I once read the first page of “Finnegan’s Wake” out loud to show someone how absurd it is, but when I got to the “koaxkoax” they said “Wait, isn’t that how the frogs speak in Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs’.” They were correct. They had identified an allusion, though what it mattered in context remained a mystery.
", ...though what it mattered in context remained a mystery." is literary criticism of some weight. Our ability to doubt efficiently is so far from the animal, in our minds, that we think the hesitations of the fishes have no meaning, since our efforts to encode them have been barren. "Woe unto them that taking tides for their inflections, hath more purpose to perform a craft than finding their assignment."
When I was in college my lit professor brought in a recording of Joyce reading Finnegan’s Wake. It was totally different from seeing it on a black and white page.
I've read all of it. I have to agree with Nabokov (the author of "Lolita") that it's not that great. Eliminating plot and character for the most part and reducing a novel basically to word play is just taking away too much. The most difficult novel ever written, but not among the best.
@@johnkrieger185 I’ve never made it through Finnegan’s Wake. I did make it through Ulysses, while I was living in Dublin. That helped. I think it was worth it.
A German critic once praised a German translation of Finnegan's Wake, saying the translator had done the utmost right thing by translating it from Non-English into Non-German.
Had I been given that job, it would have been done on a 20-pages-per-round basis, with option to quit the contract after any round, and payment for each round in advance.
four easy steps to appreciating Finnegans Wake: 1. Figure out if you appreciate the basic musicality of it, if the sound and vibe of the language alone pleases you. Look up the video of Joyce himself reading the section where washer women are laying out laundry and gossiping. Follow along with the text while he speaks (the video I'm thinking of has a link). You'll get a sense of the bare rhythm of the text and pronunciation wordplay. On the second page Finn McCool is said to have "lived in the broadest way immarginable." Does the idea of a book stuffed with puns like this tickle you? You may be interested. 2. Read everything and anything. Read Joyce's previous books. Read Ellmann's biography of Joyce to get a whole lot of context and analysis you wouldn't otherwise get. Read Samuel Beckett, Joyce's apprentice, who borrows a lot from FW era Joyce but in a far more pared down way (also amazing in his own right). Read some secondaries if you want, like Joseph Campbell's book. Read a bunch about myth and folklore while you're at it, as the themes and story of FW work the way myths do. 3. Get the Oxford edition, not the Penguin. Oxford has a great introductory essay going over the general themes and recurring symbols, as well as a section by section outline of what is actually happening plot-wise in a given set of pages. 4. Read it, enjoying the basic rhythms of the language; don't worry about getting lost so long as you are generally following the outline and recognizing the story beats as they happen while recognizing the thematic point of the language and the story beats. The challenge now will just be connecting your sentence by sentence reading with all of the above; it helps to loosen control and just vibe to it, knowing you have your whole life ahead of you to grind out every minute detail if you want; right now you're just reading it. Read out loud in your worst approximation of an Irish accent. And really that's the
These are not only almost exactly my conclusions (arrived at after reading Ulysses and then utterly failing at FW), but you put your recommendations also in a very attractive form ... I love that hidden gem!
I read it over several months. I just set a goal of reading, I think, 10 pages a day. I also read "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" and another guide at the same time.
@@greatcoldemptinessWhy do some readers have to be such a pompous ass? Good for you. You read it and didn’t think it was hard. Great. Most people are going to find it very difficult to read and understand, because it is intentionally a difficult book, but that doesn’t make them stupid or a bad reader. OP just made a joke and you decided to be a jerk for no reason. Hope you’re proud of that.
Infinite Jest is my favorite novel of all time. My first time through I had never read anything like it before and I was enthralled. Like Gravity's Rainbow, it rewards you the second time through. These authors chopped up the narrative in a way that significant details are presented before sometimes many pages later you are provided a reason to recognize their significance. While overall I enjoyed GR, the obscene scenes in that book are over the top for me. I got most of the way through Ulysses and enjoyed it for the most part, but I had help from an explanatory text that I read at the same time. I appreciated Joyce's experimentation, helping usher in modernist literature. Truly, Ulysses has humor as you say - but so does Infinite Jest, in spades - and Gravity's Rainbow as well. I like works of art that make me think, that don't reveal their mysteries so easily, that I can return to again and again and find new things each time. I am now intrigued to check out Finnegan's Wake.
I liked how the entire climax & denouement of Infinite Jest happens off-screen, and he gives you enough knowledge to fill in the blanks and work out what happened. It's really unique how he did it.
@@condor2279I never finished Infinite Jest, but I intend to sometime (maybe with the assistance of a reader’s guide). I read around 100 pages of the book & I quite enjoyed it. I think (from what I’ve seen) he’s a very good writer.
It grabbed me by the throat and heart when it came out, and I must have read it five times I think, in a predictable response I suppose, given a theme within. I thought it was stupendous stuff, but now many years later I don’t think I’d be quite so receptive. Age has withered me, no doubt. Possibly I’m too familiar with that type of writing now, and though DFW was its high priest, and a thrilling discovery, I don’t feel as enthused by his vision now I’m that much older. In this regard, I think the book doesn’t quite bear comparison with a few others in my litany pantheon, its power having dimmed rather. But I really hope I’ll revisit the book before I peg out, since the pleasure it once gave me was utterly all-consuming.
I think there's also a cinematic equivalent. There are some films that seemed innovative and brilliant at the time and don't stand up. And others do. Some are just dumb fun and some challenge your brain. I just finished watching a time travel film from 10 years ago (I do like me some time travel) but unlike most of them it was so unexpected I actually spent 10 minutes afterward just trying to lay out the chronology. This day and age you can go online and find somebody who has similar reaction and by God yeah there's a whole thing, a discussion from years ago that I stumbled into amongst all those search results. It's fascinating to read through people's thought processes when they're trying to figure out something ostensibly so turgid you might as well give up. But we don't give up! Forgive the pun but it's time well spent.
On the other hand, "Dubliners" by James Joyce, a collection of short stories, is very readable and quite good. It's hard to believe it's even the same author as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
Once I asked my literature teatcher what was the hardest book he ever tried to read, he said immediatly "Ulysses, I took 6 years to finish and I still dont get it". And just for curiosity, here in Brazil we have a writter called João Guimarães Rosa, who is our James Joyce, he also spoke several lenguages and made a truly masterpiece called "Grande Sertão Veredas", maybe the greatest and hardest brazilian novel.
No one should ever even try to read "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake." They are pure mental masturbation, and their only value is that they amused Joyce in writing them. The idea that one is writing something of such value that it is worth months or years of somebody else's time to read is such an example of overweening arrogance, pretension, and narcissism that it's disgusting and contemptible.
Look, James, you can demand all you want, but y'all spent 17 years writing _Finnegan's Wake,_ so 17 years is about all I'm willing to devote to taking it in. That's a fair trade, if ever there was one.
@@aqdrobert James Joyce's ghost be like: "He's bloody right! Feck! Arse! I thought it'd take at least a decade to figure that one! 17 years for nothin'!"
Yeah, I created a reading group for it at my University a year a two ago. Over 14 weeks of consistent focused meetings each week, we only got through the first 25 paragraphs of the introduction as a group. Really good time. Also, as someone who has now read a lot more of Hegel, I’d recommend new Hegel readers to read his lectures first then go through the little logic and big logic then go through the Phenomenology. A lot of the issue with going straight into the Phenomenology is that it uses a bunch of concepts (from his logic) that are left undefined in the Phenomenology.
