The world's most difficult books?

The Guardian responds to the Million's list of the most difficult books, and to be frank, the results are underwhelming. Here is what the Millions managed:

• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift
• The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel
• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
• Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
• The Fairie Queene, Edmund Spenser
• The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
• Women and Men, Joseph McElroy

Granted, like all lists, this one is shit. Its flaws include, but aren't limited to the fact that it has a size fetish, the fictional works are entirely in English, and the philosophical works are philosophical works and so why should they count? I'd scratch Being and Time and The Phenomenology of the Spirit off on that account, and add The Guardian's suggested amendments: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. But the amended list is still problematic, because I'm not sure anyone finds To The Lighthouse a difficult read, and Women and Men is only difficult inasmuch as it's been out-of-print for so long a paperback copy will cost you $180. McElroy's Plus is a far more difficult novel, because it's narrated from the perspective of an ornery satellite. (And it'll only run you $187.90.)

Maybe it's because of my unusual graduate school career path, but of the novels listed only The Making of Americans, Nightwood, Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow seem to me to be genuinely difficult novels. Except they're not really that difficult for the people who read them, because the people who read densely poetic world-building novels do so because enjoy doing so. I know that Gravity's Rainbow isn't for everyone, but there's a subset of the reading population for whom it's very much for. I'd have no qualms, for example, recommending it to someone who's obsessed over Infinite Jest.

A better list of the world's most difficult books would expand its purview to "the world," and it would be comprised of books that people who love difficult books find difficult, instead of ones that people who don't do. I'd suggest adding:

• Appleseed, John Clute
• Dhalgren, Samuel Delany
• JR, William Gaddis
• The Tunnel, William Gass
• Anything in German or Chinese, Because SEK Can't Read German or Chinese

My list isn't exhaustive, either, but at least it suggests that The Glass Bead Game might be tremendously complex or The Man Without Qualities can match Clarissa page-for-page. Since my list is a list and, as stated above, all lists are shit, I invite you to give me the what-for in the comments.

Comments

[Dr. Virago]

What? To the Lighthouse is *so* not difficult (as you point out)! And the Faerie Queene is just long and in verse. Paradise Lost is much more philosophically difficult, as is its periodic sentences in verse, for that matter.

Actually, what really belongs here is Piers Plowman. First of all, there's the difficulty of *which* Piers Plowman one even means. And then there's the difficulty of the Middle English alliterative verse (the Latin is pretty easy). And then there's the difficulty of OMG-what-does-it-all-mean?! Takes a whole semester to read that fucker attentively.

[mxyzptlk]

Might add something like David Markson's This Is Not A Novel. It isn't, but it is, but it isn't -- yet it is. The book reads like a series of disconnected observations (almost stream of consciousness, but a little too aware; stream of supra-consciousness?), but as you read through, you start to pick up on repeated thematic and symbolic details that begin to form a narrative chain. DFW once described Markson as one of the more interesting writers working, someone he looked to for creative inspiration. (I loaned Markson's book to my advisor in grad school and never saw it again.)

How about something like Cortazar's Hopscotch, for structural playfulness, or Sam Beckett's The Unnamable?

I'm totally down with A Tale of a Tub. I've never seen a class become so confounded while trying to parse a text.

Someone who might be a lot more difficult than a first or third reading suggests is Cormac McCarthy. He can be subtly tricky, like in the way he eliminates apostrophes from all negative contractions. There's a reason for it, but it's not readily available.

[Stephen]

Contemporary poetry is far more difficult than Spenser, if we're going to mix poetry, fiction, and philosophy. How about Ezra Pound's Cantos, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and almost anything by John Ashbery?

[SEK]

Actually, what really belongs here is Piers Plowman.

My wife would disagree, but she's a medievalist, so she doesn't count.

I'm totally down with A Tale of a Tub. I've never seen a class become so confounded while trying to parse a text.

That's more a matter of them not understanding the historical context. After all, most of his contemporary's knew exactly who Swift was satirizing.

Someone who might be a lot more difficult than a first or third reading suggests is Cormac McCarthy.

I prefer my Faulkner uncut.

How about Ezra Pound's Cantos, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and almost anything by John Ashbery?

No kidding. I started the Cantos about a decade ago, and I'm still barely through the first three. Granted, I also gave up about a decade ago, but still.

[mxyzptlk]

That's more a matter of them not understanding the historical context. After all, most of his contemporary's knew exactly who Swift was satirizing.

But this was a grad school class. In Anglo-Irish literature. At Trinity College in Dublin. It was one of the better textual debates I've witnessed -- different factions arguing for the different political, social, academic, religious, and metatextual elements as primary.

I prefer my Faulkner uncut.

Heh. Touche.

[summervillain]

I don't know about 'To the Lighthouse,' but I found 'The Waves' pretty gosh-durn challenging. More recently, Nicola Barker's 'Darkmans' wasn't all that hard to read, but I found it difficult to comprehend.

[John Quiggin]

Is Clarissa difficult? I had the impression "long, boring and studied only because it's the first big novel"

[SEK]

Your impression's absolutely correct. I had a professor my first year of grad school who taught it, Pamela and Shamela, and when we pressed him at the quarter's end about how much he'd made us read, he confessed that we really could've just read Shamela and learned all we needed to about that stage of the development of the novel.

[Martin Wisse]

Bah. Appleseed was a doddle, only made challenging by Clute's prolix nature, while Dahlgren sold half a million copies, so can't be that difficult. Try Delany's latest novel, with the loving descriptions of snot eating, that's difficult.

[Josh]

Dhalgren sold a little over a million copies, Martin, and was much-loved. Doesn't mean all its buyers or fans made it to the end!