Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some books are to be read only in parts; Others to be read, but not curiously; And some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. — Francis Bacon And some great books take a whole lot of chewing before you can digest them.
Did you ever start a book that you just couldn't finish? But then, years or decades later, you picked it up again, and finished the whole book, and it was worth it? Then this diary is for you. This is a diary about levels of reading, and all the things that can make books easy or difficult to get into, and our personal reasons for trying and trying again. I will share my own ideas about what makes some books easy, and some harder, and a few formidable. Then I'll tell you why some books took me two or more tries to get into, but were worth the work. This diary should not be work, at least not for you, dear reader. In case it proves longer than you have time for, I have left bold handholds, to help you skim any sections you choose not to climb. If you tire of climbing, please just skip ahead to the poll, and then leave a comment (or join in the conversation). This is a curious diary, and it's eager to hear from you: what book did you give up on the first time, what made you come back to it, and why was it worth it in the end? Perhaps you're not so interested in difficult books, and would rather read about books we enjoy re-reading - in which case, please look first at [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/02/1031581/-Bookflurries:-Bookchat:Will-The-Book-Hold-Up cfk's diary], where many Kossacks wrote about our favorite books, and why we re-read them.
A difficult book is not always a good book. For every hard but good book, there's a whole shelf of books that are hard because they're badly written. I poked around the internet a bit, checking lists of difficult books. One that made [http://listverse.com/2010/06/07/top-10-difficult-literary-works/ a few lists] is Atlas Shrugged. This is simply a bad book. Any novel, which stops in its tracks for a 70-page speech of turgid and tendentious propaganda, has lost the plot. There are really only two ways not to be disappointed in Ayn Rand's writing: 1) Don't read any of it. Take special care not to read about her personal life. 2) Read once, in your teens or early twenties, The Fountainhead. As a young, free-thinking idealist, I found the main characters compelling (especially the hero, Howard Roark), and the plot kept me turning the pages. This is still a bit of a gamble, but it would have worked for me, if I'd stopped there. Or if the author had stopped there. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the book was very successful, and convinced Ayn Rand that she could write. As Milan Kundera said, every great book is smarter than its author; and this is also true of The Fountainhead. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Already, at The Fountainhead, we are ambling among The Appalachians of my Bookcase. These are books that I find easy to pick up, entertaining to read, and sometimes very hard to put down. [http://www.amazon.com/GREAT-Books-EASY-to-read/lm/3U3QOT2AM4QCD Examples] are The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird; most books by Michael Crichton, J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, John Irving, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen; and a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. All the Narnia books are here; but only the first few books of George R.R. Martin's and Robert Jordan's series - soon after that, their plots get too convoluted to be Appalachian. What makes Appalachian books easy to read? The most essential ingredient is a well-organized, compelling plot. If an author can keep you turning the pages fast enough, you may breeze right past flat characters, improbable coincidences, and vague descriptions. Characters are the second vital ingredient. As The Fountainhead shows, two or three characters who you care about can save a book. If the characters are detailed and true to life, if they develop as the book proceeds (as Austen's main characters do), so much the better. Between you and me, that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect Verfremdungseffekt] works on stage, but let's leave it there, okay? At home I prefer a comfy chair, a cup of tea, and a book I can get lost in. The third literary ingredient that helps me do this is a vivid and interesting world to explore. Which is probably why I have so much Fantasy and Sci-Fi. If a book's first three ingredients are bland and predictable, it really needs the spice of a tasty writing style. Some authors reliably make us laugh, or think; or else we just enjoy hearing their voice. Then we may read them not for their tales, but how they tell them. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now let's hike into The Alps of my Bookcase. These are not difficult books per se, but can be formidable to a novice reader. All of this categorizing is somewhat subjective - I have found some "hard" books easy, and some "easy" books hard. Here are some books I consider Alpine (but feel free to dispute me in your comments): All The King's Men, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Bell Jar, I Am a Cat, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Madame Bovary, The Master and Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Possession, Ragtime, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Things Fall Apart, Tom Jones, and Ubik. What makes these Alps harder to read? Here are some common stumbling blocks that impede an inexperienced reader from reaching the peak of full comprehension. These obstacles are rare in Appalachian books, but every Alp has its obstacles. 1) Good books have layers. You may read them in your teens, but you'll miss things, because you lack the awareness that comes with greater life experience. Sure, precocity can help. Generally, though, the more life-experience you have, the more subtly you perceive humanity and society. In [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/02/1031581/-Bookflurries:-Bookchat:Will-The-Book-Hold-Up cfk's diary], I mentioned reading The Great Gatsby as a teen, and
it was an enjoyable and easy read. But I came back to it with much more experience and knowledge of books. The second time, I saw about four times as much there - but 3/4 of the book is implicit: in characters' life histories that are sketched but not filled in, unless you really watch for every clue; in the different characters' levels of awareness, what some pick up on and others miss; in the tragic undercurrents of all the romance; and in the symbols and myths and American dreams which jump out at an experienced reader.
