Posted on 03/09/2007 11:22:35 PM PST by Blind Eye Jones
A Brief History of Time - Hawking.
Dune by Frank Herbert
Atlas Shrugged - I finished it, but it took years. Lots to like and lots to hate. Ayn sure pounds the theme into you over and over and OVER again. One heavy and dense Christmas-fruitcake of a book.
Frankenstein: Not impenetrable at all, but just boring, dated and repetitive. I read this for the first time a few years ago and was completely underwhelmed. Page after page of "Oh wretched soul, thou art the scourge of thy tortured provenance" etc. etc. blah blah blah shut up shut up SHUT UP.
As for my own copy, I never made it past page 23.
Edgar Allan Poe is also very difficult to read. Except maybe on a cold, winter's night with a couple tumblers of whiskey already in you.
Finnegans Wake takes top honors for impenetrable fiction.
Never could get through Moby Dick. Tried many times.
To the Finland Station, assigned in a freshman history class at UNC. I am STILL not sure what it was about.
"Ulysses - C'mon, the champion and still champion. I've tried twice, still haven't gotten past the first 6-7 chapters".
How ironic that this subject has been raised on FR at this time. After reading my third or fourth stinker of a contemporary novel in a row I consulted the internet and decided to read some of best literature ever written. I queried Google and found one site that had "The Hundered Best Novels" and two lists; one a publisher's list and the second a readers list. The number one book on the readers list was "Atlas Shrugged". I had read "The Fountainhead" years ago and liked it so I was enthusiastic. It was a great read, the long speeches however, were painful.
On to the publisher's list; number one there is "Ulysses". Have read "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" many years ago and liked it so I figured this would be good. I'm normally a book every other day guy so that you know. It's been three weeks since I started reading "Ulysses" and it reminds me of trying to read novels in Spanish in college with a Spanish-English dictionary on my lap. I'm on page thirty and there's no dictionary to help me. I've got to make a decision about this book or give up reading.
Publishers must be liberal because I know that no one living could possibly understand what this guy's talking about.
Thanks, I feel much better.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
"As I lay Dying" by William Faulkner. Faulkner is way overrated and was influenced by Joyce's stream of consciousness style. It's better than seconal if you can't get to sleep.
Meditations on the Tarot (Anonymous)
Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides)
How does one read an unpenetrable book?
That is one of my favorite books. I actually read it through twice.
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth is another great book that many consider unreadable.
The Federal Acquisition Regulations.
Don't worry, there is nothing convoluted or opaque about Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". It is a straightforward historical account about the horrific Soviet communist concentration camp system, written by someone who experienced it for over a decade.
The enormity of the Gulag system and its mountainous criminality as described by Solzhenitsyn will shock and overwhelm the reader. But you must read it through, if only for the moral purpose of committing the Gulag victims' fate to your own memory, and not letting them be forgotten.
Most anything by P.D. James. The TV dramatizations are tolerable but her novels fit the bill.
She did write a delightful book, "The Maul and the Pear Tree" about the 1811 Radcliff Highway murders (in Londonistan), but there at least she had reality as a pole star.
The Cat In The Hat
"Absalom! Absalom!" and "The Hamlet" by Faulkner
Ditto on Moby Dick.
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