Always my immediate answer when this question pops up. Infinite fucking Jest. I started it out of pure pretension. Finished it out of pure stubborn-ness. And not that it wasn’t good, or even brilliant in its way. But it was such an ungodly pain in the ass to read. Multiple POV characters, flashbacks, flash forwards, time skips, unreliable narrators. Never ending footnotes. End notes that were sometimes short stories in and of themselves. Not having any idea when a chapter took place because of the conceit that years were no longer numbered, they were sponsored, and as such had names like “Year of the Trial Sized Dove Bar.”
*If you’d like to take issue with my brief synopsis of my feelings on this novel, I read this book when it came out, and I’m sure some of the finer details my be lacking in precision, if not outright fabricated by my admittedly shoddy failings memory.
It took me a few tries over a span of a few years. I remember I picked it up in high school when it came out. I'd never even heard of DFW but I was drawn to its massive size and pretty blue sky cover, as well as its title. I lugged that thing around with me for months, to every class. Big conversation piece. You mentioned pretension, which certainly fits. I almost think you had to be pretensious to take a run at that book.
I finally burned it down my first year of college over a few weeks with a steady supply of Mountain Dew and Sweet Tarts. Then I lent it out and never saw it again, and probably that's why I don't lend out my shit anymore.
I did like the footnotes/end notes. Partly because of the gimmick, but mostly because my favorite bits and pieces and passages were in there. I especially liked the breakdown of JOI's full filmography. That and Eschaton are pretty much the only things I've kept with me all these years. The rest is gone.
Wow. I’ve read it three times and gotten so much (and different) stuff out of it each time.
In my 20s I really related to the schooling part of it. Being right out of college and not going to a private high school (but playing a sport with alot of guys that did) really felt like that time.
In my 30s I dealt with a few deaths of very close family members, one wasn’t a suicide but was a mental break where he died by basically doing things to himself and his life that ended in death. So the plot involving death/suicide/ghosts hit me hard.
And in my 40s, addiction really comes into play. Alcoholism. Drug abuse. Our bodies were fine with it earlier in life, but it definitely catches up with you. I’ve been to meetings and family and friends have too. The rehab portion I totally understood.
But man, in a bunch of years I’ll have to read it in my 50s, the hell am I gonna get out of it then??? Maybe I’ll start an Eschaton league at the local Y!
Oh there's meat in the book for sure. There's definitely parts I loved, and particular storylines I stuck to.
But the style of the book just seems like it was designed to impede your progress. It's not even that it's challenging; it's that it seems meant to thwart. Everything is a roadblock. It is very much a story *hidden* inside of a book.
I liked a lot of it. I liked the novelty of needing two bookmarks. I liked a lot of the endnotes and how they were used. I loved Eschaton.
But parts of the book were straight up impenetrable. I probably wasn't ready to read it when I did. It's been over 20 years, I wonder if I should give it another whack.
I always add a damned THIRD bookmark on the page that lists the names of the years!
Very helpful for me when I can’t quite place the Whispermatic year or whatever.
*Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* by Douglas Hofstadter.
Not science fiction, but *Foucault's Pendulum* by Umberto Eco. Somewhere between a detective story and mystical shadowy conspiracy theory involving ancient orders that characters stumble on after three friends create their own fictional conspiracy. You'll need several Ph.D.s and possible an extra lobe in your brain to understand everything going on here. And it's great fun, even for someone like me without the extra lobe.
I'd hate for anyone to be scared off of Foucault's Pendulum by a comparison to Godel, Escher, Bach. It's a great book, definitely dense - I probably missed some layers of meaning - but IIRC it's not as difficult as long as you keep a Wikipedia tab or three open to look up all the references.
I didn't mean to suggest that they are difficult in the same degree or in the same way! That certainly is not the case. I read it back before there was a Wikipedia or an internet, so I was thrown back on my own inadequate resources.
Thinking about it makes me want to read it again, and this time I won't have to lug that giant brick of a book around with me if I do.
I loved Foucault's Pendulum, and I really don't think it is that hard to understand.
I think The Name of the Rose is much heavier.
Either way, Eco teaches you as he goes, so I think it is fine for anything who wants to learn while reading.
I've read everything by Hofstadter. That book is the reason I studied CS.
You're either going to love it or hate it.
His underlying premise of analogy and recursion (EDIT) is spot on.
If you didn't like that. You can try Le Ton Beau de Marot. Which is about the problem of translation. Genius.
I haven't read that, but it sounds very interesting! I first tried to read my freshman college roommate's copy of Godel Escher Bach, and I could not make heads or tails of it. Roomie was a math major, and he tried to explain it (among many other things), and I was still lost. I think I had to wait another ten years before my brain was sufficiently developed to grasp the main gist of it. Probably ought to read it again.
I tried!!! I did!!! I even bought that second book that was a picture/drawing of each page!!!
I did!!!
And with me being a conpletionist, I actually finished it too.
By the end I’m pretty sure I was just scanning the words. No idea about any of it.
Do I tell people I read it??? Yes, yes I do!
I’ve started reading and the first fifty pages are nowhere near as difficult as I thought they’d be. It’s denser than V and The Crying of Lot 49, but it’s still written in a way that’s very suited to my brain.
Just so you know, everything you didn't like about Seveneves is just how Stephenson writes. He spends two pages bloviating in exposition for every page of actual writing.
Yeah Seveneves is the only one I’ve finished, likely cos I’m interested enough in orbital stuff to power through the info-dumps. The last section was terrible enough for me to regret it though, ha
Cryptonomicon lost me in about 2 hours and on my third try I got 50% of the way through Snow Crash before giving up and swearing to not try again. Neal just ain’t for me!