I read Ulysses while living in Dublin. I think you need a knowledge of Dublin and it helps if you’re familiar with Irish music. My friends and I did Bloomsday one year. We hit every pub mentioned in Ulysses, one drink allowed in each pub. By the time the pubs closed, always after the last bus, we staggered home. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience.
My father, an amateur Joyce scholar, is the only person I've ever met who read "Finnegan's Wake." The best explanation he had for it was [paraphrasing from recollection] "Using as many different words as possible to tell a bit of everything about everything in a way that sounds good when read aloud."
This was a lucid and well-written survey of difficult books. In graduate school, I spent an entire semester on “Ulysses,” starting by carefully reading Homer’s “The Odyssey.” If you’re reasonably familiar with that classic, Joyce’s cascade of allusions makes more sense. This was pre-internet, so I had to rely on published articles and guidebooks to decipher the multitude of other allusions and languages. It would be easier to solve the puzzles today by using online material. But (as others have pointed out), the real pleasure of reading this difficult book is Joyce’s masterful wordplay, which often is more accessible if read aloud. Doing so definitely increased my appreciation. Joyce’s quip about professors spending their lives on his book has turned out to be so true. As for “Finnegans Wake,” I agree with William Faulkner’s assessment: “This is a case of the artist getting too close to the divine fire and being electrocuted by it!”
For the non-scholar, I'd actually recommend NOT trying to catch the references and allusions, at least with the Bloom chapters. You can get a lot of mileage out of it just by inhabiting the mind of a character so fully, with writing that sometimes sings, and the fart jokes.
Before the Internet, we had annotated versions, which are actually still really nice: You can sit down & just read straight thru without having to open any device in parallel.
@@JamesWrightLBC Get a recording of Joyce reading it. The cadence is brilliant. I still don’t have a clue what it means. I’m not sure it means anything, but I love the sound of it.
James Joyce was an author who was designed for audiobooks. I've read Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake twice, the first time in paper and the second time by audio, and the listening experience was so rich and satisfying.
... nice tip. but do you think joyce wrote it with the intention of technology being needed to understand or enjoy it? i've heard of all these books but only tried to read one; joyce's "Ulysses." i stopped trying after about 5 pages. and those first 5 pages i couldn't decipher with a captain marvel decoder ring. i bought it at a used book store on the cheap. man i love libraries and book stores. they have that great musty smell of intrigue, adventure and knowledge. i hate shopping but book stores and record shops, both practically extinct these days (thanks technology), are the only places i like to browse.
My father used to say that Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" was the hardest book he had ever attempted to read. This is a person who read the entire dictionary from start to finish. Multiple times.
I’ve studied academic philosophy extensively and I struggle to get through a 10 page excerpt of Critique of Pure Reason . Although the work of Logical Positivist A J Ayer was the most incomprehensible
I would say that Kant's writing is what makes the First Critique so hard to read. Rather than its explicit content and ideas. For example, you can get a good secondary reading and Kant's ideas tend to become quite comprehensible over time and with more experience. That doesn't mean the content is not also difficult. But Kant's approach certainly didn't help readers. Now Hegel by comparison is just crazy difficult on both the conceptual and the textual level. And not because he was a terrible or dry writer. Even if you do find a secondary work that makes Hegel somewhat more digestible... it normally comes at the expense of much of Hegel's own intentions and ambitions. Put 5 of the top Hegel scholars in the world into one room... and you will end up with at least 6 or 7 incompatible interpretations of what Hegel was trying to convey! 😄
The best way to get through Germans is by learning German language and familiarising with classical German literature. In the words of gadamer, Germans really love their long drawn out sentences and soulful obscurities. And when you translate that to English, it becomes difficult.
@shahsadsaadu5817 I guess the reason I found it so decidedly readable was that I do speak German. It was my first language, though apart from the first 2 years of my life, I've lived in the UK. I read it at college too, which makes a difference. You're more inclined to really give things a go when everyone else around you is doing the same
After the first read through, Sound And Fury is not that bad. I have gotten to the point where I can tell where we are and who is telling the story in about any part. The beauty of the writing is what got me through the first read. The writing is intoxicating. It is one of the books that has shaped the way I think about reality since I first read it almost 50 years ago.
I got about half way through V and knew I was missing something important and started over. I had missed the point entirely the first time but had still enjoyed it. It has a lot of very funny parts. It was like reading an all night BS session in college back when everybody was high on something.
I agree. Did a Faulkner seminar in which we read 17 of his 20 or so novels. Sound & the Fury and Absalom, Absalom were my personal favories, though I could not blame anyone for having completely different ones. And I love the short story, The Bear. Spent a couple of years with a lot of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, & Dos Passos... and in the library's closed stacks with all the literary criticsm about them and their works was. A couple of the best years of my life. Told myself I would read Finnegan's Wake for retirement. Well, I'm here and I know that's not going to happen. As much as I love Joyce...
In the St Patrick's day parade in Toronto in 2004, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, there was a float celebrating it, followed by groups such as "People That Tried to Read Ulysses"where there were about 100 people marching. Then it was "People That Finished Ulysses" with about 20 people in that group. Then there was the group, "People That Understood Ulysses." There was no one in that group.
Honestly I low-key hate this attitude to Ulysses. Loads of people read, love and understand the book! It pays off a little effort with a lot of payback. I recently reread a chapter and I was glowing afterwards: it's so funny, creative, playful and human. Though I do understand it's not for a lot of people and that's fine too
Actually, I think Ulysses is not that difficult to read - as long as you accept that you you will not understand or even fail to notice many (perhaps most) of the hidden allusions, that is. Still, it is a comprehensible story, and if you have some knowledge of English (or European) literature (which I do only on a rather basic level, unfortunately) you will even appreciate the different styles of narration in the different chapters. Unfortunately, I do not know much about Homer's story so I cannot grasp the parallels between the two. Anyway, this book is highly entertaining and fun. Finnegan's wake, on the other hand, is a completely different level of madness - I still have not found access to this one (sadly).
At the high school where I worked, there was a paper bound Finnegan’s Wake in the fiction section. It survived “weeding” by three long serving librarians. I hope it is still there. A librarian’s little joke.
As a former teacher-librarian who did weeding, I could never get rid of classics, no matter how old they were looking and knowing they’d never, ever be read by staff or students. I just couldn’t. It seemed like a crime, morally wrong, a loss of our history.
“Weeding” would take more stamina than I could muster. Often the books discarded from the library found their way to my classroom, where I had my own collection of 250+ Book Club book sets. Book Club , which can be as challenging and transformative as you want, can be the best of pedagogies if taken seriously. My colleagues finally adopted it, and watered it down to the point that it wasn’t worth much. Book Club also allows you to compensate for the shortcomings of a official core literature, in our case almost exclusively DWEM.@@learningisfun2108
I LOVE this video, especially the sections on Joyce. Quite apart from the actual content, your delivery is spot on. Difficult as they are, I love 'Ulysses' and' Finnegans Wake'. In comparison with 'Finnegan's Wake', 'Ulysses is fairly straightforward - but to be honest, I read them mainly for the fun of the language.
