Interesting that that should be your choice tsuwm. Before I'd looked at your reply my instant first choice was Ulysses, and I haven't read Finnegan's Wake to make a comparison between the two.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
Joyce is tough. Conrad is pretty dense. I understood the plot of Heart of Darkness, but there was quite a bit going on under the surface that I missed entirely.
I'll add to that John Dewey. We read a several paragraph snippet of him in an English class and the average word length must have been the greatest by a wide margin I've ever seen. A PhD in English once told me he didn't understand Dewey until he'd been teaching for 20 years. When it requires 10 years of school and 20 years of teaching to understand something, I'd have to say that's pretty hard.
Not so tough, but hard to keep track of all the Russian names, is "War and Peace."
Anyway, we only read it in translation; the original was in Russian, of course. I imagine Russians have much less trouble with the names. Possibly they'd have trouble with English names.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In my second year of high school, I tried without success to read Marx's Capital. I also, later on at university, found Sydney's Arcadia to be unreadable.
Well, the problem with Tolstoy (and Dostoevsky, too) is that there are so many names...and they're so long. I can't think of any books by English authors like that, but then I haven't read every single book that has been written.
Back to John Dewey... I will toss after him every writer about "aesthetics" (and other completely dense misnomered 'theories' of philosophy) that it has been my misfortune to plow through over the years-- and allow me to toss on the heap Marx, Hegel, Marcuse, & all the French philosophers except Sartre (whose style is crystal-clear). My comment is exactly that of BobHale regarding "War and Peace":
quote:
Actually I found it hard to care. I've tried to read the book several times and lost interest less than fifty pages in every time.
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You'd be surprised, though, how many folks think that Librarians HAVE read every book in the library.
That reminds me of a time when my daughter and I were in a very large, 3-story Borders. My daughter wanted a book, but she couldn't remember the author, the title, nor much about it, though she did remember that it was yellow. I told her I'd ask for the clerk to help, and my daughter jumped all over me. How stupid could I be?! How would the clerk ever know the book when we knew so little about it. Well, my daughter acted like she didn't know me, but I asked the clerk with the small amount of information I had about the book. I don't know why...but as luck would have it, the clerk immediately said, "Oh, I think I know," and went right to it!
I still chuckle when I remember the look of shock on my daughter's face.