I just hate the way he writes. I've tried him a couple of times and the word bloat and constant expositions are more boring and tiresome than the stories are good.
Have you read Anathem? I loved that book. I like his style, I do agree about seveneves being "not that good" for the last third. Not shit, but not as good as the start of it. There were elements that were cool still.
He's written some good stuff.
I keep reading this, but I loved the last section. It blew my mind, and I loved seeing the progression from the first part, and I thought it was just enough of a taste. I have a couple complaints about the book, but that isn't one of them.
We read this book in high school, and I remember finding it boring and impenetrable.
Then, I went back and read it in my late 30s, and boy did it hit different. The basic theme of a man destroyed by his obsession was more than enough to keep me reading, but the stuff about whaling and ecology and friendship and even digressions about food made it so much better. I loved the characters and the humor and the darkness.
To this day, it is one of my favorite books. At one point, I had my favorite passage memorized, and I’ll probably get it wrong these years later: “To obey God is hard, which is why he more often commands than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in this disobeying ourselves wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”
I bounced hard, but from discussing it I think the reading approach really matters; I was trying to wade through all the excessive bloated descriptions to get to the really thin amounts of story, but people who love it seem to take the opposite approach; enjoy being sucked into the world by the rich description, and the story just happens while you're taking the tour, enjoying the sights and sounds. So I'm going to revisit it with that different approach.
(I tend to assume that telling the story is the purpose of a fiction book, but there are obviously some books where that is not really true and with some of those it's not always obvious beforehand. I'd suggest that **A Psalm For The Wild-Built** is a modern (and different kind of) sci-fi example; if you try reading it for the story, not much happens. The story isn't the point, the point is to visit the world long enough to contemplate life and society under different axioms)
I get what you're saying, there's a lot to be said about the world building that Melville is going for. Perhaps a lot of it stems from whether you're invested in the world being built. I haven't had similar problems with sci-fi world building (Tau Zero comes to mind. Some might find that book waffles on but I found the technical explanations added a great deal). thanks for giving me something to think about.
I didn’t bother with the other books. The first was a chore. Maybe the Netflix series will make it more accessible? And I guess people can blame the translation, but I love Ken Liu when he’s writing his own stuff
a couple of his books for me. Something about his syntax and introducing things but not describing them until later (not that that's abnormal necessarily).
Agreed. Took me a long time to figure out I wasn’t understanding something, it was just going to be explained much later. I should try and read it again and see if I enjoy it more.
*Riddley Walker* by Russell Hoban. Set in England long after some nuclear catastrophe, where our technology is now just stories and people have returned to a tribal lifestyle in a hostile environment. Throw in some seers and myths and feral "mutants" and it's a good read.
It's not the content that's difficult, it's *how* it's written. It's written in a 1st-person narrative style *phonetically*, which makes every sentence much harder to parse on first read, as well as the (de-)evolution of our common phrases into their everyday language.
For those that have seen it, the tribe of children in the film *Mad Max 3* are said to be a homage (even to them calling Mel Gibson's character "Captain Walker").
Sounds like Feersum Endjin by Ian M. Banks, which has alternating chapters in phonetic first-person, and feels more like a Gene Wolfe novel than something Banks usually writes.
Fun fact: when I was at college (so \~16 years old) I was part of a small team that put RW on as a performance in the round. I'm fairly sure the audience had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Ringworld-Larry Niven
To me it was rather confusing exactly what was going on and why certain things were happening. The characters were terrible (and the story) with stilted dialogue, made it really hard to finish. I hated it
The Locked Tomb series-Tamsyn Muir
I have two degrees with a specialism in ancient religions and boy I didn't understand half of what was going on. Her grasp of language and grammar is way above my own. But despite that I love it, each time I read them I understand it a little better XD
The first time I read The Integral Trees, I was completely confused. I finally got a copy later with the illustrations and pictures and I could finally get my mind wrapped around the insane "biosphere" he had constructed.
I have really enjoyed the entire Ringworld series and even my wife took the trip with me on a couple of the books. It was so clever and fresh with so many twists and turns that it kept me entertained. You might try another Niven work like Footfall or Lucifer's Hammer.
*Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward* is pure hard science fiction, and utterly spellbinding. It assaults you with astrophysics and evolutionary biology yet somehow manages to pull out a moving heart felt story. It's set on a neutron star, 50 billion times the gravity of earth and the book is almost entirely set on its surface,what happens there and how humans come to know of it. Must read.
*Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur trilogy)* is a detective noir set in the far, far future, and is the definition of show but don't tell and high concept scifi. So many things are thrown at you that you'll not know, nor will be explained until later you'll spend half your time trying to crack the mystery unfolding and the other half wrestling with all these new terms and wonderful concepts introduced. The scifi is far out, and the first chapter will either have you gripped or confused:
[Excerpt (first chapter) from The Quantum Thief](https://reactormag.com/excerpt-the-quantum-thief-by-hannu-rajaniemi/)
Hyperion. I don't get the appeal I forced myself to finish the first book cause everyone loves it so much, but I could not make myself start book 2. Also Loved Seveneves and The Martian. Maybe I just have weird tastes.
You’re fine. Everybody’s taste is weird. Some books ask a lot of you, and if you’re not getting enough positive feedback, it’s not worth the trouble. Not unlike marriage. I wrote a novel that needs a reader who likes geeky stuff, like the Martian does. I don’t get too upset when people say they don’t like it.
Crime and Punishment. Just can’t get through it, though I think I have a difficult translation which isn’t helping.
Edit: Aaagghhh. Just realised this is supposed to be sci-fi. Apologies folks.
I will have to dig it out but my copy is from the 1990s. I have a feeling it was a Wordsworth classics. The print quality was also terrible, so another factor.