Gravity's Rainbow may be confoundingly difficult in some ways. But I recall parts that were utterly beautiful, and others that were utterly, utterly hilarious. A character looks out over a city at sunrise and sees "crystals growing in the morning's beaker." Some great writing.
Yea it's kind of sad the poster wrote it off without giving a try. Also kind of weird they rated the difficulty without reading it now that I am thinking about it.
There once was a rocket called V2, to pilot which you did not need to. You just pushed a button and it would leave nothing but stiffs and big holes, and debris, too. (That's what I remember from the 1.5 years I spent reading Gravity's Rainbow.)
After reading one of Stephen Hawking's books, I looked at the 'Further reading" section at the end. It recommended a book by Roger Penrose, which I subsequently bought. It was a lengthy book, and the first sentence in the preface read ( I'll never forget this) - "In order to appreciate the work in this book, it is necessary to have a firm grasp of mathematics, so the first seventeen chapters of this book are dedicated to mathematics". After returning to the store that same day, I pointed this sentence out to the girl who sold me the book...and I had no trouble getting my money back.
Are you talking about The Road to Reality? I keep a copy handy on my bedstand right next to Finnegans Wake😂 It really is worth the time, especially if you want to understand what modern physics is for real, not just conceptual abstractions. Emperors New Mind is a good one too. Dr. Penrose is a great science communicator, but he does ask a bit from his audience. Like: study math intensely for a few years. That kind if thing😂
Of all of these, I think _Ulysses_ is the only one I've attempted. I bought it and decided to read it, and probably got 100 pages in. Thank you, thank you!
@@SugarSnapDragonit's very interesting. James Joyce doesn't pull any punches telling the story he wants to tell how he wants to tell it, a habit that saw Ulysses banned in the US for around 10 years (book burnings and all) until a Supreme Court decision said that the book was not p*rn*graphy.
I struggled with The Brothers Karamozov. It is not that it's some unreadable thing, but it is difficult ( much more so that Crime and Punishment), and it's just so damn dark. It's worth it in the end, but boy, was that a trudge for me.
I’m reading this right now actually. I love Russian literature, I agree it is dark though, and a trudge, some nights I just can’t even pick it up. But I still love it!
@DrawntoBooks Mine was made worse as it was a read for high school. I re-read it on my own which was better. This teacher's summer reading was "The Agony and the Ecstacy" if that tells one anything. 🤣
I spent half a year - at least - on C+P. Was it worth it? No. Now I am going through Dr. Zhivago, which is lighter, but anything but a page turner, I must say.
I'm currently reading Finnegans Wake, and it is much easier to read than I initially thought. It is pretty much impossible to understand everything thats going on, but if you are willing to go through a few pages without much comprehension, then you'll still be rewarded with a ton of poetic language and very witty puns. It's only as hard as you want it to be, I guess, depending on how deep you want to go.
Ahmensch3115 Yes, that is how to read and enjoy Finnegan's Wake. Like dipping into a poetic river of often fun images and symbols, many basic at their heart: like Rivers, Circles of Life, etc., chickens and eggs, birth and seeds, and so on...
I read Finnegans Wake when I was still in high school. I loved it. The reason I read it was because I heard portions of it read over the radio by a woman with a gorgeous Irish accent. Somehow, sentences that were incredibly confusing when read on a page came across to me when she spoke them aloud with that musical Irish voice. I can't say that I understood them in any objective sense, but they made emotional sense, and they were beautiful. I never fully recaptured that feeling when I just read it from the pages, but the feeling still lingered, sort of hovering over the passages I read. Finnegans Wake isn't a novel, it's a kind of weird epic song, incomprehensible in the same way as those bizarre ancient Irish epics like Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, and Táin Bó Cúailnge. I should go back and see if I can find an audiobook of it, but it would HAVE to be read by an Irish colleen, preferably one with long, blazing red hair. Judging from the comments before me, some other people had a similar experience.
This ! It's not history, it's not a news report. It's ART. It's poetic prose. Nobody is supposed to read it fast and if you don't like words and you don't have an aesthetic feeling for them, just don't bother. There's lots of good books out there that won't tax your vocabulary or make you think, if that's what you want.
I read Gravities Rainbow. I was astounded at the breadth and depth of his knowledge of WW2 history and facts. I enjoyed it very much. I thought remembrance of things past was much more difficult.
Lists like these always make me appreciate the writing of Virginia Woolf, even when she isn't mentioned. Despite how notoriously difficult stream-of-consciousness writing is to read, I have always found Woolf's writing very readable while still having as much substance as anything by Faulkner who is the only other stream-of-consciousness writer I regard at being at her level (I have yet to read Joyce).
That's why Woolf is great, and also why she doesn't end up here. Because she writes the style so efficiently that it doesn't confuse, it just enhances the story.
@@DrawntoBooks idk - It might be that I came to Joyce first, and therefore am more used to his style with stream of consciousness, but I do find Woolf's style more confusing than Joyce's - I have just recently read "To The Lighthouse" and the fact that you keep switching whose head you are in there made it quite difficult for me to get through.
Reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" gave me a bit of a brain cramp. The explorations of "quality" made me feel like I had been using my brain for a doorstop. And then, Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady" was an infuriating experience. His use of endless subordinate clauses is like...a dental drill pouring acid on a human face...waiting for the Cleveland Browns to find a quarterback.
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are both so worth the effort. Actually Joe Campbell co authored a book titled A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake that is very helpful. Thanks for making this video and encouraging us all to keep on reading!!
You can't really read the book, it's more of an archeology... it's digging for clues and relics.... and there are definitely far far better books on Finnegans Wake than Campbell's A Skeleton Key!
Maybe "Ulysses" because in that book there are vivid characters and a story. There are none in "Finnegan Wake" and without thise, it is not worth trying to decipher Joyce's wordplay.
"The Sound and the Fury" was one of the most amazing reading experiences I had in high school. It remains one of the most important milestones in my life for myriad reasons. I love that exasperating but ingenious deconstruction of the "normal" storytelling process. I'm so glad I stuck with it until the entire picture began to develop like a Polaroid photo. And, yes, I love both Joyce books, too.
@@ΓιώργοςΜεταξάκης-ξ2ο I agree that it's a masterpiece. But I've noticed that lots of people agree with her that it's a difficult read. I loved it myself.
Found it not difficult so much as bothersome to read. His 'Absalom, Absalom', however, is on my list of the ten best novels I've ever read. Got so drawn into it that it was like swimming underwater, holding my breath. Had to take a break every now and then, to get air. And then back in. (His 'As I Lay Dying' is far better IMHO than TSatF, and is funny to boot.)
Another contender just based on writing is The Silmarillion. While technically a cohesive narrative, it's more like it's Tolkien's behind-the-scenes outlines for a whole series of books smashed together. Besides the complexity of the events and character relations, it's also written in this extremely dry old-fashioned English that's sometimes hard to wrap your head around.
To be fair, The Silmarillion was never really intended for publication. All of Tolkien's works were really an excuse for him to enjoy his penultimate nerd's nerd personal hobby: creating languages. He just loved to create languages, and he knew how history, geography, folklore, and time affected all real-world languages, so Arda and Middle Earth were mostly just his way to build those real-world influences into his created languages. When he was originally writing The Hobbit, he intended to write a stand-alone fun fantasy story with no intention of it being part of the Middle Earth saga, but he just couldn't help putting so much of it in, especially the songs and poetry.
