One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand Bascule, or read it "normally".
Great novel! Love Banks..
Short Little Difficult Books
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#42What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?
Willingness.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#43One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand Bascule, or read it "normally".
Eh. The only thing I remember offhand of Bascule's orthography is "Ergates thi ant", although for some reason the book is the rare one where I've effortlessly memorized the names of many protagonists (I'm not very good with names, both IRL and in literature.)
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a problem I have yet to see schools tackle. A kid in junior high school has no mental context for the Russian Revolution of 1917, for instance. Having them read Animal Farm is a pointless waste of time.
Same with things like (picking at random) The Great Gatsby and a lot of literature having to do with adult relationships and romance. How on earth is a 16-year-old in 2025 going to understand what's happening in Gatsby? I read it, wrote some papers and got As on them, but didn't really make sense of it at the time.
In addition to being a short classic, I think teens could identify with Gatsby being obsessed with getting the approval of people who have nothing but contempt for him. There's a devastating scene at the end where the narrator, Nick Carraway, organizes a funeral for Gatsby and literally none of his friends show up. I think that might resonate deeply for more than a few teen readers.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is like that. It's best read in the pit of a cold winter.
Great book. And a counter point, Blood Meridian by the same author. Extremely difficult for no reason whatsoever. Terrible book.
I just finished Blood Meridian and consulted AI as-needed to cover the many, many metaphors. The funny thing was that Google AI got a lot of the book wrong, getting the fate of some characters mixed up as well as confusing some faceless deaths with others. Too much wanton violence to keep track of.
The book definitely covers evil and nihilism thoroughly, so why would you want to read something like that? Well, for every bad decision someone makes in the book, the reader has the opposite response of, "oh crap, don't do that!" So reading about nihilism doesn't make you more nihilistic. While I thought it was a great book it isn't something you should just read without consulting outside sources.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#46I 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 was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I ended learning them by rote.
Even translated, some short books from a very different culture far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin" or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.
A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Páramo" the reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality. Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more about style tricks.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#47The non-fiction version of this would be to read primary sources from long ago or written in specialized language. I'm reminded of Cal Newport's advice to ease into challenging books by first reading a secondary source which explains the nuance of the primary source. Something like An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn before reading the Odyssey itself.
It's been somewhat disappointing researching the reading habits of people who read many books a year. For the reader who tears through ebooks on Kindle Unlimited, they mostly read genre fiction in a few categories. The same thing has been happening to me. I used to challenge myself to read "the classics" but lately before bad I reach for genre fiction written at an 8th grade level.
For many, reading is just another form of entertainment. Maybe call it the hollywoodification of books? While it's far better form of entertainment than TikTok or Instagram, the true potential is in its ability to make us smarter by challenging our thoughts and dieas.
When books are seen as just another entertainment product in a saturated marketplace, why chose something which makes you struggle?
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very likely that a book funny to adult you would went over 9th grade you regardless of reading speed.
This is a problem I have yet to see schools tackle. A kid in junior high school has no mental context for the Russian Revolution of 1917, for instance. Having them read Animal Farm is a pointless waste of time.
I read Animal Farm in 9th grade and it had a profound impact me. Hmmm is that you Napoleon?
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#49Do 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 read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.
You could read fiction for personal growth and non-fiction for fun as well.
Re: Short Little Difficult Books
#50"The Righteous Mind" by Haidt is interesting to me on the difficulty scale. From any technical analysis (like grammar, sentence structure etc), it's not difficult at all. It wasn't boring to me, and I didn't really get stuck on anything in particular, but it still took me two weeks to finish it.