All of that richness of perception came from reading people, and reading life, as well as reading books. 2) Old books are obscure. Most books from the 1800s, and all books from even earlier, require some obscure vocabulary and background knowledge for full comprehension. Familiarity with The Bible (King James Version, of course) always helps, and some knowledge of Shakespeare, Greek myths, and basic history is very useful. While all of these original sources are worth reading, they can be pretty hard going too. So many readers just keep plugging away at a variety of increasingly ambitious books, consulting footnotes and forwards as they go, until they absorb the gist of what they need from these secondary sources. The more experienced of a reader you are, the easier reading gets. Translations also obscure the author's style and clarity, more often than not. I'll discuss this more in the Himalayas ahead. 3) Some worlds are remote. Memoirs of a Geisha shows us a distant country, period, and social milieu. However, it was written for a modern Western audience, and its world is made very accessible to us. On the other hand, what many authors do best is express their own peculiar (from our viewpoint) worlds. African, Asian and South American writers may show us new and wonderful worlds, but they can be quite confusing at first. Closer to home, Kafka's mood, Nietzsche's style, and Auster's austerity, can be daunting to the uninitiated. 4) Length can multiply obstacles. The longer a book is, the more room there is for confusion. Plots sprout sub-plots, and characters crowd the stage (if they're Russian, and end in -ich, they get harder to distinguish). If a book is old, deep or strange, the longer it is, the more turnings there are to lose your way. Each of these stumbling blocks slows our comprehension, and makes full clarity harder to attain. If the book in your hand doesn't speak clearly to you, you may have to work to finish it - or you might just put it down. Now we're standing on the Matterhorn, and you can guess what mountain range comes next. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ If you're in a hurry to get to the Himalayas, jump to the next line across the page. If you'd rather acclimatize and drink some cocoa first, here are a couple of digressions. My first plan for this diary was all Himalayas. I was just going to write on the books that had taken me more than one attempt to finish. Then, I spent more time hanging out in the [http://www.dailykos.com/user/Readers%20and%20Book%20Lovers Readers & Book Lovers'] Group. I found a friendly, funny, fascinating group of Kossacks. I started to see how well some of them could write. Well, I'd like to do that too. So I tried to raise my game here. I put more thought and editing into this - well, even more than my previous pinnacles, on [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/08/29/896461/-30-Good-Double-LPs?showAll=yes&via=blog_494631 30] of the [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/09/04/897130/-4:20-Rock-Greatest-Double-Albums?showAll=yes&via=blog_494631 best] double albums in rock. Already, in this diary, I've articulated a whole theory of easy vs. hard reading, which I didn't know I had in me. I'm looking forward even more to reading your comments. Once I got this far, I decided to do some serious research. So I googled awhile, and I came across a few [http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/3470.REALLY_REALLY_DIFFICULT_BOOKS lists] and [http://ask.metafilter.com/148868/Difficult-Books comment] threads [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/29/challenging-difficult-books-tomes?CMP=twt_gu full] of [http://www.themillions.com/2009/10/introducing-difficult-books-a-descriptive-list.html difficult] books (The last two links are more interesting, because of the articles they start with). These helped me compile the list of Himalayas this diary ends with. I also found two articles speaking directly to a question at the heart of this diary. How difficult should a great book be? My second favorite discovery was Mark O'Connell's humorous account of why he never used to read long books, and what he discovered when he finally did: [http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/the-stockholm-syndrome-theory-of-long-novels.html The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels]. I preferred Jonathan Franzen covering similar territory, because he articulated such a useful distinction of what different readers value in books:
It turns out that [http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.] In one model, which was championed by Flaubert, the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it. We can call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance. In the opposing model, a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience... Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust. This is the Contract model. The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection... To an adherent of Contract, the Status crowd looks like an arrogant connoisseurial elite. To a true believer in Status, on the other hand, Contract is a recipe for pandering, aesthetic compromise, and a babel of competing literary subcommunities...According to the Contract model, difficulty is a sign of trouble...From a Status perspective, difficulty tends to signal excellence.