On my fourth read-through of Finnegans Wake currently. The first time took about a year with an average of roughly two pages a day. Felt I understand about 20 pages worth of it, but what I did get was stunningly beautiful, a way of linking what things feel like to experience with the abstract concepts and symbols the words represent. The second read-through blew my head off. I've never found so much in a single work to enjoy in any piece of art, not just literature. On the third read-through I compiled my own version of the text out of some of the more poetic and comprehensible passages, which comes in around a hundred pages. For the fourth read-through I'm now supplementing it with the Naxos recording read by Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan. At this point it's just an endless wormhole of ideas and inspiration. Hope you get into it one day as it's well worth it!
Wow, four times, that's so cool that you love it so much! I read that it's the kind of book that you can explore for your whole lifetime, I'm just super impressed you understand any of it
@@DrawntoBooks What I've found helpful is not actively trying to understand it. Just try to hear the music in the language itself and let it wash over you. The less you struggle to understand the more clear it becomes with repeated exposure. It's a kaleidoscope, so whatever patterns your mind is able to grab in the moment is what you'll see. Cheers!
Was it not Ulysses for which Campbell wrote skeleton key? (What do I know?) May I add, read in a group and read aloud. No requirements for group membership, but the more varied the experience of the members, th3 more fun it will be.
Hegel deserves to be on the list. I haven't read Phenomenology, but I have read Elements of the Philosophy of Right and it felt like an achievement to be able to dissect and analyse it.
revisiting phenomenology after reading joyce, hegel seems to me to be downright explicit. of course there are concepts which are difficult to grasp, but the language itself, i would argue, is as clear as it could reasonably be expected to be
I wouldn't call it hard in the same way. Hegel is hard because he's unconventional in a way but he's not ambiguous. Once you become acquainted to hegelian philosophy it all becomes pretty clear, not so hard. But I think it's very hard to do it on your own just by reading his works. You have to follow a course on it. At least that's how I became familiar with it. When I started the course, I really thought it would be the hardest of my classes, but now it turns out it might be one of the easiest. If you're interested I might give you infos and explain stuff to help you in your reading. Edit : it's also a matter of practice. As my teacher says, it's a bit like a new language you have to learn.
This may sound a little crazy, but I tried to pour through Joyce's Finnegans Wake a month ago while taking help from my 13-year-old cousin. I seriously took every input he gave, and tried to view each paragraph, heck, each word through that lens. We couldn't get past page one but we did make a couple of fun discoveries on the way 😂😂
I think the key to "read" Finnegans Wake is in what you said about the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. Joyce is not using language to convey meaning, but to convey music, in all its parameters: melody (sentences), harmony (clusters of words), timbre (the different languages, rhythm (word spacing & punctuation), etc. So, the book works more as a symphony, than as a novel. You don't listen to Beethoven's Fifth to rationalize every note that is being plucked, but to submerge in the mass of sounds & flow with the music. That approach to Finnegans Wake make it very enjoyable, in spite of you understanding what is going on (which does not mean that it's utter nonesense, but rather that the motifs are scattered all along the work). It was something not unusual in its time: Kandinski made music with his paintings, Schoenberg was thinking his music in terms of colors, &c. As you said, Joyce is, in his core, very playful, & if you let go with the flow of it, eventually will be able to play with him in the game he's proposing. It's quite intimidating at first, for certain.
He is writing a normal novel, with all the imagery there, you have to understand it like any other book. It is not a symphony, This is simply false. It is only true for Book II ch 2, that's it, that represents the most abstract and deepest part of sleep.
I think that your comment is very intriguing. Not sure that I agree 100% but I like the thought. I feel like I am letting go of many other forms of knowing this work if I try to fit it into any type of category. I especially balk at the "dreaming" idea. Okay, yes it represents stream of consciousness and the dream realm is it's playground but this book is so much more than that. The symphony is only a tiny part of the experience, but the idea definitely resonates in the work. I will file it for later reference as I continue to coax meaning from the pages. Thank you.
@@anthonybrakus5280 Yeah, I mean, of course musicality is only an aspect of how Joyce employs words, but it's a major one, imo. It's also very evident for me, as another commenter pointed out (alas in what I perceived as a very rude manner, that's why I parried that conversation), that there is a syntactic/narrative progression of the work (otherwise it would be utter nonesense), but that's also the case in musical composition. The concept of 'programmatic music', developed by romantic composers delves deep into that idea: take, for instance, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", where by the mere modulations of the melodies for the Tzar's Anthem & the Marsellaise, he depicts not only the Franco-Russian war, but also which faction is winning or losing at each point of the work. Cesar Frank's "The Accursed Hunter" is another exemplar case of orchestral music having a heavy narrative inclination. My point is that it's clear that Joyce's main composition concern was not using words for clarity of exposition or anything akin, so trying to brute force comprehension as if the work were a very compact riddle (which seems to be a common approach among those frustrated with this book) is by no means the best way to read it, let alone enjoying it. A musical approach is the one that was useful for me, & I find that the clues suggesting such an approach are quite evident in the book, but in the end it is only an example of how to approach the book not from a syntactic/narrative centered position. I'm sorry if my words become entangled at some point. I'm afraid it's not a very easy idea I'm trying to convey, & English is not my native language. I would struggle to express this point in Spanish as well. Regards!
I think I understand what you are saying. I definitely find the same kind of revelatory nuance in musical ideas. I really learned a lot about the mathematical abstractions present in Bach's work. I read another masterpiece of Western art called "Goedel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid" which spelled out the clear relationship of math ideas with Bach's work. He introduced the concept of homeomorphism and showed how a piece by Bach is homomorphic to a concept in number theory. It's truly a once in a hundred years type of work. I have a small selection from my library that I keep on the night stand next to my bed for quick access... Finnegans Wake, The Road to Reality, The Bible, Complete Shakespeare, Goedel, Escher, Bach and a few others that change depending on what I am currently interested in (usually math or physics related). I'm a musician and love music. I have studied a lot of compositional theory, but I wish I knew more about historical theory and artist's intention. The ideas you shared about 1812 Overture are wonderful. Some day I will make the time to learn more in that area. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with me. I am always glad to learn and the things you have so far talked about are quite fascinating. 👍🏾
I don’t mean to be that obnoxious guy here, and I’m not trashing anyone who struggled with this book, but I don’t find Sound and the Fury to be nearly as difficult as many people claim. By the end of the book, you will start to understand everything. Upon a second read, you will get it. It’s fragmented and stream of consciousness, but the answers are mostly all there. If I would pick a Faulkner book to put on this list, it would without a doubt be Absalom Absalom; a brilliant novel, truly, but one of the more difficult books I’ve read. That said, it is worth your time but I would recommend doing Sound and the Fury first for story reasons. If you’re unfamiliar with Faulkner, try As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, or Sanctuary.
