes and T-72s, when I could have just encouraged US bankers to lobby for reckless deregulation? Boy, am I a sucker." -- Joseph Stalin in Anti-Semite Heaven, standing next to Ayn Rand.

I have an insane tolerance for extraneous data.

Have you read The Anatomy of Melancholy? Robert Burton inundates the reader with data-glut. It's glorious. The same for Gargantua and Pantagruel and Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux.

>81 kswolff: Anatomy of Melancholy -- yes. It took me half a year to read but I loved it. Gargantua and Pantagruel -- yes again. I have not read Laura Warholic, but it is obvious I should.

80: chiming in on the chorus of approval.

81:

The amount of energy you devote to hating Ayn Rand is impressive.

I had imagined Gargantua and Pantagruel would be right up my scatalogical alley, as it were, but I did find it extraordinarily tedious.

84: The amount of energy you devote to hating Ayn Rand is impressive.

Almost Richard Dawkins-ish in its fury and volume, eh? Like Comrade Ayn, I seem to have a desire to re-emphasize my point again and again with the subtlety of a 2x4 administered to the back of the reader's cranium.

So if "unreadable" is one thing, how do we determine what is "plainspoken"? Sometimes this can be as condescending and ridiculous as willfully difficult texts. Unlike, say, late Beckett, who wrote with a compacted intensity, squeezing every last drop of meaning from very few words. The common caricature of the plainspoken reader comes across like Black Bart's assessment of the commoners in Blazing Saddles, "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons." It's one thing to write an insular, winking piece of pretentiousness for the High Art crowd, it's another to write something so dumbed down that it is insulting to livestock and Richard Bey audience members:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnLfMVuBrJc

Relax and read Flann O'Brien's several books, they truly are worth your time.

86:

Oh, absolutely!!! Intelligent, funny, well-written.

#81: Oh my god, I think I love you! Best rant in the world!

I must agree with some of you here... though I can only speak for The Fountainhead. I found it to be boring, and filled with robotic, unrealistic characters that serve only for Rand to show off her philosophical ideas. It feels like a treatise with characters, not really a novel. ZERO human factor, if you ask me, because the characters barely resemble human beings.

I know many people love her and this confession will probably earn me a few rotten tomatoes... I think there are many other better philosophical novels out there, ones in which the plot really entwines with philosophical reflection. Much better than being bludgeoned on the head by cardboard cut-out characters.

There, I said it. Geez.

As for Sade, I say go for it!

I work in a publishing house and we publish Jane Austen's books... I feel bad because everyone loves her while I find her rather unreadable. Boring, that's it, despite her crafty social comments (that actually never fail to put me to sleep)... I wonder if p'haps I'll find her more interesting as I grow older... hum...

No one seems to have mentioned Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which is nearly at a Finnegan's Wake level of difficulty.

The two ambitious novels by the tragic Gil Orlovitz (1918-1973), Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, are comparable to the work of Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, Gass, Coover, Joseph McElroy, David Foster Wallace, D. Keith Mano, Gilbert Sorrentino, Don DeLillo, Marguerite Young, William T. Vollmann, and Alexander Theroux, but are virtually unknown.

Googling Orlovitz, he seems almost completely forgotten. There's almost nothing about him online, not even an entry in Wikipedia.

Information about Orlovitz here:

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/gil-orlovitz-dlb/

It's a sad story. The two novels barely gained any recognition, and...

"Orlovitz's personal fortunes were deteriorating. His wife Maralyn, whom he had married in 1954 and with whom he had had a daughter and two sons, demanded a separation; he also found it harder to hold a good job, moving from paperback houses to more transient firms, and finally to a position with Marvel Comics. By 1973 he was unemployed and on welfare, in ill health, living in a single room in New York City. On 9 July, returning from an unsuccessful attempt to visit his wife and two young sons, Orlovitz collapsed on the street and was taken (in a coma and with a 108° fever) to a hospital where he died the next day, never regaining consciousness. Because police were unable to trace relatives, Orlovitz was buried in a pauper's grave and remained unidentified until a missing person's report filed by his wife was collated with the death record."

This might get my Literary Snobs membership card revoked, but I could not make it through The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco. I take pride in finishing every book (EVERY book) I start, even the French copy of Germinal that I read at age 13, looking up almost every single word using a French-English dictionary... but I had to admit defeat in the face of insurmountable tedium. I could give it another shot -perhaps I'm older and wiser now- but I just can't bear the thought.