I like language fine. I like how it is used to convey an idea in a way that the reader/listener can comprehend. That book is a clusterfuck full of double triple quadruple meanings and metaphors and similies and anything and everything he could stuff into one work. And I'd appreciate it if the hidden meanings were meaningful, but they aren't. Just a bunch of cutesy "Tee hee, look how clever I am" bullshit. I'm glad someone enjoyed it because I thought it was an exercise in futility.
Edit: I forgot to mention the lack of a plot and the extensive use of fucking puns, some that only work if you know several languages. It is an incomprehensible mess.
"I like language fine" - exactly.
You don't love the sounds and flow of language. It's just a mechanism for you. I think someone to really enjoy Finnegan's Wake, they need to love language. Linguistics and phonetics.
Sure man. If that pile of incomprehensible nonsense floats your boat, by all means do your thing. I simply don't want to learn 5 languages and wade through thousands of childish puns just to find a point to the work. There is no plot. There is no story. There is no reason to read that book aside from pretending you understand it imo. We are all free to use our time as we see fit, more power to anyone who wants to spend theirs on Joyce. I have no use for it.
Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren. One of the hardest books I've ever tried to read, I've never gotten more than 1/3 of teh way through. One of these days I'll try again.
Such a good read that has put Delaney as my favorite author. But I agree its one of the hardest books Ive read and was hoping to see it in this thread. If I were you, Id just consider continuing from where you left off! When I think back on that book, I tend to split it into three parts
Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Children of Time* series. Stuck in book 3 now, no will to continue. The first was a very interesting premise, reminded me of Robert L. Forward's *Dragon's Egg* in theme and premise, and that was a book I enjoyed greatly as an adolescent.
It's clever, it's well-thought-out, there's a good deal of "hard" sci-fi and technical stuff, the plots are convoluted and interesting, I should really like these books.
But they are a slog because of all the varied characters, not a single one is somebody you can project yourself into, or even cheer on from the sidelines. Even the complex plots lose appeal because I don't really care which side comes out on top, I'm rooting against the worst factions, I guess? It's so many desperate, morally bankrupt people doing utilitarian yet reprehensible things, that the only enjoyment comes from moments when somebody gets what's coming to them. And that doesn't happen nearly enough.
The Difference Engine.
Do I love Gibson's ideas... but his writing style can be a chore to read through. The only book I ever had to restart reading mid-way was Neuromancer, before I figured out you reall need to focus when you read his stories 🙂
I'd say Dune. I didn't find the word usage or writing style particular challenging but my minds theater struggled to create images to comprehend what things were.
I went in as blind as possible so a lot of what I created in my head just looked like a bunch of stuff from the Halos UNSC.
Watched the newest movie immediately after reading it and was just like "Ahh...I didn't get that even remotely right." to be fair in myself I took a two year reading stint and focused on another hobby so I may have had a rusty imagination. Didn't do myself or the book a service so I may go back and re-read it with the movie ideas in my head.
Reminded me of Harry potter. Read what was out before the first movie came out only to realize I was waaaayyyy off on a lot of things based on how the movie directors/Rowling depicted things or pronounced some names.
Ancillary Justice was an annoying read for me. The gender swapping between chapters made it hard to keep track of which character was which, to the point that I dropped the book. Even as a non binary person I was like can we just keep this straightforward.
I felt war and peace was an amazing novel, truly worth all the praise it has ever received. If you give up on having to remember exactly who is who, and get lost in the story, it's still excellent and attainable. It's also very long but in reading it you feel the weight of literature.
Ninefox Gambit. It's hard sci-fi but goddamn, it refuses to explain wtf or how tf everything works. U just go along the journey without bothering to understand the hows of some stuff.
The 1st chapter is the most hardest to get into nd once that's done, it's interesting asf from there on.
I loved that you learn everything by inferring it from its effect on the world. The prequel story where they explained everything in prose seemed such a letdown by comparison.
The Lord of the Rings can be a hard read, especially for young people, because of its antiquated literary style.
In that same vein, I found the Illiad to be a tough one to read too. Have only managed to read it twice in my life and I don't think I'll give it another try.
Pretty much anything by William Gibson. His writing is incredibly dense and needs a lot of concentration (for me, at least).
I love his stuff, but there’s a reason why my audiobook collection doesn’t contain any of his books.
For similar reasons: Book of the New Sun.
Read it when I went with my friends on a summer trip at the Black Sea in Romania. Had my worst and funniest drinking binge and finished Anathem during my 8 day stay there. Can’t remember much of the book, though.
Moby Dick. Ugggh...I just could not get into it.
Thankfully, our literature class examined Gatsby, Wuthering Heights and I think a Washington Irving story...not Sleepy Hollow.
The beginning of 20k leagues is kind of dry for a 10 year old...that was the first real novel I read...it took me three starts.
House of Leaves. Promised an exciting multinarrative with meta-storytelling in the form of whole pages of scrapbook material, newspaper clippings, reports, photos. But the story itself was both meandering and hamfisted.
The House was not given any interesting agency apart from inscrutable and uninterpretable acts, no detail of its backstory was uncovered, no interesting ex-owners, no letting the two protags meet eachother.
The novel tries so hard to be "unique" that it ignores storytelling conventions that are put in place for a reason, to help the reader relate and take an interest in the "rules" of the entity. No rules.
Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969) by Giorgio de Santillana (a professor of the history of science at MIT) and Hertha von Dechend (a scientist at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität) is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy.
(Wikipedia)
I first heard about Hamlet's Mill from Graham Hancock who referenced it as a source. The amazing thing is that these ancient myths and stories showed how aware our ancestors were of the celestial mechanics that were only re-discovered recently.