There's no explanation for why I read Gravity's Rainbow the first time. Without a chart of the characters, I was adrift for most of it, even as I was catching hold of some of the better vignettes. The second reading was a revelation as it became as easy as pie to fit not only the characters together, but their organizations as well. Pynchon runs a pretty tight ship. On the third reading I had the pleasure of remembering these small stories within the story, as they were coming up for review. In one of them, the tragedy of an isolated submarine and its skeleton crew sees them "so lonely that their only hope was that they might die of it." Something that could be useful to anyone reading GR would be an index, but who ever heard of that in a novel? Still, if one could look up the entry at Byron The Bulb, the risk of addiction to GR would go way up. It is an intensely humane and ghastly and hilarious story, and so is Gravity's Rainbow. EDIT: The adjectives chosen by the Pulitzer board are an embarrassment; they're finding "unreadable" a book they haven't read. The "turgid" crack reminds me of William Hazlitt's lamentable misfire while criticizing Samuel Johnson: "He always writes on stilts," indicating that William looked into Johnson about as diligently as the board looked into Pynchon.
I agree. Not nearly as difficult as Ulysses or F. Wake. There was a story. One needs to realise it has vignettes, many brilliant. Like the conversation between two skin cells discussing what it will be like to rise to the surface and die. I'm read it only once and need to give it another shot. I admire you for giving it three tries. Couldnt get through Mason and Dixon. Vineland was readable but not fascinating. Same goes for Inherent Vice. At least its a story. I shall have to tryn "Against the Day'.
These books are pretty nuts. Remembrances of Lost Time was the most difficulty book I've ever read personally; there's sentences that go on for entire paragraphs.
I've still never read it, but I read a fascinating book by Lydia Davis where she talks about translating it, and all the challenges Proust's French poses for making it both understandable in English and true to the spirit of the original. Basically, he's as difficult to read in French as in translation!
I read an excerpt of it in World Lit, and that was enough for me. It was the dullest thing I ever read; how can someone write such a long book about trying to fall asleep?
I read the first one. Swann's Way. Definitely some long sentences. But it had its moments, and great prose. Still, it wasn't fun enough to make me want to read the other six or so books. I almost never read a whole book series because I never get drawn in that much. Although I did read the Book of the Dun Cow trilogy.
@@theboombody I'm finishing the Dark Tower series now; it's probably the first series to really hook me in, but some books are better than others. If you're real adventurous, Gormanghast is a bit slow but worth the time because it has such flashes of brilliance
My 1st college English professor (1970 or so) told me if you can read The Sound and the Fury you can read anything. I read it. He also suggested I try Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.. I tried. Ulysses would be a bridge too far.
I would add "Riddley Walker", a post-apocalyptic novel written in a devolved form of English that is difficult to understand at first, but gets easier as you continue to read it...
I really enjoyed "Riddley Walker," read it twice so far and the second time was much more comprehensible than the first. A fun fact is that the author, Russell Hoban, wrote a series of children's picture books about a badger named Frances ("Bedtime for Frances" is one - that should give you a sense of the intended audience). When I read "Riddley" the first time, I was astonished that the same man had written both. Check them out, especially to read to a child aloud.
Somewhere at the bottom of the Baltic Sea lies a copy of "House of Leaves", thrown off a cruise ship by a PHD in biochemistry fully capable of completing and understanding it. He's as green as it gets and still he dispatched it to the deep.
I really liked this. It also reads like a poem. And I don't blame the biochemistry PhD: the sea will claim its own; those that were meant for the deep, like a house of leaves, to the deep will reach
I loved House of Leaves! It's an amazing story about relationships among families, friends, lovers, and people who never truly meet - and it's bursting at the seams with Easter eggs. But I have to admit that it helps to take notes when you're reading it. 😉
I love "Ulysses". It isn't as hard to read as people think. It's funny, clever, and well worth it. I'm not brave enough to tackle "Finnegan's Wake" yet.
I once tried reading it and didn’t get far. Then I heard a recording of a passage (read, I think, by Joyce himself), and oddly enough, it made perfect sense!
I bailed on Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, and Finnegan's Wake. Life is already too short to read all the books I would like to read. I read Ulysses because it was assigned in an Irish Renaissance class and was glad for the experience. The Sound and the Fury I would not put on the list. I loved how the succeeding narratives filled in the blanks left by Benjy. It remains one of my favorites.
I read all of the books you mentioned - along with well over 100 others - within my last year of High School, which was actually my Junior year. Yes, graduated me a year earlier basically they didn't know what else to do with me. I loved Ulysses " Too deep for rme Stevie..." and I loved Finnegans'Wake "...riverrun, past Eve and Adams..." is twoeasy....“Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.”...It was his 'great comic book' as he liked to call it. Yes - difficult, beastly bites by buggery! BTW: great video, really, great.
I love House of Leaves, but I suspect its reputation is a bit harshly earned. It can definitely be read a fair number of ways, but once you sit down and make an actual choice on how you approach it, it becomes a lot more manageable. I think for most it's the simple fact that you want to read it straight-through as a novel, but the format goes out of its way to distract you from that. I found myself somewhat disappointed then when I realized how little most of this narratives have to do with the resolution.
I had been curious about it from the time it first came out. But I did wonder if it was more "style over substance." I just don't have the mental energy for that. I am willing to deal with an unconventional writing style if the story is well done and has a strong conclusion. But to go through a bunch of hassle just to be disappointed in the end? Ugh.@@melvinshaw7574
Once upon a time, I was tripping on LSD and idly flipped through Ulysses. Up to that point out had been impenetrable. I was not sure that I was really reading what I was reading because it was funny and lucid. Some kind of S&M scene between a husband and wife. So, I bookmarked the page and resolved to look at it again when I was sober. I was astonished that it was definitely there and just as weird and wonderful as it was when I had been tripping.
I bought "Finnegans Wake" second hand in a bookstore, and found on its first page a note written by its former owner: “Once you get past the first hundred pages, it’s a concentrate of pure delight.” ... I guess I'll never know.
Both Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are hilarious. The Sound and the Fury is not as hard as its reputation. Joyce is funny -- and Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is incredible.
@@Tolstoy111it’s beautiful and makes the whole novel worth it. It rids itself of all the confusing stylistic choices, and becomes 100% Raw and honest and we finally see what this whole book was about… why were followed these guys wandering the streets for 17 episodes.
I took a graduate class that just studied Ulysses. The best way I figured out how to approach it was to first follow along with an audio book, then I read it again while looking at the Gifford Annotations and the Hastings Guide. Then I began to see character motivations, heartbreaking loss, Stephen's entire journey, and I wrote a short screenplay dissecting Molly's "Penelope" episode, and then presented a different paper on why the "Circe" episode was written as a play. Ulysses is my second favorite novel.
@@DrawntoBooks Finally!! I have often thrown out there similar stuff that the OP did here, and almost never is there the proper response. When someone finishes a comment with "...And then she finished second. To another women by the way. A women you may have heard of" the correct thing to do is ask for the name of the winning women! Good job, Drawn2Books.
@@DrawntoBooks Dune by Frank Herbert. I've loved that book since I was fourteen years old and I've read it five times in my life. I'm on the older side. 😉
My father rarely spoke of his college days in the engineering school at Stanford. Everything to do with engineering came easy to him, but he also took a required English class that he mentioned more than once over the years. He was so proud to have gotten through "Ulysses"!
I think you should also have mentioned "The waste land" by T.S. Eliott. It is basically a poem-novel featuring time shifts, language shifts, full of literary references both modern and ancient. It is basically Joyce, but in verses.
The only thing at all difficult about The Waste Land is knowing the allusions. Much, much easier than Joyce and much, much shorter. He even gives you notes!
