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?
Faulkner - just don't like that dude. Actually I don't like much "modern" fiction.
"The English Patient" was a terrific movie - rotten book. One of the few cases where the movie was better than the book - in my opinion.
Some social snob once told me that the more obtuse a book is the more sophisticated it is. Well, put me down as unsophisticated.
Love Somerset Maugham - especially "Of Human Bondage."
Love fiction that is lyrical - has a particular musical quality such as M. M. Kaye's "The Far Pavillions," hen she describes the "green sky" of India.
Jack London too - marvelous sentence structure - wonderfully balanced.
From Jack London's "Sea Wolf":
"The last line was down. Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh still dwelt the soul of the man. Walled by the living clay, that fierce intelligence we had known burned on; but it burned on in silence and darkness. And it was disembodied. To that intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a body. It knew no body. The very world was not. It knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark. "
When I read I hear it as music - when I write I hear music. Each word must be in sequence of sound as well as meaning - otherwise the symphony is destroyed.
How a book is written, the sound of the language, is every bit as important as the story it sculpts.
.............................................
As for non-fiction.....which is the genre I read most....just give me the facts....I don't want "invention."
(i.e. open it to any random page and start reading)
That sounds like a possibility, I will make another attempt.
Wolfe's "A Man In Full" (I think was the name) was not his best but it does an outstanding job on creating a portrait of Atlanta. Wolfe is a social critic who uses fiction.
"How to ride a bicycle" by Albert Einstein
1. Anything by Saul Bellow - A cure for insomnia
2. Anything by Malmund - Sheer torture.
3. Proust - Is he better in french?
4. Kant's - Critique of pure reason. Couldn't decide whether the man was a genius talking about stuff I couldn't understand or just a windbag incapable of writing clearly. Stopped reading after about 50 pages.
As for Joyce and Moby Dick. I got "Ulysses" and "Moby Dick" on Books on tape and enjoyed both of them. Listening -as opposed to reading them - made me realize what great books they are.
Well, it's not technically a valid answer since I didn't actually READ the damn things, but "Gravity's Rainbow" is my nemesis.
I hate it so much, I with never to try it again, and I don't feel even slightly guilty about it.
Convoluted:
Mein Kampf.
I finally gave up.
You and me both! I got through maybe 30 pages of that thing. I think I still have it somewhere, maybe in a box in the garage.
I could not for the life of me figure out why Salman Rushdie was in so much trouble.
any math textbook
I remember liking that one a lot.
"Caddy smelled like trees." WTF? Bite me, Faulkner!
I swear, when I found out in Book 2 that Benjy was a 'tard and Faulkner didn't have the grace to inform us earlier, I was FURIOUS.
At first I thought you folks were talking about Thomas Wolfe of Asheville, NC. I guess nobody reads him any more. His first two blockbusters were Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. The characters were all so clearly based on people in his home town that he was pretty well ostracized there. Then he evidently thought of some stuff he had forgotten to say and wrote two more of the same material, but with names of characters changed. These were The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again. He died shortly afterward at about 38, and much of the last books was cobbled together from a mountain of manuscripts by his editor. Any of these would probably rate being on this list today, though I thought Of Time and the River was pretty good when I read it during boring barracks evenings back in the fifties.
LOL! While some of these are "impossible" to read, for some reason I don't object to still requiring students to read them! These kinds of books force the mind to focus- a quality that seems lacking in education these days..
Now THAT is a thread I'd love to start . . . What was the first book you threw against the wall and hollered, "No way in hell am I ever picking up that thing again!"
I will have to give Neuromancer a try. I'd have to relate to it. In 1984 I was home-building PCs and haunting the dialup BBS scene. My dialup provider was also a computer geek so I got on the Internet via his connection in the early 90's. When the WWW came along, there were hundreds, and soon thousands of those new-fangled web sites to play with (some of which weren't always available because their owners shut down the computer for the night and went home).
Come to think of it, "House of the Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne was a bear.
Must be 19th century American authors in general.
==These kinds of books force the mind to focus
They are demoralizing. I hope they get to read something interesting.
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