A few Christmases ago, my husband decided he was going to buy me the largest possible book he could find, the one with the most words. I ended up with
War and Peace (1440 pages) and an independently published book called
Walls of Phantoms (1320 pages) I enjoyed the first and for my husband I slogged through the latter. The links are to my reviews. So I was quite amused and relieved when did a search today and discovered he could have gotten me Marcel Proust's
In Search of Lost Time (7 volumes at 4211 pages), Madison Cooper's
Sironia, Texas (2 Volumes at 1731 pages) or Luo Guanzhong's
Romance of the Three Kingdom's (4 Volumes at 2342 pages). I think I got off lightly.
While perusing the interwebz, I stumbled across The Millions
Difficult Books series which they started in 2009 and for 2012 have put together a list of the top ten they consider the most
difficult of the difficult.
Check out the link for their reasoning.
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| The Faerie Queen |
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| To The Lighthouse |
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| A Tale of a Tub |
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| Phenomenology of Spirit |
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| The Making of Americans |
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| Nightwood |
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| Clarissa |
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| Being and Time |
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| Finnegan's Wake |
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| Women and Men |
The only book on this particular list I've read is
To The Lighthouse and while stream of consciousness writing is not easy to read, can't say it was the most difficult book I have ever read. Would have to say
Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre which, like it's title, was simply nauseating.
Have you read any of these books? What is the one book you would consider the most difficult so far to read?
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Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review
post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in
your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field
leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then
type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url. If
you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the
comment section of this post.