The other book was the aforementioned Atlas Shrugged. For political, moral and aesthetic reasons (that radio speech that seemed to go on for days in the middle of the book was a litmus test for true believers, no doubt), I was ready to fling the book across the room on multiple occasions.

Ah, I remember someone ranting about that radio speech. I wonder who??? ;) I kind of liked The Island of the Day Before but don't ask me what it was about.

Unreadable book du jour Outside Rules: Short Stories about Nonconformist Youth - Speaking of no energy/boring. First three stories were okay but after that... There was even a story about a girl who sat on her porch swing and did nothing all summer. That's nonconformist? If I were a teen reading this book, I'd be offended by the lack-luster unmotivated whiny image these authors have of youth. I was expecting a book with stories about teens with problems that they try to do something about. Ha! Maybe one character was more original than our favorite (sarcasm) teen protag, Bella.

". . .a girl who sat on her porch swing and did nothing all
summer" (93)

Nearly a description of the (anti?)- heroine of an (F. Scott Fitzgerald story that I recenlty read: "The Ice Palaceʻ".
I got the book, a bargain pb at
a public libraryʻs ongoing book sale, and as I have very mixed feelings about Fitzgerald I was prepared to be disappointed in him as a short story writer. (I do admire Tender is the NIght and The GReat Gatsby.)
I wasnʻt disappointed. ʻIce Palace" makes a very good suspense story, but the suspense may have only been "frosting on the cake" to the author. His main theme is the
incompatibility of a very easy-going Georgia girl, engaged to
a more dynamic Minnesotan.
Almost inevitably, one thinks, they break up at the end. The actual breaking up is only announced briefly, not described.
FItzgerald himself was a Minnesotan,and I suppose itʻs only natural that the heroine and the other Southern characters are something of a caricature, while the NOrtherners are more believable.
But I have to admit that he
can make basically "doing nothing at all" interesting.

Alas this author was no Fitzgerald - and there wasn't a fiance - only an off-screen friend who wanted to introduce lump to guys - none of which are fleshed out enough to even be a caricature.

Dynamic Minnesotan? I'm a Minnesotan and that isn't an adjective I hear paired with Minnesotan very often.

Thanks for the info on Orlovitz--a very sad account. Let's hope his work is rediscovered.

You folks at the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS imprint listening?

Dalkey Archive might be a good fit for Orlovitz, as well.

Reading through the thread more carefully, I see that Gertrude Stein was mentioned, in posts #64 and #66, but not The Making Of Americans specifically.

buckjohnson (#41): I could have written your post almost word-for-word, since I'm in the middle of Ulyssses just now too. I'm in complete agreement with everything you say. The book is glorious, but it is true that when you go to the level of quotidian, ultra-specific realistic detail that Joyce does, the result is going to have to be annotated almost immediately, not just for future readers, but even for contemporary readers who don't share the context. Ulysses is always referred to as an experimental novel, but it seems to me that the experiment is as much on the level of "How realistically detailed can a novel be?" as it is on the level of "How verbally inventive can a novel be?" Joyce goes even farther with the verbal inventiveness in Finnegan's Wake, but I'm not aware of anyone having outdone Ulysses in realistic detail.

With the exception of the Ayn Rand/Dan Brown stuff, I love all the material mentioned in this thread, at least conceptually, whether I have read it yet or not. I'm with John Waters, who said in a cinematic context, "Films that are impenetrable I'm always first in line for." (And Waters has encouraged his audience to read "hard books" as well.)

I suspect this thread could go on indefinitely and become its own mega-text. Another major 20th Century novel that has been pegged as "unreadable" is Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil (available from Vintage). There are other German-language writers who go deep into the thickets - Arno Schmidt, Hans Henny Jahnn, Peter Weiss for starters - grandiosity being something of a German cultural hazard.

Not all of the German works are translated. A couple of other doorstops of more than 1000 pages that await translation into English are S. Yizhar's Days of Ziklag (1958) and Stefano D'Arrigo's perhaps aptly titled Killer Whale (1975).

Casting our eyes on the past, the immensely patient can dig into the mammoth French romances of the 17th Century by Madeleine de Scudery and others, most of which were translated into English at the time. Scudery's Artamene is said to be 2.1 million words long, making it more than twice as long as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (900,000 words) and even well beyond Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1.2 million words).

The classic Chinese novels, such as Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone (5 volumes from Penguin), are also, shall we say, leisurely reads (although I can vouch for The Story of the Stone that it is also enthralling).

rolandperkins (#94): I just read Fitzgerald's first two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age (available in one volume from Penguin). I love Fitzgerald's novels, and he's an author that I have a rather intense identification with, but these early stories are a very mixed bag, and some are borderline embarrassing.

