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

Blind Eye Jones

[KellyAdmirer]

Atlas Shrugged is up there. That speech at the end that seems to go on for dozens of pages, that was hard to get through.

[Stentor]

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

I'm on page 50. I think you have freed me from the necessity of continuing.

[SoDak]

Ulysses(oh heck, anything by...)--James Joyce
The Sound and The Fury--Faulkner

It's the dang phonetic slang that riles me.

[oldleft]

[T.L.Sink]

I agree with you about Joyce and "Finnegan's Wake." I guess I'm too impatient to appreciate avant-garde literature and "stream of consiousness" writing. I'm just old fashioned enough to not want to have to read a dozen critical reviews and explanations of "keys" to symbolisms, etc., that explain to me what the author really means.
To me, it's analogous to being instructed in the meaning of hieroglyphics.

[zadox]

two books come to mind:
1. Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolf
2. A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal.
Both are convoluted but well worth the effort...

[SFConservative]

The San Francisco Yellow Pages.

Excluding the impenetrable part, that is ...

[Lurker]

Anything by Virginia Woolf.

Anything by Tom Wolfe.

L

[Irish Rose]

Don't say that! I bought it at a book sale because it was written by Solzhenitsyn and haven't read it yet.

But I guess it's no great waste even if the book isn't that good, seeing as I only paid fifty cents.

[StarfireIV]

Nietzsche. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" English and German versions

Some passages like "On the flies of the marketplace" are very clear, others are barely comprehensible.

[Cyclopean Squid]

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Only got through 1,000 pages. All that happened was he liked this girl Gilberte, and her mom Mme Swann. They had tea together. Then he went to a beach. That's it. Really. I had to stop reading it. Awful. AWFUL

[goldstategop]

The Talmud. It is the one work akin to pure mathematics. It is taut, abrupt and the inner logic is exactly the reverse of which we are familiar. Nevertheless, it has all the liveliness of a scholastic debate and in its pages one can find generations of scholars trying to dicipher the true meaning of The Torah. This is one work best studied with a teacher and fellow students so you can anticipate where the debate is heading. It is with the aid of Rashi, that the work becomes less opaque and much clearer. Without his contribution, Jews would have a harder time appreciating all the subleties of The Talmud, which is literally a world unto itself.

[Allegra]

I LOVE Tom Wolfe!

[CaliGirlGodHelpMe]

The Celestine Prophecy. What a bunch of overhyped, convoluted, pretentious hokum.

Interview With The Vampire comes a close, ludicrous second. Loved the film, though.

[Cyclopean Squid]

A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

I hate that book. 20 pages to describe a church steeple. Proust needed to get a life instead of sitting in his corked room. Why did I waste my time on that abomination?

[Allegra]

The one I can't stand is John Irving. I read one of his in the 80s when I was quite young and thought it was just disgusting. I never understood why so many of his books were bestsellers.

[goldstategop]

The best works of literature demand the participation of the reader. When we return to the work, we discover new meanings in it that weren't apparent to us before. Life is like that and the journey is never finished.

[Cyclopean Squid]

If that is the best work of literature, give me trash. I think it's retarded and overrated. I tried to like it--and I'm someone who has great patiencea and desire to experience the Classics--but that was not good. Granted I can't read French, but the translation was miserable.

If you enjoy it, more power to you. I prefer to spend my finite time on this Earth reading things that actually hold my interest.

[starbase]

While I've never wasted my time on the piece of garbage, I'll say that Mein Kampf has a reputation for being droningly unreadable, hence the lack of international reaction to its assertions.

[Mojave]

Anything by a Russian

Anything by Ayn Rand.