What is the most convoluted, opaque, impenetrable book you ever read?

Blind Eye Jones

[Blind Eye Jones]

What is the most convoluted, opaque, impenetrable book you ever read?

[wtc911]

Joyce is a great-uncle on my mother's side. I never warmed to his work. (btw...my BA major was CompLit) I liked the Germans and Americans best (after the Bard of Avon of course). The Russian writers drove me crazy too.

[MarkL]

"Das Kapital," by Karl Marx. It was required reading in a college class, "Marxist Economics." I never did read that book, just things other people wrote about it. And on the final exam, I just parroted back what the professor had said over the semester, and wrote down some stuff that really didn't make any sense to me. I wound up with a B+ in the class, which really ticked off my roommate, an Economics major who was also in the class (I was a computer science major).

That one class did more to turn me towards becoming a "small 'l' libertarian" or Jeffersonian Liberal, than anything else.

Mark

[Ben Chad]

In 1977, this book gave me many headaches.

[tarheelswamprat]

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Make that two votes. I forced myself to finish it and am still suffering from dain bramage as a result. /grin

[Fellow Traveler]

200 hundred posts and not one mention of Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" This is absolutely the worst dreck it has ever been my misfortune to come across. I had to read this in high school. I normally read 1 to 2 books a week at that time. I could not get through this at all. Somebody mentioned "Catch-22", I loved that book in high school. I must have read it 4 or 5 times. Each time you read it something else pops out at you. I think the problem people have is the whole book is a series of events that happen out of order, kind of like the movie "Pulp Fiction"

I read "Atlas Shrugged years later and except for the 70 pages speech at the end enjoyed it.

[wtc911]

see 197.

[GladesGuru]

Mohammed's "Queeeran".

[ChessExpert]

"Anything by William S. Burroughs."

I had to do a double-take on that. But O.K. - no problem. After a little research I realized I was confusing him with Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan and a bunch of science fiction.

[keeper53]

"The gospel is: you are more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe yet you can be more accepted and loved than you ever dared hope at the same time because Jesus Christ lived and died in your place."

Tim Keller(DG Conference)

You are in a church that is truly making a difference. Great teaching!

[weaponeer]

But when I go to a book fair and see a copy of Silas Marner, I just flip out. I buy it and tear it to pieces in front of the seller, muttering things like, "You're never gonna prevent some kid from enjoying reading books."

LOL! My feelings exactly. God, I hated that book in high school, and also "How Green Was My Valley" or some such.

[Eepsy]

I quite liked Silas Marner. It's a nice little self-contained morality tale.

Sound and the Fury, though, is a pile of crap that should never again be let through the door of a high school.

[Savage Beast]

Read Poe as the struggle of a terrified, alone, and possibly abused boy, grown into a man, driven to the brink of psychosis by his mother's death and therefore abandonment of him, longing for her return from death but terrified by the fear that she might return, and it is all clear--but horribly sad.

He sat in the front row, night after night, watching his mother play Juliett, killing herself and then returning to life in her dressing room, and when she died, he was left completely alone--and very confused.

The Raven is one of the most depressing things I've ever read.

Understanding all this didn't make Poe enjoyable, but it made it far more understandable (and less impenetrable) for me. Instead of being shocking and horrifying, his writings became depressing journeys to the brink of madness.

[Tribemike]

Song of Solomon

[keeper53]

But when I go to a book fair and see a copy of Silas Marner, I just flip out. I buy it and tear it to pieces in front of the seller, muttering things like, "You're never gonna prevent some kid from enjoying reading books."



LOL, that is funny!

[Gorzaloon]

Jonathon Swift - Gulliver's Travels ..for some reason.

It has a lot of embedded satire, some of which may have been related to current issues, and therefore meaningless to us.

However, about twenty years ago, some friends of mine, who also worked in R&D, rediscovered his "University of Lagado" section and began sending xeroxes of it to each other, and we we all laughed till we cried..People were calling each other on the phone and reading it to each other and breaking up laughing so hard we could not finish sentences.

Excert from http://library.ucsc.edu/exhibits/gulliver.html

: The English visitor also describes:

a project for "extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers...to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers;" "an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food;"

replacing silkworms with spiders ("because they understood weave as well as spin);"

"softening Marble for Pillows and Pincushions;" and, a method to "prevent the Growth of Wool upon two young Lambs" in order to "propagate the Breed of naked Sheep."

The visitor goes on to describe projects conducted in the part of the Academy devoted to "speculative Learning" (or the Arts and Social Sciences).

Memorable among these is the "Literary Engine," a device designed to produce random strings of words, so that "the most ignorant Person...may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study."

I suspect that after one has spent a few decades writing white papers and grant applications, progress reports, and summary reports, etc. this satire becomes side-splitting.

[StoneColdTaxHater]

Any bill before the U.S. congress or senate

[reg45]

After noting that many of these books were (and still are) required reading in humanities classes in college, I am overjoyed that I majored in chemistry - PChem seems simple in comparison.

[ChessExpert]

"Dune by Frank Herbert"

This has been mentioned several times, to my surprise. I just thought it was long. But I liked it. Maybe it conveyed mood more than intellectual content. I probably would not have the patience to read it today.

[keeper53]

Are you sure it was Crime and Punishment? I don't think it is that long a book. Maybe you are thinking of The Brothers Karamazov? Either way, I love Dostoyevsky!
I also, could never get through:
any Pynchon
James Joyce
Rushdie
and sadly, Paradise Lost. (over my head)

[Tolkien]

So many books, so little time.

Anything by James Joyce or Nietzsche.