97: If we are bringing the Germans into it, what about Guenther Grass, a most scantily clad Kaiser, if ever I saw one. Die Blechtrommel was for me far too blech to be worth the trommel, more tin ear than tin drum. I award it an Oskar for most unreadable.

Symbolism does not by itself make a work significant, no matter how much of the stuff you manage to pack in per square centimetre. There is a venerable tradition of this, of course. Goethe's Faust Part II must be a contender for a prize in this category. "It's a play, you idiot!" I hear someone cry. But if a play is unstageable, all that is left is to read it, and if it's unreadable...

>88 vulpineways:

Everyone loves Karl.

Hey...

That should be a sit-com. It would beat the snot out of "The Big Bang Theory".

Jay Gatsby is a whiny bitch. And Nick Carroway is nothing but an enabler. Is it me, or do the comparisons between Gatsby and Romney seem fitting these days? Although I imagine Romney's swimming pool is several stories high, like his garage and Scrooge McDuck-esque Money Vault. At least Mittens will have more time to read either The Book of Mormon or Atlas Shrugged Not sure which one has a more stultifying prose style or poorly written plot? At least John Galt wasn't stuck on a boat with a tiger. That would just be stupid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZEZ35Fhvuc

Looks like the thinking man's Kite-Runner, but, ya know, less rapey.

What a month-long Internet event devoted to writing unreadable books?

http://bestofnanowrimo.tumblr.com/

101 What a lovely new adjective you've invented. Alas, I don't know how I'll be able to slip that one into a casual conversation - especially when I'm talking to middle schoolers.

> 1

Some nice books there, though I'm certain you will not glean any sense from Rand, no matter how many times you read her.

I enjoyed Ulysses by Joyce, though many have ditched it before halfway.

> 104

Thanks. My Kobo tells me I am 80% through Finnegans Wake. Reading it now is a foolish stunt on my part since I haven't even read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I have only skimmed Ulysses. Nevertheless I am enjoying reading FW and I will circle back and read the others afterward.

Have you read Carl Jung's priceless comments on Ulysses?

"…I read to page 135 with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way. The incredible versatility of Joyce’s style has a monotonous and hypnotic effect. Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter…”

http://jungcurrents.com/jungs-essay-on-ulysses/

Jung on Joyce--there are a couple of heavyweights.

106: Check out CG Jung Speaking, a collection of his interviews and miscellany. There is a random excerpt on Jung and Joyce. A nice bookend to Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov. I'd also put Ada as another challenging read, every bit as verbally dense as Finnegans Wake, but with an erotic story focusing on incest set in an alternate history.

104: Rand has about as much sense as an unsold Enron stock certificate.

> 107

Since I'm a Puckish contrarian, I will cite this review:

Brian Domitrovic
To the Randians of All Parties
Why Ayn Rand’s economic arguments make sense—and why they’re ignored
19 November 2012

Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins (Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., $27)

which may be savored at http://www.city-journal.org/2012/bc1119bd.html

I am not endorsing Domitrovic's review.

108: I do love a Puckish contrarian, especially since Christopher Hitchens has passed on to the Secular Whiskey Bar in the Sky. Then again, "To the Randians of All Parties" bespeaks the totalitarian DNA that makes up the Objectivist Hivemind. Of course Rand's ideas make sense to Randians. Just like Stalin's premeditated famines made sense to Stalinists, always quick with a justification and a rationalization, despite the massive piles of evidence to the contrary. But we can talk more about Rand and her distaff doppelganger Stalin in the Human Monsters thread.

The other issue is that Big Government is allegedly worse (and not its mirror image) of Big Corporations (and their being Too Big To Fail). Then again, you don't point out logical inconsistencies of the Christian faith to Torquemada when he's tightening the thumbscrews. Never argue with fanatics ... just laugh at them. The zealot doesn't know how to react when you start treating his anarcho-capitalist temper tantrum as a stand-up routine. Cuz Rand is a SERIOUS PHILOSOPHER, DAMMIT! Stop laughing at me!

And her verbal diarrhea is quite unreadable. At least to anyone that's read another book in their life.

Wait, there's verbosity not in service of the narrative, right there.

102: Curse you, I just lost a good 20 minutes looking at that display of earnest ineptitude.

" (Nabokovʻs Ada (is) another challenging read, every bit as verbally dense as Finnegans Wake." (107)

Thatʻs like saying that Wade Boggs was as formidable a hitter as Babe Ruth or Ted Williams. Or, if baseball analogies arenʻt your thing, itʻs like saying that Groucho Marx was as deeply serious an actor as James Mason or Lawrence Olivier.
But I do agree that Ada is "challenging".

