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Short Little Difficult Books

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Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#81

Post by InitialLastName »

quercusa wrote: post #5
vunderba wrote: post #2

> Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my life. I sometimes half-jokingly maintain that Moby-Dick was really written as part of an early BOOK-IT [1] reading incentive program to improve literacy among whalers by disguising a novel as a cetological guidebook. There are entire chapters devoted to the harpooning process, sperm whale anatomy, maritime legal disputes over whale harvesting, etc. [1] - h…

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...

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#82

Post by dbtc »

pklausler wrote: post #65
miltonlost wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shakespeare is from around the same time period as Rabelais in OP. If you haven't read Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, As You Like It, they also take some getting used to but are worth it in the end.

I don't think that English changed as much, but I could be wrong. Shakespeare's not hard for a modern English reader, given a decent edition with vocabulary hints in the footnotes. I got through most of it as a sophomore.

Check out the spellings in the original folios though: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-fo...

Our school books have all had some (very helpful) translation work applied to the original text.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#83

Post by gitarre »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #75
viccis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always that person who needs to make a knee-jerk inferiority feeling into the author's problem. The author never made value judgments about people. In fact, he starts by pointing out that he thinks those kinds of judgments either way are silly.

The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.

It doesn't, really. It labels a person a "social media poster who identifies as a reader" based on them passing negative judgment on difficult books ("fundamentally fraudulent") and those who read them ("anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob").

Sure, there is the middle part ("books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer"), but I took the bit about negative judgment to be the main thing the author was complaining about.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#84

Post by gitarre »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #29

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.

For sure; engaging in any particular difficult hobby (be it reading hard books, lifting heavy weights, or playing an instrument extremely well) is unrelated to how moral a person is.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#85

Post by arthurjj »

tkfoss wrote: post #79
arthurjj wrote: post #71

He's upfront that it's novels only but I really enjoy short difficult non-fiction more. * Exit, Voice and Loyalty - about how organizations and people work. Easily the best social science book I've ever read * Art & Fear - gives a much better model for creating software than most books

I don't know about the first one, but Art & Fear is one of the lightest books on my bookshelf. Why do you consider it difficult?

It's likely I projected the complexity onto the Art & Fear. Reading it every few pages I thought about how what it was discussing applied to creating software. But that's not really what the author intended, it's more the mindset I brought to the book

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#86

Post by sotix »

pklausler wrote: post #58
idoubtit wrote: post #46

I 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…

I think that English might have fewer opportunities for this sort of thing; I found Beowulf to be surprisingly dull in the original. Greek, on the other hand, has lifetimes' worth of good stuff in its ancient forms, and can really reward the time spent in learning to read them.

However, I can hardly read Ancient Greek as a modern Greek speaker!

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#87

Post by jamiek88 »

InitialLastName wrote: post #81
quercusa wrote: post #5

Earlier 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...

Wait? That was the moby dick guy?! Loved that Bartley story.

Re: Short Little Difficult Books

#88

Post by poncho_romero »

babblingfish wrote: post #47

The 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 researc…

Do you recall in what book or article Newport made that suggestion?
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