Difficult books you've enjoyed

[nancylebov]

What are difficult books you've enjoyed reading? I'm mostly interested in fiction, but non-fiction is welcome, too.

We're gonna have a couple of rules for this discussion.

You may not vent about hating a difficult book someone else enjoyed. If there's interest (of course there's interest) in a discussion about difficult books you've hated, I'll start it with a different post.

If a book someone else says is difficult isn't difficult for you, don't say it here. Say it somewhere else if you like.

Difficult books I've liked:

The Worm Ouroboros
Moonwise
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

EDITED TO ADD: By all means, talk about what you liked in the difficult books you liked.

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Comments

[kiya]

Hal Duncan's Vellum holy shit.

(Nope, still not articulate about this fucking book, wow. It is brutal and brilliant and impossible and there's a moment where one character offers another a light for his cigarette - just that - and I had to put it down because the fucking layering meant too much.)

[sartorias]

Years ago, Garcia Marquez's 100 YEARS of SOLITUDE. Once I realized it was a highly symbolic history of South America I was able to swim with the tide. Barely. In admiration.

Right now, 琅琊榜. Line by painful line. I am such a slow learner.

[calimac]

The book that I found it most painfully slow to crawl through at first reading (it took me about a month) but which had me absolutely captivated at every step was Titus Groan.

[steepholm]

Here are two: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which I loved so much that I did my PhD on it - but I don't think anyone ever called it easy. And Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker - read and much enjoyed when it came out. (Would it stand up to a reread? I daren't find out.)

[supergee]

James Joyce, Ulysses
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Thomas Pynchon,Gravity’s Rainbow
I will always wonder how much I missed

[madfilkentist]

I'm re-reading Les Miserables. It has huge passages of historical narrative and general commentary, but it has a great story and characters.

[sturgeonslawyer]

H'mm. I've read two of the three you list. I didn't find "Strange/Norrell" difficult, and "Ouroboros" only at the beginning; once I got used to the use of language it went down smooth.

As for books I found difficult but still enjoyed - supergee has already mentioned "Ulysses", and I agree. I'll add Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game", and for some reason I found Dickens's "Pickwick Papers" a serious slog but enjoyed it the whole way.

[firecat]

Some books I like that might be considered challenging for one reason or another (dense prose, emotional intensity, dark subject matter, complex plot, fiddly technical details): Moby Dick, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's The Healer's War, John le Carré's Smiley series, Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond series and Niccolò series, John Crowley's Ka, Paolo Bacigalupi's, The Windup Girl, anything by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Dickens's Bleak House, Delaney's Babel 17, CJ Cherryh's Cyteen

[estelendur]

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, The Silmarillion.... these come to mind off the top of the head.