[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.
Man am I with you guys on this one. You can call "Gravity's Rainbow" indulgent, you can call it turgid, you can call it anything you want, but bottom line is that it is sheer torture to read. It is PUNISHMENT.
Also, anything by Soren Kierkegaard. Take this short but ever so typical example from "The Sickness unto Death": "The self is a self which relates itself to itself or is a relation relating itself to itself in the relation."
Say, what?
Anything by Pynchon!
I found the first half of Gravity's Rainbow readable, even enjoyable. After that, the writing seemed more and more unbearably self-indulgent and pointless. I gave up about 3/4 of the way through. That was years ago though; if I ever end up with endless time to waste in the future, I might give it another shot.