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

Blind Eye Jones

[Tainan]

great thread

[BnBlFlag]

The Gulag Archipelligo

[DryFly]

Atlas Shrugged

[OwenKellogg]

It took me 26 years to finish The Plague by Camus.

Started it 4 times. Finally read it through and gave the book away to a coworker, telling him not to return it.

[KellyAdmirer]

James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake." Just way too obscure. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Ulysses" are great, though. "Finnegan's Wake" makes Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" seem like light summer reading.

[Lancey Howard]

Marvin K.Mooney Will You Please Go Now!

[RushCrush]

I second that! Just got rid of my copy. That and DaVinci code- I thought they were obtuse.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Satanic Verses comes to mind. Bought that to see what all the fuss was about back when it came out.

Just didn't see it. Having a price put on one's head does wonders for book sales, though. ;-)

Rushdie's birthplace, Bombay, plays a big part in that novel as it does in several of his other novels, so familiarity with the city, it's neighborhoods, it's slang, and Bollywood films helps a lot. An understanding of Islam and it's myths is also helpful. Along with Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, it's one of my favorite Rushdie novels.

But it isn't an easy read. I'd be amazed if any of the Iranian mullahs who sentenced Rushdie to death had ever read it, let alone understood it.

[Lancey Howard]

'Gravity's Rainbow' by Thomas Pynchon

[Covenantor]

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

[from Wikipedia}

In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene."

I concurred with the eleven members and consigned my paperback copy to an outhouse in Maine, in hope of transforming it into something useful before the pages returned to their original source.

[RunningWolf]

The book of myself? :-)

[goldstategop]

A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time never gets easier whether on the first read or the hundredth as a result of the author's long and labrinthine sentences that seem to meander on forever. Each sentence contains a complete thought and sometimes a complex thought is expressed in a run on way to capture the full force of its import. The 3,000 page novel is the greatest attempt ever to capture a human lifetime in its totality.

[WingBolt]

Anything by Pynchon (possibly excepting The Crying of Lot 49)

[BooBoo1000]

"Quiet Flows the Don', read all five books of it. It about Russiaand there sure were a lot of Vitches around. But strange thing is I enjoyed it

[Covenantor]

LOL! I was still editing while you posted.

[Mom MD]

that's funny. I was thinking about Foucault's pendulum myself, except I didn't technically read it - not more than the first couple of chapters anyway, just couldn't get through it. And I did so enjoy the Name of the Rose

[MadIvan]

Ulysses by James Joyce.

Regards, Ivan

[Irish Rose]

As a Christian I've read it beginning to end several times. There are parts of it I can understand; others are totally obscure. (Mark of the Beast, anyone?) And I find it impossible to unify all that's in Revelation, and all other End Time prophecies, into a clear, complete understanding of the End Times.

Although comprehensible, much of Paul's writing is also very deep. There are passages I have to read slowly. Christianity is not a simple religion.

[starbase]

It took me 26 years to finish The Plague by Camus.

Wow! I flipped through a few of the hundreds and hundreds of pages of Les Miserables, and Notre Dame de Paris, which is the rather uninspired French title of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame".

Beyond that, French novels are always threatening to spin off in philosophical directions which could only interest a cynical Frenchman! Mon Dieu!

[Allegra]

An understanding of Islam and it's myths is also helpful.

Well, I have a bit of a grasp on that. And while I haven't been to Bombay, I have enjoyed other novels set in India, particularly during the time of the British Raj. M.M. Kaye's Far Pavilions was great fun to read, for example.

I just found SV to be a bit dry and had a tendency to wander all over the place. But that's just my taste. I did enjoy a couple of his ex-wife Marianne's books, although she's a bit heavy on the liberal symbolism.