Tough reads & why they're tough for you?

[AgentofOblivion]

I can't get anything started. I'm thinking of trying Middlemarch and hope I can get into on a flight to Vegas on Friday

Never heard of it, but that looks boring as shit.  Maybe try something relevant to your culture and lot in life?

[MadJohnShaft]

That's the other 5 books I am reading, this thread is about stretching out and challenging yourself, skippy.


I settled on The Recognitions instead. It's from the 50's and ultra revered.

[RageofKlugman]

I didn't find it that difficult and absolutely loved it; but lots of people have mentioned Ian M Banks Feersum Endjin as a tough read, mostly because the main characters dialogue is spelt phonetically throughout the book.

Banks' vision of a far future society is as bizarre as a great piece of sci fi should be, and his description of the cybernetic afterlife "the Crypt" is stunning.

I'd forgotten about Feersum Endjin, I loved that book alothugh the phonetic spelling does make it hard work in places. One of the very few books I've started and not finished (despite trying several times) is Banks's Against a Dark Background. I love all of his sci-fi, but that one always struck me as really half-arsed.

[renfield]

I finished Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus Trilogy and I'm actually quite proud of that. Those were some tough motherfuckers.

I once started in Tolkien's The Hobbit but I gave up after a few chapters. I love horror and some SF but the fantasy genre is obviously not my thing. I'm not gonna bother myself with his LOTR trilogy.

Another book I just couldn't get into was The Catcher In The Rye. I found it to be boring and dated.

Other books I had some difficulty with but which I'm going to re-attempt one day:
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Herman Hesse - The Steppenwolf
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Thomas Pynchon - V.

By the way, I'm a big Cormac McCarthy fan and yes, his style takes a bit of getting used to. I've not only read Blood Meridian, I've read it twice and will give it a third time someday. Once you're used to his style his imagery is pretty striking.

If you haven't read Illuminatus! you have no fucking inkling of how the world really works. Wake the fuck up sheeple!

[Sprague Dawley]

omg this forii used to have some actual threads before it deteriorated into "I like sausage and hot dog"?

james joyce's ulysses.  i've begun it 5 or 6 times and never made it more than 30 or 40 pages in.

thats about twice as far as most people got. and about 37 pages firther than this thick cunt got

I finished Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and I'm actually quite proud of that.

odd book, after he'd spunked out an entire thesaurus in the opening 30 pages he kind of ran out of puff and seemed to think "fuck, a story then"... and realised he was a science guy and didnt really have one

Catch 22 is a fucking awesome book, but took several reads to "get it". One of my all time favourites, I'll just open my copy at random and start reading, even after having read it many times.

shit yeah, it is great fun. Sowing the seeds for M*A*S*H

Currently reading Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Interesting but I am doing an awful lot of re-reading and it is long.

he is a pain. "Against the day" is a hoary great doorstop of a thing. All that "chums of chance" bollocks can suck it

[renfield]

I haven't done Gravity's Rainbow, but Infinite Jest is really awesome

[Josh]

Infinite Jest took a few attempts before I was able to finish it. Great book, no question, but tough. The hardest thing for me about it was that DFW was already dead by the time I got around to trying it and because so much of it is clearly based on his own life, I sensed I was digging into something really personal and intimate that I almost felt like I had no business reading. It's brilliant, but, man, does it get dark sometimes. Also, all those footnotes...

[Bro. Righteous]

William Burroughs - Word Virus.

A mindfuck of hell and back with exquisite inner human amazement. Work of art.

[giantchris]

I had trouble reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for a class a couple years ago.  His writing is too dry for me, there isn't enough exposition to paint a mental picture.  I also felt like his dialogue was heavy handed and it felt like it had ultra-violence just for the sake of having ultra-violence that didn't seem to serve the plot much.  There wasn't really any character development either it just felt like a series of events that were described in very short sentences.  I feel like that was a sci-fi book for people that don't actually read any sci-fi.  Everyone kisses this guys ass for Blood Meridian which I admittedly haven't read but after reading The Road I don't want too because I think he's a shitty writer

I also had a lot of trouble reading anything by Nietzsche and Von Clauswicz's On War because I feel like German doesn't translate that well into English.  It may have been the translations I've read but I didn't feel like I was understanding the ideas on the same level as I have philosophy books from other cultures.  On War was absolutely brutal and I couldn't finish it despite having some interesting ideas. 

[renfield]

I haven't read The Road but yeah, love Blood Meridian and mainly because of the way it's written. How is this not utterly badass? The line I have underlined is maybe one of the most thunderously awesome things I have ever read.

The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is out.