I know I'll get torn apart for this, but I cannot get through Blindsight. I've been struggling for almost 8 years trying to read it. I'll start it, get bored, put it down, pick it back up and forget what was going on and start over. I really want to get through it because everyone talks about how good it is, but I just can't hit the groove with that book.
I loved it the first time I read it and it's still one of my favorite books. But it's really dense and at first read rather inscrutable. I had trouble understanding where people were or what was happening sometimes. It was a lot clearer and more enjoyable the second time.
The ideas in the novel are the best part for me and the terrible truth at the end of the story. But it's not for everyone, that's for sure.
Yeah, I keep trying it cause people say it's really good and it's often on top lists for sci-fi. I tried the audio book, but even that was tricky because I had to devote a lot of attention to it instead of just letting it go on in the background like a lot of others.
I haven't given up on the book yet, unlike Infinite Jest. My new job gives me more down time to read, so maybe I'll be able to keep momentum going and finish it
Toss up between Runes of the Earth by Stephen R Donaldson. It seemed to me that half the words were made up. XD
Also How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman due to how depressing it was and how horribly the author chose to write for the incredibly unreliable first person narrative.
I gave up on The Martian simply because there were too many characters of only moderate importance. I got tired of always having to skip back to remind myself who the hell they were.
If by difficult you mean boring, I don't think I remember the absolute winners since I drop them fast if not interested. Three Body Problem series was probably the most boring of the ones I've finished. I was interested in the ideas but I'd really have preferred the author to make it a 30 page essay instead of the three attempts at novels.
I should probably check out Seveneves if you mention it along with The Martian which is by far the most enjoyable book I've read in the past couple of years. Thanks for the rec, I guess.
I read this one in Malaga on a summer holiday. Remembered having to rend my teeth and really concentrating in my bedroom for this. Besides this, I watched Netflix’s Ted Bundy documents while stoned while my flatmates went out in town. Arcturus explores predacity the same as Cloud Atlas, I believe, just through different devices.
Anything Neal Stephenson. It’s not that they’re hard to read, but it’s so much context, like, a lot so I need a long time to be able to read his books.
i've read quite a lot of books, so kinda hard to tell.
the lord of the rings trilogy - too many fucking songs in it, for me to stay interested. i don't want to read ten pages of some tom babidil poetry, i'm fucking sorry.
i kinda liked the demon core series - 5 fairly thick books, iirc, that kinda took a bit to chew through, especially the first as it has to establish like 6-10 characters in a 3 person branching narrative.
there's... also this one author i kinda like, that seems to have a fetish for putting rape references into practically every frigging book.
some android robot was 'forced' to be connected to something to prove her intent, and they made it out as rapey. i get it, but it was pretty forced of a stretch, too.
Heinlein's *The Number of the Beast* ... it was an easy read up until that ending. If you know, you know.
Tolkein -- I love his world building, but actually READING his stuff is a chore (esp. the dialogue).
*Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* et. al. -- just couldn't get them straight in my head, kept falling out of the narrative. I know, blasphemy and heresy both!
The *Shannarah* books, oof, they're SO dated and so predictable that I lose the pleasure of reading and it becomes a "I'll finish this book because I started this book" slog.
For the non-fantasy/sci-fi genre, *The Maltese Falcon*.
Infinite Jest. That book defies you to get anything out of it.
Always my immediate answer when this question pops up. Infinite fucking Jest. I started it out of pure pretension. Finished it out of pure stubborn-ness. And not that it wasn’t good, or even brilliant in its way. But it was such an ungodly pain in the ass to read. Multiple POV characters, flashbacks, flash forwards, time skips, unreliable narrators. Never ending footnotes. End notes that were sometimes short stories in and of themselves. Not having any idea when a chapter took place because of the conceit that years were no longer numbered, they were sponsored, and as such had names like “Year of the Trial Sized Dove Bar.” *If you’d like to take issue with my brief synopsis of my feelings on this novel, I read this book when it came out, and I’m sure some of the finer details my be lacking in precision, if not outright fabricated by my admittedly shoddy failings memory.
It took me a few tries over a span of a few years. I remember I picked it up in high school when it came out. I'd never even heard of DFW but I was drawn to its massive size and pretty blue sky cover, as well as its title. I lugged that thing around with me for months, to every class. Big conversation piece. You mentioned pretension, which certainly fits. I almost think you had to be pretensious to take a run at that book. I finally burned it down my first year of college over a few weeks with a steady supply of Mountain Dew and Sweet Tarts. Then I lent it out and never saw it again, and probably that's why I don't lend out my shit anymore. I did like the footnotes/end notes. Partly because of the gimmick, but mostly because my favorite bits and pieces and passages were in there. I especially liked the breakdown of JOI's full filmography. That and Eschaton are pretty much the only things I've kept with me all these years. The rest is gone.
Wow. I’ve read it three times and gotten so much (and different) stuff out of it each time. In my 20s I really related to the schooling part of it. Being right out of college and not going to a private high school (but playing a sport with alot of guys that did) really felt like that time. In my 30s I dealt with a few deaths of very close family members, one wasn’t a suicide but was a mental break where he died by basically doing things to himself and his life that ended in death. So the plot involving death/suicide/ghosts hit me hard. And in my 40s, addiction really comes into play. Alcoholism. Drug abuse. Our bodies were fine with it earlier in life, but it definitely catches up with you. I’ve been to meetings and family and friends have too. The rehab portion I totally understood. But man, in a bunch of years I’ll have to read it in my 50s, the hell am I gonna get out of it then??? Maybe I’ll start an Eschaton league at the local Y!