I enjoy hard great novels when the author writes to both of these models. By challenging me to pay full attention, to pause, ponder, and puzzle my way through, an author gets me deeply involved, collaborating with my full imagination, learning and marveling as I go; by rewarding me with compelling plot, fascinating characters, and loose ends that eventually tie together, the author stops me from throwing their brick of a book out my window, and injuring some hapless passerby. Finnegans Wake, and other Volcanoes of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharsis Tharsis]. There are volcanoes on Mars much higher than any earthly mountain. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Mons Olympus Mons] is about 2.5 times as tall as Mount Everest. Finnegans Wake is the Olympus Mons of my Bookcase. I have tried to read it. I got about 30 pages in, and discovered a rather short paragraph, about a third of which made sense to me. I put the book down with a sigh, feeling a rather small sense of accomplishment. Many of the [http://www.amazon.com/MOST-DIFFICULT-BOOKS-EVER-WRITTEN/lm/R29VPS3NEIQ0AS very hardest] books are non-fiction, written by abstruse philosophers or Frenchmen a bit too in love with their own cleverness. The hardest of these in my bookcase is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and I'm told Hegel and Heidegger run pretzels round Kant. Even so, Kant writes in such long, unwieldy sentences that some Germans prefer to read him in English, where the translators have broken him down into shorter, more digestible chunks. Some of the Himalayas I list below may be Volcanoes of Tharsis. These are novels with too much difficulty and too little pleasure, books that you don't intend to finish, ever. These books do not belong in my bookcase; they belong on Mars, where they can perplex the Martians, and make them think twice about invading Earth. Drink up your cocoa, we're about to get moving again. I've been to the Himalayas outside my bookcase, if only for two weeks. I spent a week on a houseboat in Srinigar with my dad. Then I trekked up to a glacier at four kilometers altitude. I could tell you a thing or two, about a kind pony-man caught in the monsoon, his venal boss, and the blowback of over tipping; about the perils of potent hash at high altitudes; and about the most ambivalent experience of my life. But that would take a whole nother diary. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The time has come, intrepid readers, to climb The Himalayas of my Bookcase. First, to get your bearings, take a glance at the poll below us. These Himalayas signpost the development of the modern novel. There are other works, which are Himalayan, but don't fit in my novel timeline: The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Tale of Genji are too early; Paradise Lost, Ezra Pound's The Cantos, and John Ashbery's Selected Poems are poetry. My aim was to pick novels worth reading more than once; and to make a representative selection, with choices for all serious readers. They're not quite as representative as I'd like. If you have read Himalayan books by authors of color, or from other continents, or who are women, or GLBT, please share them in your comments. What makes these novels so hard? All the obstacles we've already met, in greater abundance, and much more literary experimentation. Each of the books below was written by an author who looked at what was being written around them, and then they decided to go further, or else to strike off into uncharted territory. Looking at the 15 novels I chose for the poll, you'll see Ulysses in the middle, dividing them neatly in half. The first seven are made more difficult by their age and translation; the others are made more difficult by post-modernism. James Joyce has a lot to answer for. We read books in translation through a glass darkly. The Magic Mountain is a pretty hard novel before you translate it. In a [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/29/challenging-difficult-books-tomes?CMP=twt_gu comment] in The Guardian, Waynebg showed how translation can muddy and impair the author's meaning and style:
“‘Krokowski is the assistant – devilishly clever article. They mention his activities specially, in the prospectus. He psycho-analyses the patients.’ ‘He what? Psycho-analyses – how disgusting!’” (H.T. Lowe Porter translation) “‘And then there’s Krokowski, his assistant – a very savvy character. They make special note of him in the brochure. He dissects the patients’ psyches.’ ‘He what? Dissects their pysches? That’s disgusting!’” (John E. Woods translation)
If you're going to read The Magic Mountain in English, get the Woods translation. Sometimes translators do a fine job, rendering a foreign text into everyday English. Fifty years pass by, and what was once clear, now just feels old and clunky. If you want to read a hard foreign book, it's important to research a little and find the clearest translation. Even so, it will be hard to approach the richness and beauty of the original text, especially when the author has a distinctive and original style. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now for tales of my own Himalayan reading. Most of my defeats occurred in the first 50 pages. I usually returned to novels only after I heard more good reports of them from friends or reviewers, and only when I felt hungry enough to make a more determined attempt. For every book I quit and returned to, there were five or ten that I was happy to give up on forever. Moby Dick. This [http://www.themillions.com/2009/11/difficult-books-richardson-sterne-melville.html is] a [http://listverse.com/2010/06/07/top-10-difficult-literary-works/ classic], and [http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/How-to-Read-a-Hard-Book/2 frequently] cited, [http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/09/reading-and-whale Himalaya]. I started Moby Dick years ago, and quickly ran aground. I recently read a book of Melville's short stories, including the excellent Billy Budd. That convinced me to try once more to swallow the Whale. Right now, I'm almost half way through it, and enjoying it very much. Yet, some days I think it would be a better book if it were 200 pages shorter. I explained the pros and cons of Moby Dick [http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1036942/43967582 at length] last week, so I'll condense that answer here.
