Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.
I’ll do as I like.
Short Little Difficult Books
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#102I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old form of your modern language. My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it wa…
Huh. Is French from 900 years actually comprehensible to a modern speaker? English from same certainly would not be; Old English is a different language.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#103I happened to have been assigned Moby Dick in 9th grade English class. Foolishly put off reading it until the night before the book report was due. Got about 1/3 of the way through and went through life thinking it was boring. Fast forward decades, I'm now reading it for real. It hilarious, it's pause encouraging, I love it! (And I'm still only 1/3 through.)
Slightly tangential but I was discussing high-school English book selection with a relatively new English teacher. He was frustrated that his 9th/10th grade students were uninterested in the books. He was hamstrung in book selection by budget (buying new books wasn't an option) and essentially seniority (he couldn't select any books that were read in more advanced classes even though few of his students will take those classes). So the system was unintentionally teaching most kids that reading books was boring.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#104Landau Physics books
I would say almost all of the Soviet era Mir Publishers books are like this. Small, succinct and information-dense.
As an example, Vygodsky's 2-vol "Mathematical Handbook" (Elementary Mathematics & Higher Mathematics) and Yavorsky & Detlaf's "Handbook of Physics" have ungodly amounts of knowledge in a relatively small size books.
You can get them (and more) from https://mirtitles.org/
Handbook Of Physics – Yavorsky, Detlaf - https://mirtitles.org/2022/06/27/handbook-of-physics-yavorsk...
Mathematical Handbook – Higher Mathematics – Vygodsky - https://mirtitles.org/2022/06/02/mathematical-handbook-highe...
Mathematical Handbook – Elementary Mathematics – Vygodsky - https://mirtitles.org/2011/09/12/handbooks-of-mathematics/
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#105Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is for it to be hard.
Borderline impossible! It's a much wider gap than modern English to Shakespearean English is.
There’s got to be a chronological point where older Greek gets much easier, though. Or at least, there was back when Greeks still had to work with katharevousa in school. I learned both Ancient Greek and then, though a year spent in Greece, Modern Greek. When I pick up late Hellenistic literature like Achilles Tatius, I feel like it is activating more the Modern Greek part of my brain than the 5th-century BC Athens part of my brain.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#107What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
It's been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I take it out and read a couple of pages each time and then put it back. Keep thinking I should buy a guide to reading this book but never got around to it.
Even a short summary of the Wake can suffice to get you started. You're never going to understand it all, and that's okay, but even a brief chat with a Wake fan can give you the basic clues of its structure and the HCE/ALP Shem/Shaun dualities. I think it's a mistake to spend time with guidebooks than with the text itself if you want to read it for pleasure as opposed to writing a thesis on it. At least, postpone the guides until after your first trip once around.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#108I've been slogging through Blood Meridian for the past couple of months, only taking little sips of content here and there, but it finally clicked for me last night and I'm fully engaged with it. And man was it worth the effort. The way he paints scenes with just the right amount of words is pretty amazing. I'd love to see this book adapted onto film.
Ha, I'm in a similar position, having given up on it after a few months of sips. At what point did it click for you?
Right around the point at which The Kid killed that bartender and joined the military.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, I'm in a similar position, having given up on it after a few months of sips. At what point did it click for you?
Maybe this is sacrilege but I find audiobooks help for this because the narrator just keeps going with little effort on my part. Even if I miss things it’s okay, and getting through it helps get into it.
My friend who recommended it to me told me the best way to consume it was via audiobook even though he prefers to read. He said it's the one book he prefers that way.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd .
For a salmon-sized taste, Bartleby the Scrivener. Great annotated version here: https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herma...
Both Billy Bud and Bartleby are very focused on the human drama. If you are more interested in the sea rather, I'd suggest Typee and its follow up Omoo.