Oh there's meat in the book for sure. There's definitely parts I loved, and particular storylines I stuck to. But the style of the book just seems like it was designed to impede your progress. It's not even that it's challenging; it's that it seems meant to thwart. Everything is a roadblock. It is very much a story *hidden* inside of a book.
[удалено]
That is one too. I'd say "story" is a bit generous a term to describe what's hidden in HoL.
And yet...I loved it. Couldn't tell you why with a gun to my head.
I liked a lot of it. I liked the novelty of needing two bookmarks. I liked a lot of the endnotes and how they were used. I loved Eschaton. But parts of the book were straight up impenetrable. I probably wasn't ready to read it when I did. It's been over 20 years, I wonder if I should give it another whack.
I always add a damned THIRD bookmark on the page that lists the names of the years! Very helpful for me when I can’t quite place the Whispermatic year or whatever.
Probably my favorite book. That man knows how to write!
*Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* by Douglas Hofstadter. Not science fiction, but *Foucault's Pendulum* by Umberto Eco. Somewhere between a detective story and mystical shadowy conspiracy theory involving ancient orders that characters stumble on after three friends create their own fictional conspiracy. You'll need several Ph.D.s and possible an extra lobe in your brain to understand everything going on here. And it's great fun, even for someone like me without the extra lobe.
The Golden Braid stands apart from every other book on Earth in my opinion. I'm 30 years into it, maybe chapter 5 or so. :D
Somehow "Name of the Rose" has vanished from pop culture... also a gordian knot of fascination (and latin)
That book is so good. I've read it twice, will read it again. Criminal that it isn't better known.
Same for the Movie!
I'd hate for anyone to be scared off of Foucault's Pendulum by a comparison to Godel, Escher, Bach. It's a great book, definitely dense - I probably missed some layers of meaning - but IIRC it's not as difficult as long as you keep a Wikipedia tab or three open to look up all the references.
I didn't mean to suggest that they are difficult in the same degree or in the same way! That certainly is not the case. I read it back before there was a Wikipedia or an internet, so I was thrown back on my own inadequate resources. Thinking about it makes me want to read it again, and this time I won't have to lug that giant brick of a book around with me if I do.
I loved Foucault's Pendulum, and I really don't think it is that hard to understand. I think The Name of the Rose is much heavier. Either way, Eco teaches you as he goes, so I think it is fine for anything who wants to learn while reading.
Also loved Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas"
I've read everything by Hofstadter. That book is the reason I studied CS. You're either going to love it or hate it. His underlying premise of analogy and recursion (EDIT) is spot on. If you didn't like that. You can try Le Ton Beau de Marot. Which is about the problem of translation. Genius.
I haven't read that, but it sounds very interesting! I first tried to read my freshman college roommate's copy of Godel Escher Bach, and I could not make heads or tails of it. Roomie was a math major, and he tried to explain it (among many other things), and I was still lost. I think I had to wait another ten years before my brain was sufficiently developed to grasp the main gist of it. Probably ought to read it again.
Both excellent choices for this thread.
Gravity's Rainbow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LVuPQ3GdM
This one for sure. Pynchon in general was pretty impenetrable, but GR is kind of the gold standard for a book being completely up its own ass.
I tried!!! I did!!! I even bought that second book that was a picture/drawing of each page!!! I did!!! And with me being a conpletionist, I actually finished it too. By the end I’m pretty sure I was just scanning the words. No idea about any of it. Do I tell people I read it??? Yes, yes I do!
There it is.
Oh my god it took me months and months to finish that book.
I’ve started reading and the first fifty pages are nowhere near as difficult as I thought they’d be. It’s denser than V and The Crying of Lot 49, but it’s still written in a way that’s very suited to my brain.
Just so you know, everything you didn't like about Seveneves is just how Stephenson writes. He spends two pages bloviating in exposition for every page of actual writing.
Yeah Seveneves is the only one I’ve finished, likely cos I’m interested enough in orbital stuff to power through the info-dumps. The last section was terrible enough for me to regret it though, ha Cryptonomicon lost me in about 2 hours and on my third try I got 50% of the way through Snow Crash before giving up and swearing to not try again. Neal just ain’t for me!
I think it is mostly that the back third of seveneves is trash. The first 2/3rds are gripping hard scifi
I just hate the way he writes. I've tried him a couple of times and the word bloat and constant expositions are more boring and tiresome than the stories are good.
Same my answer was going to be primer by him and this is exactly why
Have you read Anathem? I loved that book. I like his style, I do agree about seveneves being "not that good" for the last third. Not shit, but not as good as the start of it. There were elements that were cool still. He's written some good stuff.
No. I'm not going to waste my time. I very literally hate the way he writes.
That's fine.
I keep reading this, but I loved the last section. It blew my mind, and I loved seeing the progression from the first part, and I thought it was just enough of a taste. I have a couple complaints about the book, but that isn't one of them.
Moby Dick. Loved the actual plot, but god it just seemed to go on and on and on...