What's hard about Moby Dick? Too much whaling. Many, diverse digressions which really slow down plot development. The language gets dusty, overblown, purple like Shakespeare when he's drunk. What's rewarding about Moby Dick? The same poetic language I just bemoaned. Our narrator, Ishmael, doesn't obtrude much on the tale he's telling, but when he expresses his philosophy, it's large-minded and overflowing with humanity. Melville had been whaling, and had jumped ship and lived among cannibals. He fills his book with his love of life, and rich descriptions of every part of creation that enchanted him. He balances a deep feeling for tragedy and doom against a warm and subtle sense of humor, and a respect for strength of character.
Swann's Way. Proust's enormous opus, In Search of Lost Time, has seven volumes. Swann's Way is merely the first. By itself, it's already a Himalaya. Hardcore bibliophiles claim this opus is the most subtle and perceptive ever written; everyone else says it's slower than watching paint dry. Here are some reactions to it: [http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/How-to-Read-a-Hard-Book/3 two] in [http://skipperweb.org/forums/index.php?topic=106.0;wap2 praise]; one [http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/08/germaine-greer-proust condemning]; and one [http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hays/humor/crawling_up_everest.html hilarious]. I only made it through Swann's Way, and that took me three attempts. Proust doesn't give his readers much to hold on to. The plot trickles along; for pages on end, nothing much happens. Finally, when I made it about 60 pages in, Swann's Way started to cast a spell on me. Proust has great subtlety and specificity of perception and description. I sort of had to stop swimming, and just steep myself in the text, soaking up the rich and complex world he created. Instead of giving me any of the things I looked for in books, Proust gave me a very different kind of experience, and it took me awhile even to see what he was showing me. One day, I'll probably read Proust's whole opus. I'm in no hurry, though. I'm more inclined to read Henry James's last three novels first. The Name of the Rose. The Eco you'll find on lists of hard books is Foucault's Pendulum, which is indeed a harder book — but it's not nearly as good. The Name of the Rose has plenty of Eco's cleverness, but it serves the plot, supporting the structure and organically enriching the ornaments. In Foucault's Pendulum, the cleverness gets away from Eco, and his story gets lost beneath all of his trickery. The Name of the Rose grabbed me the first time I picked it up, and never let me down. The characters were fully drawn, sympathetic, and true to life; the relationships and the mystery kept me turning the pages. I'm sure I missed many finer points, but I knew enough of the book's world, the history of the Catholic Church, Aristotle and scholasticism, that I never got completely lost. Infinite Jest. This novel is so complex that there's an extensive website devoted to unraveling its tangled tapestry. Here are [http://infinitesummer.org/archives/215 eleven pieces of advice], including two suggested guides to help you, and links to ten other webpages. It is, by most accounts, brilliant; but did it have to be so clever? Friends and authors I respect say that David Foster Wallace was not just showing off, he was creating a dazzling, immensely complex work of art. I read about 50 pages, jumping back and forth to the endnotes, as you're supposed to. There was a lot of good writing, but the whole thing easily overwhelmed me. Infinite Jest is the literary equivalent of moving to New York City, knowing no one, and having to find both a job and a place to live at once. There is just too much there for me to carry all the loose ends around in my head for months. I plan to pick it up sometime when I have a whole month free, so that I can dive right in and devour it from stem to stern. A friend who loves Infinite Jest says it really comes together around the third reading. That's not what I call encouragement. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ There are hundreds of obstacles to reading books. I've read a lot of Dostoevsky, but I never finished Crime and Punishment, simply because a) I found the mood bleak, and b) too many teachers told me to read it. Please share below any books that you found hard but rewarding; hard and not worth it; or impossible to finish. I'm especially interested in your feelings and reasons in each case. If you actually read this whole diary, thank you so much. Here is much wisdom in a nutshell, followed by 50 hard books.
If you like the book, fine; if you don't, don't read it. The idea of compulsory reading is absurd; it's only worthwhile to speak of compulsory happiness. I believe that poetry is something one feels. If you don't feel poetry, if you have no sense of beauty, if a story doesn't make you want to know what happened next, then the author has not written for you. Put it aside. Literature is rich enough to offer you some other author worthy of your attention — or one today unworthy of your attention whom you will read tomorrow. — Jorge Luis Borges
These novels are mostly Himalayas: Clarissa - Samuel Richardson Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle The Golden Bowl - Henry James The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann Auto-da-Fé - Elias Canetti Nightwood - Djuna Barnes The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch The Palm-Wine Drinkard - Amos Tutuola Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison Watt - Samuel Beckett The Recognitions - William Gaddis Voss - Patrick White The Tin Drum - Günter Grass Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs Giles Goat-Boy - John Barth Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delaney The Silmarillion - J. R. R. Tolkein Mulligan Stew - Gilbert Sorrentino Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie Darconville's Cat - Alexander Theroux The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe Women and Men - Joseph McElroy The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro The Tunnel - William Gass Blindness - José Saramago Underworld - Don DeLillo House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski 2666 - Roberto Bolaño 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami