All others are merely pretenders to the throne.
However it is a brilliant piece of literature and the most intellectual dissection of existentialism ever written.
Zen will always be on of my favorite.
Posted on 03/09/2007 11:22:35 PM PST by Blind Eye Jones
What is the most convoluted, opaque, impenetrable book you ever read?
Not to mention the Iraq Study Group report.
Wasn't that actually a collection of Tolkein's notes and ideas for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? I read about fifty pages of it and I gave up. I needed more note paper than the book had pages to keep up with the myths, gods, and everything else that was going on.
Anyone ever get stuck in the unedited edition of William Hope Hodgson's The Nightland? Great, great book, if you like science fiction. It will make your hair stand on end. But it's written in a very unnatural, stilted syntax that takes some getting used to. And it can be repetitive.
One chapter which was only about how much and how deeply the main character loved his true love, goes on for 60 - 90 pages, iirc. Well, the reader has to be made to appreciate why the hero would undertake such a dangerous, epic journey in the first place. Otherwise, I guess the whole story would be so darned unbelievable.
Anyway, that chapter was very irritating and I was just about ready to fling the book across the room when I finally got to the end of it.
I read the first volume of Gulag when I was a freshman in college. It's the book that turned me into a conservative. Probably the single most influential book I ever read.
I tried that at age 12. It came in a five book set with 'The Hobbit' and the LOTR trilogy (I know, I know, it's one book and not a trilogy) and I started with 'The Silmarillion' first. It was years later before I actually read the other books which were where I should have started first, ignoring 'The Silmarillion'.
"Mein Kampf"
God sakes, the things that two men will do when they're locked up in prison together. I was almost willing to release Rudolf Hess from prison after reading that book based on the idea that he suffered enough having to sit next to Hitler in jail all those years transcribing that idiocy while Hitler dictated to him. No wonder Hess went crazy. I can't believe that any Nazis actually read that book.
Maybe this will help: Things are going to get worse (as you can see that they actually are), then, the Lord is going to return and take care of the situation.
You're on to something, there...
"The Book of Love: understanding women". I wrote it my self and still don't get it.
You must have read it in the Russian. The English translation is prolix but stays between the lines. It is amazingly densely packed for being so long.
Weave World by Clive Barker of Hellraiser fame.
I read the entire collection high school. Can't remember why I went looking for them, but at the time (mid 70's) I was the only one who had ever checked it out.
It had quite an impact on me also. Should be required reading IMO for high schools.
After reading Gulag I had no patience whatever for my liberal friends' arguments about how oppressive America is.
Camus impressed me as being entirely too busy playing with his toes and his fingers to actually move things along. I don't make entries about the most convoluted, etc., book I have read because I only read one that fit the category because I had to for a class long ago. Many others I picked up and read the first couple of pages, like Finnegan's Wake and The Brothers Karamazov, then read a couple of pages in the middle to see if they stayed the same and then gave them to younger relatives and told them they should read them to improve their minds. Those things are what the old Classics Comics were for.
I read and enjoyed Name of the Rose until that damnable Movie Ending. It struck me that the whole thing was about hoping to sell movie rights.
Tom Wolfe....eeeggggghhhh....so much potential and yet so much pretention. (IMHO)
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