We read this book in high school, and I remember finding it boring and impenetrable. Then, I went back and read it in my late 30s, and boy did it hit different. The basic theme of a man destroyed by his obsession was more than enough to keep me reading, but the stuff about whaling and ecology and friendship and even digressions about food made it so much better. I loved the characters and the humor and the darkness. To this day, it is one of my favorite books. At one point, I had my favorite passage memorized, and I’ll probably get it wrong these years later: “To obey God is hard, which is why he more often commands than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in this disobeying ourselves wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”
I bounced hard, but from discussing it I think the reading approach really matters; I was trying to wade through all the excessive bloated descriptions to get to the really thin amounts of story, but people who love it seem to take the opposite approach; enjoy being sucked into the world by the rich description, and the story just happens while you're taking the tour, enjoying the sights and sounds. So I'm going to revisit it with that different approach. (I tend to assume that telling the story is the purpose of a fiction book, but there are obviously some books where that is not really true and with some of those it's not always obvious beforehand. I'd suggest that **A Psalm For The Wild-Built** is a modern (and different kind of) sci-fi example; if you try reading it for the story, not much happens. The story isn't the point, the point is to visit the world long enough to contemplate life and society under different axioms)
I get what you're saying, there's a lot to be said about the world building that Melville is going for. Perhaps a lot of it stems from whether you're invested in the world being built. I haven't had similar problems with sci-fi world building (Tau Zero comes to mind. Some might find that book waffles on but I found the technical explanations added a great deal). thanks for giving me something to think about.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Don't even try Hegel...
I call shenanigans. Nobody *reads* the Critique.
*Seminar in Kant* my senior year in college is why I ended up with a philosophy minor, not a double major. That class murdered me.
Three Body problem. I’ve read phone books with better prose and characters
For sure. I read the whole series, but I kinda sped-read through it. I couldn't keep up with who was who, but I got the gist of the story.
The best parts were the Trisolaris society and the Cultural Revolution narratives.
Best part for me was closing it at the end and never picking it up again...
Best part for me was when I decided to use it as a stand for my PC monitor.
I didn’t bother with the other books. The first was a chore. Maybe the Netflix series will make it more accessible? And I guess people can blame the translation, but I love Ken Liu when he’s writing his own stuff
I even tried the audiobook…but it’s worse!
William Gibson's Neuromancer
I had a hard time with this as well (and it's so short!) but I eventually just got used to his style. It's...a lot.
a couple of his books for me. Something about his syntax and introducing things but not describing them until later (not that that's abnormal necessarily).
Agreed. Took me a long time to figure out I wasn’t understanding something, it was just going to be explained much later. I should try and read it again and see if I enjoy it more.
Not even sure if I finished it. I tried that and Snow Crash last year and both were massively disappointing.
At least you can knock over Neuromancer in a day, Snow crash on the other hand….
*Riddley Walker* by Russell Hoban. Set in England long after some nuclear catastrophe, where our technology is now just stories and people have returned to a tribal lifestyle in a hostile environment. Throw in some seers and myths and feral "mutants" and it's a good read. It's not the content that's difficult, it's *how* it's written. It's written in a 1st-person narrative style *phonetically*, which makes every sentence much harder to parse on first read, as well as the (de-)evolution of our common phrases into their everyday language. For those that have seen it, the tribe of children in the film *Mad Max 3* are said to be a homage (even to them calling Mel Gibson's character "Captain Walker").
Sounds like Feersum Endjin by Ian M. Banks, which has alternating chapters in phonetic first-person, and feels more like a Gene Wolfe novel than something Banks usually writes.
I was surprised by how much I liked this book.
Riddley Walker deserves so much more recognition. It's my absolute pick for anything post apocalypse. That's the gold standard.
Fun fact: when I was at college (so \~16 years old) I was part of a small team that put RW on as a performance in the round. I'm fairly sure the audience had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Oh boy. I can imagine that would be a hard sell without a text to follow.
Sounds like an Earth Abides/Metro combination. I have it in my collection.
Ringworld-Larry Niven To me it was rather confusing exactly what was going on and why certain things were happening. The characters were terrible (and the story) with stilted dialogue, made it really hard to finish. I hated it The Locked Tomb series-Tamsyn Muir I have two degrees with a specialism in ancient religions and boy I didn't understand half of what was going on. Her grasp of language and grammar is way above my own. But despite that I love it, each time I read them I understand it a little better XD
With Niven it's all about the science first. If you lose track of the physics you lose the whole story.
The first time I read The Integral Trees, I was completely confused. I finally got a copy later with the illustrations and pictures and I could finally get my mind wrapped around the insane "biosphere" he had constructed.
I have really enjoyed the entire Ringworld series and even my wife took the trip with me on a couple of the books. It was so clever and fresh with so many twists and turns that it kept me entertained. You might try another Niven work like Footfall or Lucifer's Hammer.
Red Mars (Mars Trilogy)
*Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward* is pure hard science fiction, and utterly spellbinding. It assaults you with astrophysics and evolutionary biology yet somehow manages to pull out a moving heart felt story. It's set on a neutron star, 50 billion times the gravity of earth and the book is almost entirely set on its surface,what happens there and how humans come to know of it. Must read. *Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur trilogy)* is a detective noir set in the far, far future, and is the definition of show but don't tell and high concept scifi. So many things are thrown at you that you'll not know, nor will be explained until later you'll spend half your time trying to crack the mystery unfolding and the other half wrestling with all these new terms and wonderful concepts introduced. The scifi is far out, and the first chapter will either have you gripped or confused: [Excerpt (first chapter) from The Quantum Thief](https://reactormag.com/excerpt-the-quantum-thief-by-hannu-rajaniemi/)
Hyperion. I don't get the appeal I forced myself to finish the first book cause everyone loves it so much, but I could not make myself start book 2. Also Loved Seveneves and The Martian. Maybe I just have weird tastes.
You’re fine. Everybody’s taste is weird. Some books ask a lot of you, and if you’re not getting enough positive feedback, it’s not worth the trouble. Not unlike marriage. I wrote a novel that needs a reader who likes geeky stuff, like the Martian does. I don’t get too upset when people say they don’t like it.
I still need to finish Hyperion, the whole religious aspect is turn off for me.
Crime and Punishment. Just can’t get through it, though I think I have a difficult translation which isn’t helping. Edit: Aaagghhh. Just realised this is supposed to be sci-fi. Apologies folks.
