--- On Tue, 15/6/10, Anil Kumar <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Anil Kumar <[email protected]> Subject: [silk] Ten toughest books to read To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, 15 June, 2010, 12:12 Calling the attention of the bibliophiles on Silk - http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/books/Ten-toughest-books-to-read/Article1-557458.aspx Oh well; the others too... Ten toughest books to read Who among us hasn’t struggled with a book or poem that failed to capture our attention? Here's a list of ten toughest reads in literature. 1. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce: Internet searches on “most difficult” and “hard to read” novels unfailingly recognize Finnegan’s Wake as the most difficult work of fiction in the English language. Written partially in a made-up language of mindbendingly convoluted puns, this novel is often considered unreadable. 2. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner: Some readers have found themselves filled with fury after trying to tackle the near-punctuation-less, paragraph-long, stream-of-onscious sentences. 3. Naked Lunch, William Burroughs: Is it any surprise that a book whose pages were written while the author was high on heroin, then cut into pieces, randomly reassembled, and published is a tough read? The book certainly is a difficult read, as sentences seem to just end without warning and new sentences begin half-way through. //I really don't like these three, having ploughed through them dutifully but with increasing dislike. 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. //Oh, come off it. It's one of the best, and once you've got the Trivial Pursuit thingy out of the way, really gets inside you. 5. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne: You may need a dictionary and you can easily get lost in the multiple pages of descriptive digressions. Hawthorne himself admitted to adding a complete chapter (The Custom House) only because the book was otherwise too short to print. //Grim, mainly because of the plot. It's so horrifyingly suffocating. 6. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco: Fans read Eco with a dictionary at hand, raving that his books are “for the strong of spirit, people with perseverance, willing to struggle in order to reach the ultimate truth that only the very few have mastered.” //I was surprised at the opposition. Not his best, but not THAT bad. Stiff to read coming to it straight from Name of a Rose, and disconcerting. Trouble is, his particular theme, and the strange goings on of the Capets vis-a-vis the Templars has been featured historically again and again. 7. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: This not-quite-objective-history, not-quite-memoir, “literary investigation” weaves endless depressing narrative threads, using prose seemingly designed to punish. The palpable sense of despair and apathy comes less from the text, but from the reading thereof, and it forces most readers to abandon the fight. //Just say Russian, read Plum about the Russians, and let it go at that. 8. Moby Dick, Herman Melville: This 600-plus-page book goes on and on—and on—about whaling techniques while remaining light on plot. //? OK, if you say so. I thought it was quite acceptable. 9. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand: Devotees recommend taking on the 1,000 page book in small doses, over a long period of time. //Yeah, sure; one page at a time, read and re-used in the littlest room. 10. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy: Fans say it’s best to read a few chapters at a time, keep notes, rent the film, and then be sure to “do something special” to celebrate after you’ve finished it. In fact, many people have read it just to say they did. //Very unfair. I just can't agree, and don't understand the snide ones. (Info Courtesy: listverse.com) http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/557458.aspx © Copyright 2009 Hindustan Times - Anil KUMAR
