>> *4. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot:* This tremendously dense modernist poem is told in five parts and abruptly shifts between characters, time, place, and languages (English, Latin, Greek, German, and Sanskrit) with nothing more than the reader’s own erudition to make the connection between passages.
Bzzt. One of these is not like the others. It's a longish poem, but it doesn't qualify to be on this list - it's not a book, and it's not even Eliot's densest work. Besides, the clever-BA-graduate references are why people read the annotated version, which demystifies it rather a lot. Does Udhay's Harry Potter dismissal equate 'tough' with 'boring'? That will inflate everyone's bounce lists. Supriya