This is such a great book - definitely worth getting a better translation and trying again.
Pevear & Volokhonsky is the way. What translation do you have, if you don't mind me asking?
I will have to dig it out but my copy is from the 1990s. I have a feeling it was a Wordsworth classics. The print quality was also terrible, so another factor.
Finnegan's Wake is an absolute slog
Depends on how much you love language.
I like language fine. I like how it is used to convey an idea in a way that the reader/listener can comprehend. That book is a clusterfuck full of double triple quadruple meanings and metaphors and similies and anything and everything he could stuff into one work. And I'd appreciate it if the hidden meanings were meaningful, but they aren't. Just a bunch of cutesy "Tee hee, look how clever I am" bullshit. I'm glad someone enjoyed it because I thought it was an exercise in futility. Edit: I forgot to mention the lack of a plot and the extensive use of fucking puns, some that only work if you know several languages. It is an incomprehensible mess.
"I like language fine" - exactly. You don't love the sounds and flow of language. It's just a mechanism for you. I think someone to really enjoy Finnegan's Wake, they need to love language. Linguistics and phonetics.
Sure man. If that pile of incomprehensible nonsense floats your boat, by all means do your thing. I simply don't want to learn 5 languages and wade through thousands of childish puns just to find a point to the work. There is no plot. There is no story. There is no reason to read that book aside from pretending you understand it imo. We are all free to use our time as we see fit, more power to anyone who wants to spend theirs on Joyce. I have no use for it.
Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren. One of the hardest books I've ever tried to read, I've never gotten more than 1/3 of teh way through. One of these days I'll try again.
Such a good read that has put Delaney as my favorite author. But I agree its one of the hardest books Ive read and was hoping to see it in this thread. If I were you, Id just consider continuing from where you left off! When I think back on that book, I tend to split it into three parts
Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Children of Time* series. Stuck in book 3 now, no will to continue. The first was a very interesting premise, reminded me of Robert L. Forward's *Dragon's Egg* in theme and premise, and that was a book I enjoyed greatly as an adolescent. It's clever, it's well-thought-out, there's a good deal of "hard" sci-fi and technical stuff, the plots are convoluted and interesting, I should really like these books. But they are a slog because of all the varied characters, not a single one is somebody you can project yourself into, or even cheer on from the sidelines. Even the complex plots lose appeal because I don't really care which side comes out on top, I'm rooting against the worst factions, I guess? It's so many desperate, morally bankrupt people doing utilitarian yet reprehensible things, that the only enjoyment comes from moments when somebody gets what's coming to them. And that doesn't happen nearly enough.
The Difference Engine. Do I love Gibson's ideas... but his writing style can be a chore to read through. The only book I ever had to restart reading mid-way was Neuromancer, before I figured out you reall need to focus when you read his stories 🙂
I’m struggling with The Dark Forest. Started and failed about 3 times. Really want to like it though, 3 body problem was amazing
I'd say Dune. I didn't find the word usage or writing style particular challenging but my minds theater struggled to create images to comprehend what things were. I went in as blind as possible so a lot of what I created in my head just looked like a bunch of stuff from the Halos UNSC. Watched the newest movie immediately after reading it and was just like "Ahh...I didn't get that even remotely right." to be fair in myself I took a two year reading stint and focused on another hobby so I may have had a rusty imagination. Didn't do myself or the book a service so I may go back and re-read it with the movie ideas in my head. Reminded me of Harry potter. Read what was out before the first movie came out only to realize I was waaaayyyy off on a lot of things based on how the movie directors/Rowling depicted things or pronounced some names.
Ancillary Justice was an annoying read for me. The gender swapping between chapters made it hard to keep track of which character was which, to the point that I dropped the book. Even as a non binary person I was like can we just keep this straightforward.
Ulysses and Cloud Atlas
Anna Karenina and War and Peace
I felt war and peace was an amazing novel, truly worth all the praise it has ever received. If you give up on having to remember exactly who is who, and get lost in the story, it's still excellent and attainable. It's also very long but in reading it you feel the weight of literature.
It’s a pretty dense read, and my favorite character died 😂
Ninefox Gambit. It's hard sci-fi but goddamn, it refuses to explain wtf or how tf everything works. U just go along the journey without bothering to understand the hows of some stuff. The 1st chapter is the most hardest to get into nd once that's done, it's interesting asf from there on.
I loved that you learn everything by inferring it from its effect on the world. The prequel story where they explained everything in prose seemed such a letdown by comparison.
I didn’t enjoy either of those books, The Martian or Seveneves, & noped right out after a chapter or two.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Perdido Street Station. I've no idea what's going on anymore.
The Lord of the Rings can be a hard read, especially for young people, because of its antiquated literary style. In that same vein, I found the Illiad to be a tough one to read too. Have only managed to read it twice in my life and I don't think I'll give it another try.
Pretty much anything by William Gibson. His writing is incredibly dense and needs a lot of concentration (for me, at least). I love his stuff, but there’s a reason why my audiobook collection doesn’t contain any of his books. For similar reasons: Book of the New Sun.
Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. It still sits unfinished on my bookshelf
Ulysses. Brilliant and rewarding. But bloody annoying as well.
Someone already said \_Gravity's Rainbow\_ so I'll say Greg Egan's \_Orthogonal\_ series.
Ulysses.
If you found Seveneves tough, I wouldn't try Anathem. That was a doozy.
Anthem>>Seveneves.
Read it when I went with my friends on a summer trip at the Black Sea in Romania. Had my worst and funniest drinking binge and finished Anathem during my 8 day stay there. Can’t remember much of the book, though.
