Lately, I’ve been diving into the world of classic literature, and I’m loving some of it. However, I’ve come to realize that some classics can be quite the intellectual puzzle.
What are some of the hardest classics you’ve encountered? Which literary works have made you scratch your head and ponder their deeper meanings? I’m particularly curious about the ones that require additional research, analysis, or multiple readings to fully grasp.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I struggle with a few myself, but I genuinely want to appreciate these literary masterpieces to their fullest.
by QuietFoundation5464
29 Comments
I remember starting A Clockwork Orange and putting the book down almost immediately. I had to research Nadsat and then go back and read it again to understand.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I just got so bewildered. There were a couple of Faulkner novels, too. Maybe: Light in August or As I Lay Dying.
Moby-Dick. It is the most challenging and rewarding book I have ever read. The Ahab and whale chase is only a tiny part of the story, with most of the book dedicated to daily work on a whaling sheep, described in fantastic, visceral detail with archaic terminology and obscure philosophical references.
I have read Anna Karenina, because I had to. even though it was assigned, the assigner did not bother to explain the Russian naming conventions to us.
I never had the faintest idea who anyone was so the book left no impression at all on me.
The Book of Job. It took me decades of growing and maturing to discern the different characters that ‘console’ Job and their POV’s and motivations. Its still something that slips through my fingers if I haven’t read it in a while
Gravity’s Rainbow. Quit it and don’t regret it. I’m sure it’s great literature, but it was a slog for me.
Ulysses for sure
*As I Lay Dying* was pretty tough because of its nonlinear structure and the fact it switches point of views to characters which you aren’t sure are entirely reliable. I kept notes as I read, which helped a lot though, but I did have to reread sections many times. Really difficult novel.
*One Hundred Years of Solitude* was also nonlinear so I sometimes needed to refer to a family chart from a website and I could generally keep things straight, but the book is nowhere as baffling as Faulkner’s *As I Lay Dying* as the narrative itself isn’t that hard to understand.
*House of Leaves* is purposely a difficult book to read, but if you’re familiar with nonlinear films, then it becomes a lot easier to read, since a lot of the book draws from film theory as well as literary theory like semiotics and deconstructuralism. Luckily, I was a film major and I also knew about modernist/post-modernist artistic techniques like self-reflexivity, but if I didn’t have that background, I probably would have had to look up a lot of stuff.
*Crime and Punishment* was made a lot easier because of the extensive footnotes in the Oliver Ready translated edition.
*Cloud Atlas* is a book that I still perhaps don’t quite get, even though I really enjoyed the book. It has a really unusual structure as it’s essentially told as a series of short stories, but they are split in half, and you read in the second halves of each story in inverse order in the 2nd half of the book. I’m not really sure how it’s all connected but I love David Mitchell’s exploration of time, and his experimentation of different writing styles that are connected to the era that is depicted in the story.
Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow were definitely the hardest.
The Sound and the Fury – it took me about halfway through the book before I understood what was going on. By the end I absolutely loved it.
Ulysses
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
marcel proust – in search of lost time.
i remember reading many pages not even having a single clue of what’s going on. it’s still worth the read, even if ~4200 pages is a bit of work. but if you get behind the structure (there is no linear structure), you will enjoy it and understand the meaning behind his observations, which are one of a kind, even though sometimes too precise. it’s still in my top 3 books of all time. you learn to live life, to enjoy every little aspect of everyday life, to observe things and people, you normally wouldn’t. while thinking first, i would never get behind the meaning, it just stays with you and you’ll get behind it as soon as you close the book, take a walk through the city and think about what proust means. and boom: there you are, enjoying every single aspect of life, every second that seems so unenjoyable. you will notice very soon after or even while reading, that prousts thoughts will never let you go and stays with you in your unconsciousness. he helps you seeing the beauty in the everyday struggle. i guess i would even say the book changed my life or my understanding of life, together with camus & sartre. and all of that cause he ate a fucking madeleine…
edit: i’m a non-english speaker, so i hope i was able to express myself comprehensible 🙂
100 Years of Solitude.
I never got the “point”. Then, I found out that it’s a story about colonialism and got even more confused. I still don’t see it, but there have been derivative works in recent years that do click for me in terms of how they are a commentary on Latin American history. Maybe the book went entirely over my head back when I read it.
The Name of the Rose. Its a brilliant book, but a lot of it is pretty heavy and very incomprehensible on the first read through!
Thank you so much. I have renewed interest in the book now… better go dig it out from whatever hole I banished it to 10 years ago
Nothing comes even remotely close to Finnegan’s Wake. It is to literature what advanced algebra is to math.
Paradise Lost by John Milton. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
The later Henry James novels. The prose is so thick you have to wade through with a machete
I’m sure there are harder books, like Ulysses, but I haven’t tried them
Finnegan’s Wake
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner would have been a completely impregnable tome where nothing made sense for the first half of the book if I had not read it alongside a primer that literally highlighted sentences and passages that explain in normal terms what is actually happening.
I have not read Ulysses by Joyce, but I’ve read enough other books by him to assume that experience would be similar, if not worse.
The first classic I was exposed to was ‘The Odyssey’, which was difficult for me at the time, which I think was middle school.
I hated when we did Shakespeare units in high school. I cannot read that shit and I feel every single time I miss something when I read it.
Les Misérables. Chapter-long digressions aside, I found the prose impenetrable the first time I read it, and found it a real slog to get through even though I’ve always loved the story itself (having watched the stage and screen adaptations).
Turns out the version I read the first time around is widely regarded as one of the shittiest, clunkiest English translations out there. Tried a different version when I re-read it this year and it’s now one of my all-time favourite books.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which surprised me because I loved his short story collection Dubliners.
Dante’s Inferno. I had to read the Wikipedia page for each circle of hell and now I don’t even really remember it
Just today I picked up a little 50s pocket edition of *The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.* I’ve never fully grasped middle-English. I get most of it and surmise the rest from context but because the whole thing is written in this style as well as poetic verse, it’s been an interesting read.
Thankfully the little book seems to be an academic version, with a history of Chaucer and appendixes going over verbs, nouns, and other language therein as-well-as a glossary at the back. Someone also appears to have left pencil notes around the margins which I find interesting to read/interpret.
Of all places, I found it at **Tesco’s** little donation bookshelf. I threw a few quid in the donation box and acquired the aforementioned, similar academic versions of *Julius Caesar* and *Macbeth,* and *Jane Eyre* (abridged, sadly) all pre-70s editions, with the earliest print being *Canterbury,* printed in Glasgow, 1955.
As somebody who learned English as a second language, I found Dickens’ Oliver Twist really hard and not fun to read – I’m not sure I ever finished it.
Am I allowed to answer the opposite? I went into 1984 knowing how influential it was and expecting very hard diction and a high overall reading level barrier, but was very surprised. It reads very much like a modern novel, while also being brilliant and insightful. Love that book.