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?
Oh man, I did a quick search to see if anyone posted "The sickness..". That book was pure torture to read. It sits on my bookshelf like a trophy; the way a hunter commemorates a particularly memorable kill.