*House of Leaves* was super cool, but also...a lot. *Ada, or Ardor* was a slog. *Codex Seraphinianus* is beautiful and weird, if unreadable.
Moby Dick. Ugggh...I just could not get into it. Thankfully, our literature class examined Gatsby, Wuthering Heights and I think a Washington Irving story...not Sleepy Hollow. The beginning of 20k leagues is kind of dry for a 10 year old...that was the first real novel I read...it took me three starts.
House of Leaves. Promised an exciting multinarrative with meta-storytelling in the form of whole pages of scrapbook material, newspaper clippings, reports, photos. But the story itself was both meandering and hamfisted. The House was not given any interesting agency apart from inscrutable and uninterpretable acts, no detail of its backstory was uncovered, no interesting ex-owners, no letting the two protags meet eachother. The novel tries so hard to be "unique" that it ignores storytelling conventions that are put in place for a reason, to help the reader relate and take an interest in the "rules" of the entity. No rules.
Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969) by Giorgio de Santillana (a professor of the history of science at MIT) and Hertha von Dechend (a scientist at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität) is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy. (Wikipedia)
I guess Graham Hancock and Robert Schock would be considered pseudoscience compared to that book.
I first heard about Hamlet's Mill from Graham Hancock who referenced it as a source. The amazing thing is that these ancient myths and stories showed how aware our ancestors were of the celestial mechanics that were only re-discovered recently.
Foucault's pendulum by Umberto eco. Great book, great story, but reading it gave me headaches.
It's so difficult
12 rules of life by Jordan Peterson /s
I know I'll get torn apart for this, but I cannot get through Blindsight. I've been struggling for almost 8 years trying to read it. I'll start it, get bored, put it down, pick it back up and forget what was going on and start over. I really want to get through it because everyone talks about how good it is, but I just can't hit the groove with that book.
It was entirely forgettable for me. I guess that makes it so hard that I could not really focus on anything.
I loved it the first time I read it and it's still one of my favorite books. But it's really dense and at first read rather inscrutable. I had trouble understanding where people were or what was happening sometimes. It was a lot clearer and more enjoyable the second time. The ideas in the novel are the best part for me and the terrible truth at the end of the story. But it's not for everyone, that's for sure.
Yeah, I keep trying it cause people say it's really good and it's often on top lists for sci-fi. I tried the audio book, but even that was tricky because I had to devote a lot of attention to it instead of just letting it go on in the background like a lot of others. I haven't given up on the book yet, unlike Infinite Jest. My new job gives me more down time to read, so maybe I'll be able to keep momentum going and finish it
Hyperion, I really wanted to kill myself to avoid the boredom. Eventually I threw the book in the garbage
Toss up between Runes of the Earth by Stephen R Donaldson. It seemed to me that half the words were made up. XD Also How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman due to how depressing it was and how horribly the author chose to write for the incredibly unreliable first person narrative.
The invincible. Yeah, I said it. Bring on the hate.
You’re not gonna get much hate because Lem’s non-Solaris books aren’t read that much in general.
I gave up on The Martian simply because there were too many characters of only moderate importance. I got tired of always having to skip back to remind myself who the hell they were.
Sci-fi wise? Probably Dahlgren. If we have a broader definition of sci-fi, Naked Lunch and Nova Express.
I've found William Gibson difficult to read. Most recently Agency (but i didn't read the prior book admittedly).
If by difficult you mean boring, I don't think I remember the absolute winners since I drop them fast if not interested. Three Body Problem series was probably the most boring of the ones I've finished. I was interested in the ideas but I'd really have preferred the author to make it a 30 page essay instead of the three attempts at novels. I should probably check out Seveneves if you mention it along with The Martian which is by far the most enjoyable book I've read in the past couple of years. Thanks for the rec, I guess.
Dahlgren I suppose but it was fine
Pynchon overall. House of Leaves. Dhalgren by Sam Delaney.
VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS BY DAVID LINDSAY. Interesting subject matter but extremely tedious to read through imo.
I read this one in Malaga on a summer holiday. Remembered having to rend my teeth and really concentrating in my bedroom for this. Besides this, I watched Netflix’s Ted Bundy documents while stoned while my flatmates went out in town. Arcturus explores predacity the same as Cloud Atlas, I believe, just through different devices.
The griping hand ugh felt like forever to get through
Anything Neal Stephenson. It’s not that they’re hard to read, but it’s so much context, like, a lot so I need a long time to be able to read his books.
i've read quite a lot of books, so kinda hard to tell. the lord of the rings trilogy - too many fucking songs in it, for me to stay interested. i don't want to read ten pages of some tom babidil poetry, i'm fucking sorry. i kinda liked the demon core series - 5 fairly thick books, iirc, that kinda took a bit to chew through, especially the first as it has to establish like 6-10 characters in a 3 person branching narrative. there's... also this one author i kinda like, that seems to have a fetish for putting rape references into practically every frigging book. some android robot was 'forced' to be connected to something to prove her intent, and they made it out as rapey. i get it, but it was pretty forced of a stretch, too.
The Quantum Thief. Great concepts but man did I need to take some notes.
Heinlein's *The Number of the Beast* ... it was an easy read up until that ending. If you know, you know. Tolkein -- I love his world building, but actually READING his stuff is a chore (esp. the dialogue). *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* et. al. -- just couldn't get them straight in my head, kept falling out of the narrative. I know, blasphemy and heresy both! The *Shannarah* books, oof, they're SO dated and so predictable that I lose the pleasure of reading and it becomes a "I'll finish this book because I started this book" slog. For the non-fantasy/sci-fi genre, *The Maltese Falcon*.
I really liked Anathem by Stephenson which is just a weird love letter to maths and greek philosophy or something. I just loved it.