I couldn’t get through Trainspotting and right now I’m reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and for both of these I had to re read a lot of pages just to understand what it was actually saying. I love both of these books but it’s very much a bit of a chore for me to get through. When I first got LETB I thought I had some kind of altered copy until I read that this was just how the author wrote his stories, in clumped up paragraphs with written out slang and style of prose. For Trainspotting the overall slang and dialect was all new to me and I had no idea what the plot was for a good chunk of the book.
by Insomia_Incarnate
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When I first got into Hemingway, I had a hard time with his style. I think people who say his writing is “easy to read” or “simple” are kind of missing the point. Yes, he uses a pared down vocabulary, but if you’re just reading the words on the page you’re losing most of the charm of Hemingway. I didn’t really “get” his style until I really slowed down and dissected it sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and then everything clicked for me.
The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo. I loved it and it was beautiful writing, but it still took me a while to read because of the set up. I ended up just reading 1-2 letters whenever I’d sit down with it and it took me a few months.
Moby Dick – I kept trying every few years but it wasn’t until my mid-50s when it clicked. I don’t think I realised just how snarky Ishmael is
*Lincoln In The Bardo*, butI don’t want to sound optimistic because I’m not through it yet. And if I’m honest, it’s not looking good.
The Overstory has a lot of exposition for eight different characters, and it takes a while to realize how they’re all going to come together and what the theme of the book is until about 3/5ths of the way through. Then I was speeding toward the end but it took a while.
Ulysses
I wanted very badly to get through Trainspotting but couldn’t because of the dialect. Did slightly better when I tried to read it with a mind to phonics but couldn’t do it. I wonder if it would work better with an audio version?
Dante’s Inferno. I had the Wikipedia page tab open for the week or two I was reading it
Paradise lost
Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. He uses words that seem made up, but most of them are actually real words, just archaic. The meaning of many in-world terms is often not spelled out. Nothing in the world is as it seems on the surface, it takes multiple reads to peel back the layers. Without saying tooo much, it looks like fantasy, but it’s more like sci-fi.
I loved Last Exit! Honestly that’s what makes those books exciting to me. The only book I’ve ever put down and never picked back up was the overstory. I don’t know why but the first few pages always put me to sleep. It’s not even the content. I think it’s just the way it’s written.
Alkibiades by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. It is written in ‘old greek’ kind of way. Some sentences so incredibly long, which makes it a though read in the beginning but it fits the book so well. It is a very interesting read, both on how the old Greek world worked as on Alkibiades as a person.