What is the most difficult book you've read and/or own?

Thoma Pynchon - Against The Day. Have read his others (more than once) but can't finish this one.

steve

"Ulysses", James Joyce.

Best wishes,

Peter Wind

Earthly Powers    Anthony Burgess  Make sure you have a dictionary to hand!

Between Literature and Science

(Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge)

By Peter Swiriski.

"Ulysses" is a breeze compared to "Finnegan's Wake" by the same author. I've never manage to get past the first 100 pages of "FW" , but not for want of trying.

Even now, it's sitting on the bookshelf, glowering at me, taunting, saying: "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough".

Have to admit that Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" is pretty heavy going as well.

Joyce for me too - "Dubliners". Xavier Herbet's "Capricornia" was also too much for me.

Umberto Eco's "The name of the rose". 

Vesus: Quadermi di studi semiotic.

I have always been fascinated by professor Eco's   socio-linguistical study  and analytical essays of historical and medieval subjects.

Tony

Nabokov - Pale Fire (Something of a page-turner, Lolita is like a 300 page cryptic crossword, and even makes some sense after a while. Pale Fire is similarly perfect and precise, but just impenetrable.)

Joyce - Finnegans Wake (Laughs in the face of Ulysses, and just unreadable. Has to be a joke, right?)

TS Eliot - The Waste Land (A modern masterpiece. Thoughtfully, TS includes some notes to help with the more allusive lines. Thoughtfully, a few people have since written books which make some sense of TS's notes.)

"In The Shape of A Boar" by Lawrence Norfolk.  Not the most difficult i've read, more like one that whenever I try read it I find it too difficult and not engaging enough to persevere with.

I like this quote from The Guardian Review:

Unknowable, too, are the shapes of the original myths themselves: heroes die in one telling, only to reappear fighting a new enemy in another version. Norfolk floods the first few pages of his account with an ironic surge of scholarly footnotes, tributaries of manifold myth-rivers merging in a wild sea of contradictory meanings. Slowly this babble of papyric voices recedes, drawing the reader in expertly to the potent tug of the main text; eventually the footnotes reappear to trace the ambivalences of the tale's mysterious end.

Derrida... there's a name i haven't heard since my university days.  Along with Barthes, Lacan and Saussure.  Those were the days....

A Suitable Boy. Had a couple of chops at it, yet to reach page 400. War and Peace was a doddle by comparison.

'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'

By Laurence Sterne

One of the few books I gave up on.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.

Probably the most challenging book I have read was Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith, which I read as a 15 year old at school.  We were studying Tillich as a backdrop to learning about different faiths.  On first read, it was such a labour that very little made much sense.  However, when re-read a second and third time, it all began to make a lot more sense.  It's a book that still has a profound influence on me as well as the others in my class who read it.  It's not the easiest read (even now), but if you wish to better understand mankind's need for true faith then it's indispensible.  Gandhi's All Men are Brothers, which I read immediately afterwards, was a doddle in comparison.

Me too, my copy is still enjoying a prolonged sojourn in a villa on Lanzarotte.

Yet I liked the film adaptation "A Cock and Bull Story".

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (John Maynard Keynes).

The Tale of Genji ‘Murasaki Shikibu)

V (Thomas Pynchon)

Dancing in Emptiness by Graham Smetham - a book that finally resolves all the different interpretations of quantum theory using Buddhist philosophy - not an easy read but he is correct. Most bright people would croak half way through and the average man on the street would not get past the first chapter. 

I'd say any of the books which my grandchildren regard as their favourites.  After you've read "the hungry caterpillar" for the umpteenth time, brain death seems not that far away.

Currently reading The Beginning of Infinity, By David Deutsch.

He's a bright lad, not lacking in self confidence.

A bit too dismissive of people who don't agree with him - even if they are scientific and philosophical giants.

Good for the grey matter....

For me

Moby Dick - too much volume 

Clockwork Orange - just not get's get to grips with the language

David

Personally, I am dismissive of David Deutsch. 

Don Quixote in school when I was ten - not sure I understood it all.

Tog

Tog, good call. Don Quixote is one of very few books I've failed to finish, despite trying at least twice. Umberto Eco's Foucaults Pendulum is another. I have a vague memory of a Douglas Adams quip about a bestselling book being so inpenetrable that after a while the publishers saved money by only printing on the first 50 pages.

The most difficult book I've read is possibly 'Slaughterhouse 5'. Not hard to read, but hard to live with for the days and weeks afterwards.

Bruce

Anything by melanie klein