The Waste Land is so much better written! I was a member of the National Forensics League in high school, and read a section of this for poetry interpretation competition. It always scored high with the judges (most of whom were English teachers).
Waste Land and Ulysses were published in same year of 1922. Both authors admitted a debt to Wagner (each work containing numerous references) and were striving to make literature have the same visceral power as Wagner's music.
Samuel Beckett's "Trilogy" - Stream of consciousness, but icy and clipped, with that consciousness slowly dissolving throughout. Joyce's protege, but the minimalist to JJ's maximalist. Beautiful prose!
The problem with Finnegans Wake is not that it's meaningless, but rather that it is too meaningful. Too many meanings are compressed into each sentence. A similar confusion surrounded Ulysses when it was first published. Most critics believed it to be utterly unstructured, like modern life. It is on the other hand fiendishly over- structured, but the structure is hidden, buried in the prose. Each chapter has its own colour, symbol, art, or science, and corresponds to a part of the body and a part of the Odyssey. I use Finnegans Wake as a type of I-ching. Open it at random and see what meaning it can hold for the news of the day or whatever. This makes reading it way more fun. It's like a huge goldmine, but you have to tunnel through a lot of rock to get to the ore.
It's "Finnegans" not "Finnegan's." There's a reason why it's written that way. Update: Here's a hint-"vicus of recirculation → ricorso, Giambattista Vico's concept of circular history"
It’s wordplay. Can be read as the wake of Finnegan (if there’s an apostrophe, and what one would understand if it was said aloud), but because there’s no apostrophe, it cna be read as a command for Finnegans (pl) to wake. However, since there’s no punctuation for “Finnegans, wake!” either, then it is deliberately open to interpretation and (probably) making the point that punctuation is as important as the language which it punctuates… yet our dreams and thoughts have no punctuation…
@@duncanklf Thank you! I won't lie, now not only does that make sense, but I think it's going to improve the reading experience. Kind of sets the mood to know that he's playing word games right from the title on!
I really enjoyed reading Derrida although it's not easy to read full page sentences with heavy footnotes. It was a real mental training to juggle the complex details he includes and relationships between them.♡ Thank you Derrida♡
Having twice attempted to read Derrida's _Of Grammatology_, I consider that book unreadable. As I do Foucault, & numerous other French "literary critics". But in another way, I would also consider the works of Marquis de Sade unreadable. The man has managed to take a subject that should be endlessly interesting -- bizarre & kinky sex -- & made it BORING. Anyone who defends de Sade as having intellectual value is not talking about what's de Sade wrote, but what they want him to have written. (And said person likely didn't read de Sade.)
@@llywrch7116 Could Sade been trying to keep from running afoul of the censors? Just a thought. Derrida also could have been trying to preserve his legacy...by being obscure.
@@raylopez99 De Sade definitely ran afoul of the censors. Spent time in the Bastille for his books. As for Derrida, the French historian Emmanuel Ladurie once commented in a Q & A session, "Ambiguity has its uses. Look at Derrida."
That some literature faculty continue to assign and even revere Derrida is one of the great mysteries of life on earth. What a waste of time; in graduate school, however, you don’t know any better, and haven’t learned to think for yourself about such authors and their alleged importance. So you struggle to get through one or another such book, and at the end of the day all the jumbled, turgid, incomprehensible prose is gone forever from memory.
I read Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the end of Ulysses loud to myself several times after another. The fourth time, I suddenly felt like I was in another person's brain.
Other honorable mentions. Beckett’s trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, the unnameable William Gaddis: the recognitions, jr Robert musil: the man without qualities Proust: remembrance of things past Any of the four Chinese classics, especially the story of the stone Tale of the genji
I'd add Late Henry James to the list as well. I am reading the Recognitions atm and don't get the difficulty hype. JR on the other hand, looks genuinely obtuse,
@@funlesbian Funny, I was once obsessed with SBeckett, especially his 'Trilogy', yet am unable to read James. Have tried again and again and am simply unable to slip in, as it were.
I was going to suggest all strange away by Beckett, it's short and not necessarily difficult to get through, but from what i remember the language use was quite special(its been a few years since I read it). It always pops into my head when people talk about books that are difficult, even though I really enjoyed it. 😂 I just think a lot of people might not bother after the first page or so.
Nice list. I've read and studied 4 out of 5 (Including my university senior thesis on Ulysses, independent study on Gravity's Rainbow, a graduate class on Finnegan's Wake, and The Sound and the Fury just for fun). Infinite Jest is on my short list to read soon.
Such a great video! We had to read Ulysses for class this semester, and while I found it to be a puzzle, it was quite good! I love Thomas Pynchon, I would highly recommend Mason & Dixon by him
Thank you! I think Ulysses would be fun to read in a class, it was probably really nice to have people to talk to about it while reading. Mason & Dixon sound interesting, thanks for the rec, I'd like to read him, just not Gravity's Rainbow 😬
@@DrawntoBooks All Pynchon, including his "lighter" novels The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, partakes of all the stuff that Pynchon haters hate about Gravity's Rainbow (and Pynchon haters hate _a lot)._ Including buckets of sexual ick and extremely tacky humor. Awesome ;)
Russel Hoban's novel _Riddley Walker_ deserves mention here. It's written entirely in first person from the title character's viewpoint, but in a hypothetical British dialect of the far distant future. It's definitely a challenging read, though ultimately very rewarding.
Thanks for adding dear old Really, once you are four or five pages in, you will pick up Riddley’s speech, and his spelling which is phonetic. The dialect lets Hoban create all sorts of wordplay. He has invented quite an interesting world, with Neolithic farms, except for all the metal to be had everywhere; two religions; mythologies. The place names are all based on Kent, the farm practices on Butser Ancient Farm, the puppet show on Punch, the central legend of Elsa based on a wall painting in Canterbury, the green man is more common in old British churches than the cross. Readers should also enjoy Hobans book for older children, The Mouse and his Child.
The first time I read it, I didn’t know there was a glossary of Nadsat at the back. I managed pretty well. The film is excellent as well. The angry middle aged white guys that descended on the Capitol J6 make me think of Alex and his droogs.@@talastra
Finnegans Wake is an obscure, willfully difficult waste of time. Its also unique and rock n roll! Hearing it on audiobook , read by an irish person is a great experience. I have listened to parts of it many times. I don't understand most of it but it is pleasant to hear. It doesn't matter to me which bit i hear or read or what order it is in.
Good points. Reminds me of how in Asia certain wealthy people collect hardback books...so they can put them on bookshelves to impress visitors, never intending to read them.
@@raylopez99Everyone does that in the west. That's why you talk to people about books rather than giving them a thumbs up when you see it on their shelf. If they can't say anything about it you know who you're dealing with
When I finished it I wrote in my diary that after such a hermetic book I need something opposite, so I picked 'Who Killed Palomino Molero' by Llosa. And yes, they are both splendid and thought provoking books with opposite grades of difficulty
In the scifi world, Samuel Delany's Dhalgren also hops on the postmodern train. A great term for Gravity's Rainbow: "maximalism" - long and complex, digressive. To me, Gravity's Rainbow isn't much different from an epic fantasy, with lots of subplots and characters and flashbacks, and long descriptions of locations, clothing, and food.