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

[giantchris]

That excerpt is better written then the entirety of The Road.  I wonder if maybe he was trying to do something arty and minimalist with the way he wrote The Road because that clip from Blood Meridian doesn't even read like the same author wrote it to me. 

Like here's a dialog clip from The Road below and all the dialog in the book is these kind of short run on sentences.  People don't really talk like that consistently all the time and the whole book is like this.  Here's a blurb between the man and the boy speaking, in the book the boy is much younger and in the movie its a teenager BTW, and yes children ask lots of weird short questions like this boy does but the child's choice of wording doesn't actually match what a child would say, like when he says "later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?"  Children aren't very good at delaying gratification until they get older then the boy in the story is portrayed and in the almost complete absence of stimuli all day described by the author I find it unlikely a kid would be patient enough to be thinking about asking future questions.  That and a kid using the phrase "later in the darkness" go find me a real 5-7 year old that wouldn't just say night.  What dialog there is doesn't really match the point of view to me and I feel it distracts from the story.  It's a post-apocalyptic future its not like the boy is a child prodigy that is reading all this stuff to get exposed to a fancier vocabulary and the man/dad/whatever clearly isn't teaching him anything like that along the road.     

"He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.

Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we're still going south.

Yes.

So we'll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That's okay.

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes. Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay."

When you read eventually read it renfield I'd be curious to know your thoughts. 

Sometimes conceptual stuff is hit or miss with me, like I really enjoy almost all of Philip K. Dick's work but I had a lot of trouble following VALIS and a lot of people that's their favorite book of his.  If I read VALIS first I probably wouldn't have read any of his other works.  I probably should revisit McCarthy. 

[Josh]

Anyone who calls The Road sci-fi either hasn't read it or doesn't get it. It's not sci-fi. What causes the apocalypse in the book is of no importance whatsoever. If you read the book, read it as a father's love letter to his son and as a message that no matter how bleak things can get, sometimes hope is the only thing that gives you a chance to survive. That's it.

If you don't like McCarthy's style, I can't help you there. That's just a matter or personal taste, I guess, but I think people focus way too much on the lack of punctuation they're used to. It may throw you off at first, but soon you realize he's constructed the prose in a way that little punctuation is needed.   

[renfield]

Be that as it may, just looking at these two excerpts, The Road definitely seems lame compared to Blood Meridian 

[mortlock]

does anyone read fucking books here?!?

[renfield]

I'm reading TALISMAN by Stephen King, kind of a depressing start but it's picking up.

[Josh]

I've never read a Stephen King book before. I don't know why. Probably because I'm not really into horror. Which book of his would you recommend to someone who hasn't read any of his stuff?

[lftwng4]

I'm reading TALISMAN by Stephen King, kind of a depressing start but it's picking up.

Is that the one where him and another author wrote alternating chapters?
Kind of a cool idea.  Don't remember anything about the book.

[renfield]

It's co-written by one Peter Straub, but I didn't know they did an alternating chapter thing.

[renfield]

I've never read a Stephen King book before. I don't know why. Probably because I'm not really into horror. Which book of his would you recommend to someone who hasn't read any of his stuff?

In my opinion King is an astounding writer. You can pretty much pick something with a concept that appeals to you and it's likely to be really well written, although his plots often fall apart or never really existed in the first place.

Salem's Lot and The Dead Zone are quite beloved. Dead Zone has my favorite film adaptation of all his books, by Cronenberg.  The Stand is a unique trashy apocalypse/fantasy epic, although people hate the conclusion. Eyes of the Dragon is straight sword and sorcery fantasy, it's not considered one of his best but I liked it. I haven't read a lot of his staples like Misery, Carrie, and The Shining.

IT is different than you would think from the movie or the miniseries. It's a cocaine addled mess of a book; the battle against Pennywise is basically a loose framing device for King to jump backwards and forwards in time and do scene after scene of balls out horror, some of which involve the main characters but many of which are just records dating back hundreds of years demonstrating how this evil force has always been terrorizing this town. It's a hugely self indulgent affair but it's also sort of King at his most primal and unhinged. You will likely want to skim over the infamous preteen gangbang if you give this one a go.

Pet Sematary and Cujo are both unbelievably grim, nihilistic, blackhearted works, especially Cujo which doesn't have the faintest glimmer of redemption or hope. I read several of his books before Cujo but nothing prepared me for how bleak that shit was. Unlike say IT (which to be fair has like 1000x the body county and gore factor of Cujo), there's no cosmic evil to rise up and fight against, no coming together of downtrodden misfits for a greater purpose. It's just hateful, banal people grinding towards an inexorable doom. That poor fucking dog man, he just wanted to be a good dog and never wanted to hurt anybody. Fuck.