(None of the above should be taken as a disparagemnt of Marx or Boggs. )

112: Read a few paragraphs of each, prove me wrong.

"Read a few paragraphs of Ada and Finnegans Wake . . . ." (113)

Of FW I can, and happy to. Of Ada -- not until one of the larger libraries is open (the smaller and medium ones donʻt own it). I gave my copy (pb) to a public library, but the chances of them putting in the collection are about = to JJʻs or VNʻs chances of being awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. Some lucky collector has probably obtained it at
a long past library book sale.

I've just finished Finnegans Wake. You may read my review if you wish to be amused by my lack of comprehension of this work.

I am no longer one who dismisses the book as rubbish, even if the review hints at that. I am not mad at Joyce and I agree there's a lot to it (vagueness intentional). It may take me a year to acquire a basis to read it again and possibly change my opinion.

I've never taken the plunge--ULYSSES is probably as far as I'll go with Joyce.

I applaud your courage and determination in sticking with one of the all-time tough reads.

I'm thinking of reading Finnegans Wake and 120 Days of Sodom simultaneously, then blogging on the experience.

The wonderful thing about the Wake is that it doesn't even really need to be read in a linear fashion, since its resemblance to a Flaubertian realistic novel is only incidental. It has a front and back cover and both have little black squiggles on the page that occasionally make sense. It's fun just to jump in randomly and read a paragraph or sentence or two (sobriety optional). It is fascinating how this pinnacle of Literary Modernism relies on the lowest form of comedy -- puns, lots and lots of puns. Like how Pynchon's works are postmodern mashups of lowbrow genres -- boy's adventure serials, mystery, thriller, conspiracy, erotica, etc.

I don't understand how anyone could call Gravity's Rainbow "unreadable". I think it's a lot of fun! Admittedly, I drank the Pynchon kool-aid a long time ago when I read V.... and Gravity's Rainbow is like V. turned up to 11.

118: "Turgid, overwritten, and obscene." What's not to like?

"(Finnegans Wake) relies on the lowest form of humor -- puns. . ."

I think it was Adaline Glasheen who said that
Joyce evokes the Bible a lot, Shakespleare more than the Bible, Sterne and Swift
more than Shakespeare, and
the trashiest popular songs more than all of the above put together.
But I think that there is a lot more to Joyce's humor than can be explained by puns alone. And there is
the question of when he was joking and when he was deadly serious. And I say "deadly" advisedly, because he was undeniably very concerned with death

120: The latest Umberto Eco book, Inventing the Enemy has an essay that's a pastiche of bad reviews from fascist critics trashing Ulysses

That reminds me of something which I thought only existed as a concept, but it seems someone is actually working on it: a book called Reviews of this Book, comprised entirely of reviews of itself.

I'm currently in my Editing Apprenticeship at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. This means reading all the submissions coming into the slush pile. Ugh! Oy! I try and read through as many manuscripts as possible, but, when I'm feeling generous, that means trying to get at least to Chapter 2 and making an attempt at an intelligent assessment. (It's actually more of a challenge with submissions I like.) But most of the time, it is muscling through manuscripts from all manner of authors. There's all manner of unreadable manuscripts in the slush pile. Most of the time I'm shouting, "Just shut up and get to the damn point!" If you don't have the reader's full attention by at least paragraph 2, then fuhgeddaboudit. This doesn't mean ape invisible style and pen by-the-numbers straightforward plot-centric narratives, it means style, narrative, and voice are working in perfect concert with each other. For me, I start yawning when it is another case of mediocre "invisible style." If the story is lackluster and there's isn't even an attempt at stylistic individuality, then I don't bother reading very far into things. Unless there's a compelling character or a snappy storyline to follow, "invisible style" is just another species of mediocrity. And mediocrity isn't worth the time and energy to publish.

123

And Scott spins in his grave...

Europe's least known great book:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115276/giacomo-leopardis-zibaldone-reviewed-a...

Does anyone want to branch out to this neglected group, Literary Stockholm Syndrome? Or take the name?

Great name for a group.

Come on down.

More info on Gil Orlovitz and his "unreadable" novels Ice Never F and Milkbottle H here: http://www.toughpoets.com/orlovitz/gil_orlovitz_biography.pdf

>129 toughpoets:, what a fascinating old fossil you've dug up here.

>129 toughpoets: I have Milkbottle H on the TBR. Must give it a go one day.