I love Dahlgren. It's definitely a difficult read though. Hard to get traction and build momentum. Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series feels similar to me. Then there are the Burroughs cut-up novels. This are actually easy to read once you learn to read Burroughs. In my experience, reading his books chronologically gets you ready for the cut up novels.
Gave this one a try years ago and made it about a third of the way through (IIRC). Tough going for sure. I'd like to try again (maybe with some help) if I can find my copy... This one is another loop, right?
Infinite Jest is like a dimestore pulp novel in complexity compared to The Recognitions or Women and Men. It's actually pretty easy to read for the most part, just really really long. All the others on this list def deserve a space in top difficult books though.
Yeah I can see that, IJ is really just difficult because of all the disruption. You’re the second person to mention those other two though, Women and Men sounds insanely difficult.
@@DrawntoBooks I'm a major William Gaddis fan (I share his views on the bad effects technique has on art) and The Recognitions is gut-bustingly difficult (although quite rewarding). My favorite of his is his short, apocalyptic barnburner Carpenter's Gothic. All his themes. His answer to The Crying of Lot 49.
That was really fun. You're an intelligent, and natural critic. Great picks for the top five. I have to admit, I love how DFW uses footnotes. As most, I initially found it annoying, but then I grew to enjoy getting lost, and having difficulty getting back into the headspace of the story proper. I actually try to seek out new authors who can do this now. David Mitchell comes close.
Thank you very much! DFW was such an interesting guy, I actually love the idea too, I wonder now with kindle books if that changes the reading experience drastically.
Not footnotes exactly, but Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert uses a lot of Appendixes to further explain various aspects of plot, character genealogy, and terminology employed in his Dune saga. I found myself going back and forth to understand the highly dense first book which had a lot of concepts I had to wrap my head around. Super fun time
I’m sorry but could you specify what you mean by “enjoy getting lost?” I personally don’t find confusion to be a positive for storytelling, even if it’s revealed at the end what it all is.
Finnegans Wake is a lot of fun if you can let go and just immerse yourself in the current of words. Even when basic comprehension fails there tends to be plenty of elements in the text to enjoy in terms of wordplay. It's a pleasure to read on its own terms, full of interesting references, layered puns and bawdy jokes. As you read you'll find plenty of meaning will emerge from the text, even if the majority of the book evades immediate comprehension. It's meant to be a dreamlike experience and it excels at it.
I spend eight hours a day having a dreamlike experience, why would I want to waste my conscious hours pretending to be asleep? Finnegan's Wake is just the end point of Joyce's mad experiments with language. It's spawned countless knock-offs over the years and the net result of his influence has been entirely negative. The point of prose is to communicate, if you want to do something else then you always have music, or even poetry to work with. Why on earth would you read a long novel if you can't understand the greater part of it? Unfortunately, people (especially young people) seem to think they have to profess a fascination with Joyce or they aren't one of the cool kids, but the work is utter garbage. Go and read Flann O'Brien if you want something genuinely interesting, don't fall for Joyce and his blarney.
When I read some of these in lit class, what I found interesting was that if a student wrote like any of them, the student would fail the class. Sometimes I think we confuse mindless babble with great literature and philosophical insight. But it's just mindless babble.
You have to understand that these authors were deliberately experimenting and playing with the form in which they wrote. They had already proven themselves to be brilliant writers before deviating into experimental territory. To use an analogy, if you were to watch a professional golfer deliberately slice the ball around a tree, you could say "I slice the ball like that all the time and people say I'm bad at golf." The difference is that the professional used the slice in a very self-conscious, purposeful, and deliberate way. He's aware of what he's doing, why he's doing it, and how far he needs to deviate from a normal swing. The bad golfer is not. The same applies to these modern and post-modern experiments in literature. An inexperienced student writer trying to pull off Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness or Joycean wordplay will probably fall flat on his face because he lacks the fundamentals and depth of knowledge of these masters. On the same note- someone like Joyce was so profoundly well-read in the Western canon it would make most modern literary students' heads spin.
Maybe they are mindless babble. Maybe, just maybe, the way our schools teach and grade writing is too formal and strict, and doesn't allow people to step outside the box and write in a more creative way. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow one summer, got halfway through and was totally lost. That Xmas my bonus was a big bag of the wacky tabaccy, and I subsequently finished GR in about 3 weeks. It's a blast. Easier to read in the chunky paperback edition than the massive tomes you usually see.
Read Joyces poems. You won't regret it. I am a vocalist and reading his poetry compelled me to sing it as I read. It was the only time I composed a musical score and I thank my fellow Dubliner for that. Now I will go back to singing the works of those who no longer compose and who have long since decomposed.
Joyce's works (all of them) are among the slim portion of the written word that I feel are much better to hear than to read. But the person doing the reading absolutely has to have an Irish accent to get the most out of the (almost?) musical composition.
Another thing that makes The Sound And The Fury difficult to read: Two characters have the same name, and it being all stream of consciousness, it is really hard to figure out a) that there are two Quentins, and when you know, b) which Quentin is talked about at the moment.
Also two Jasons, and Benji's name was originally Maury, after Mrs. Compson's dissolute brother. His name was changed to Benjamin at age two or three when his mental impediments became too obvious to ignore.
I love Infinite Jest and have read it 3 times, and it is a very difficult read. Extremely funny, prescient and unique. The footnotes are really part of the book, not afterthoughts. We lost a great one when DFWallace left this life.
I read The Sound and the Fury when I was 18, and since over 15 times. Ulisses 37 years old, is my favorite. Finegan just once. It's realy tough, couldn't listen to the music of the text. A Greek friend, Nikephoros.
I began “Ulysses” in high school on a sort of dare from my English literature teacher; I finished it the summer between junior and senior years in university. 😂 . I actually read it again a few years ago while on extended vacation and found it to be much more comprehensible. Speaking of university days, I knew a young woman who was a drama student and she memorized “Molly’s soliloquy” for her MFA performance piece.
Having entered into the drafting stage in the 1910, its surprising Tolkien's "The Silmirillion" didn't get so much as an honorable mention. Tolkien created 7 languages for his legendarium, several of which are taught at University for foreign language credit, including Quenya. Also, its complex narrative structure, cartography, extensive world-building, and expansive prehistoric lore, which is foundational to his most notable works, absolutely makes "The Silmirillion "one of the most difficult books to read.
I'd say, this video is an easy take on pop literature's most difficult reads. It has all of 'em. Infinite Jest. Gravity's Rainbow. Faulkner. Ulysses. All of them are easy reads. Of course, Finnigan's Wake is number one because it's widely accepted as the most difficult book ever written. The creator of this video has no original input whatsoever.
I don't think The Silmarillion is that difficult. It's more challenging than LOTR, but it's far from one of the hardest-to-read books ever written: its language is dry, but the events are not too difficult to follow for anyone who's comfortable with the high fantasy genre. The most difficult aspect is the sheer number of invented place and character names to keep track of - but helpfully, the book includes an index so you can easily remind yourself of characters and places. Frequently flicking back and forth between the story and the index means it's slow going, but not really difficult.
@@variousthings6470Yes, you need to read with a finger in the index pages to keep track of who everyone is. The main thing that makes it hard to read is that (not being a novel) the writing is boring.
Yeah the Silmarillion is difficult mainly because it reads as an in-world history not as a novel. Personally I had the most difficulty with remembering all the characters (especially the Valar and what their role in Middle Earth was.)
This is a good list for hard fiction books. Comparable lists can be made for philosophy and poetry. My vote is for The Waste Land by TS Elliot in the poetry arena. Plato’s Parmenides, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Lacan’s Ecrits, and Derrida’s On Grammatology are also up there for philosophy. Moral of the story: these famously hard texts are all comprehensible because even elitist geniuses want to be understood by other elites.
Eliot is readable. I just had to keep going back after I learned more. Four Quartets made sense on my first read after grad school. If you want something up there with The Wake poetry-wise, I say Late-Celan is the closest from my experience. They say native German readers feel like they’re reading a translation from what he does to language.
IMHO, Lacan and Derrida are, mostly, actual hoaxes. They try to seem complicated, obscure and wise writers because they fake their knowledges. All these weird (invented) "mathematic" formulae are a complete nonsense.
Brilliant analysis of hard to read books. Thanks. Enjoyed Dubliners. Finnegan's Wake was impossible. Enjoyed James Joyce's Ulysses drama on BBC radio 4.
Loved this video. I was surprised by the inclusion of The Sound and the Fury. It's a favorite of mine, and while I found it challenging, I didn't find it particularly difficult. (This from a guy who attempted Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, and just couldn't do it.)
Same. I think the book gets a reputation for being inscrutable since it starts out with Benjy's perspective, and probably puts a lot of people off from the get-go with that. The rest isn't notably difficult.
The Illuminatus Trilogy is hard to read despite being so delicious, but only because it jumps back and forth in time and has a huge cast of characters. They're so much fun to read though, and on re-readings you'll catch many new things each time.
I've read plenty of hard books. I've read The Sound and the Fury, I've tried some of the others mentioned in this video. I've got better things to do. Gardening is as good an intellectual exercise, it engages the other muscles in the body, and it is much more rewarding in both the short and long term.
I’ve read them all. William Gaddis’ The Recognitions is in the same league of difficulty. Finnegan’s Wake is only difficult if you think there is something there. If there isn’t anything there, then it is trivially easy, but a bit pointless. I vacillate on which I believe. The difficulty of Ulysses is widely overstated. I would instead say that it’s quite rich, but it’s not like you can’t understand it if you take a little time with it. And it’s very funny. Also, only the last chapter is pure stream of consciousness. All of them are worth reading, with the possible exception of Finnegan’s Wake. Also, for other reasons, I would include Proust’s A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, which is genuinely difficult to comprehend, even though it doesn’t have some of the obvious obfuscations in these books.
I really feel like Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake solely for himself and to flex, so I kind of fall on the "there's nothing there" side of things. Proust is someone I would like to read someday and he definitely could have been on this list! As for The Recognitions, I've never heard of that one, it sounds loooong.
Agree about The Recognitions. I got about 3/5 of the way through but could not bear to continue. Ulysses is one of my top three. Could not get into Sound and the Fury. Haven't tied the others (yet!). 😅
I agree with you about Ulysses being not that difficult. In fact I have a theory that FW was written only to prove what "unintelligible" really means, and to contrast it with the relatively accessible Ulysses.
Proust is in no way difficult to comprehend. He says exactly what he means, as clearly as he can. Most of it is philosophical musing rather than action, and he lets the sentences run on as long as he likes, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to understand. And Finnegans Wake is not an exercise in incomprehensibility; it’s a book about archetypes rather than specifics, equating all possible histories with each other (world history, personal history, myths and stories, etc) as a sort of epic pun, and thus written entirely in puns. Every word in it does have an intended meaning - several intended meanings. The comprehensibility problem arises not because Joyce specifically wanted to be incomprehensible but, I think, because he didn’t fully understand how serious the risk of being incomprehensible was, since HE always knew what he meant by everything, so it all seemed “gettable” to him. So he just kept complicating his puns and allusions for years, without quite realizing how far from an audience he had wandered. Though the book does still have an audience. Just a very very small one. If you want to start getting to know it, search around online for guides and summaries and you’ll find them. Happy Commenting Everybody!
I've read excerpts of "Finnegan's Wake" and was well aware of the danger posed to my mental well-being, so, I have not attempted the full thing. On the other hand, I have read "Ulyssess" cover to cover although it took me five attempts and over 40 years to do so. I couldn't not read one of the most important books of the 20th century. Love it or hate it, this books impact was immense. The rules on obscenity changed due to this book, largely because of its' difficulty. The judge who decided that "Ulyssess" was not obscene stated that (and I paraphrase here) no one could possibly read this as pornography. Many of the books we read today would not have been allowed under the old obscenity laws if James Joyce had not paved the way. Take warning, in the U.S. there is an attempt to roll back the clock to where a select group of people decide what you can and can't read.
I read The Sound and the Fury in high school. Being from Mississippi I was eager to read Faulkner. After that introduction I never picked up another of his books.
@@Tolstoy111 I was 14 or 15 and I don't think the teacher had ever read the book herself. I just remember her saying how important it was. And then we got to read the book. And figure it out ourselves.
“The Golden Bowl” by Henry James was probably the most difficult novel I read in college. Probably not as difficult as these 5, but it was still very challenging.
I’ve enjoyed sending sentences from James’s novels to a friend who’s an English professor at a prestigious college and asking him to explain what they, the sentences, mean. I’ve never gotten answer.
I would have said James. I remember looking at one of his novels and finding it took me ages to read even a single page. I can normally speed read. The language was just so opaque.
@@iankemp1131 Later in life, he started dictating his novels to a secretary who typed them. When you do that you lose a sense of the shape and contour of a phrase.
I posted this before I finished the video but knew in my heart it would be mentioned in it: "Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?" - H.G. Wells, in a letter to his friend, James Joyce
I didn’t enjoy Infinite Bore but found the best way to read it was to just resist the compulsion to check the footnotes/appendix and simply press on through the main narrative first. I don’t agree with the post about Ulysses being tough- it’s really not, just kind of a rip-off of Flaubert’s Temptations Of St Anthony” at the end, after an otherwise pretty simple story. A tough novel you might have added was “The Confidence Man” by Melville. So subtle it’s like reading mud.
Thanks for your detailed review! I'd throw an honorary mention to 'Dhalgren', by Samuel R. Delaney. It's far more understandable than the one's you've listed, but to gain that understanding you have to suffer through some significant psychological torment, including embarrassing and uncomfortable dinner parties in nearly empty housing developments. It borrows from Finnegan's Wake by starting with the last half of a sentence and ending (after perhaps a thousand pages) with the first half of the same sentence. I read it every few years - it is a painful literary masterpiece.
I once read the first page of “Finnegan’s Wake” out loud to show someone how absurd it is, but when I got to the “koaxkoax” they said “Wait, isn’t that how the frogs speak in Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs’.” They were correct. They had identified an allusion, though what it mattered in context remained a mystery.
", ...though what it mattered in context remained a mystery." is literary criticism
of some weight. Our ability to doubt efficiently is so far from the animal, in our
minds, that we think the hesitations of the fishes have no meaning, since our
efforts to encode them have been barren. "Woe unto them that taking tides
for their inflections, hath more purpose to perform a craft than finding their
assignment."
Shit now I have two books to read
When I was in college my lit professor brought in a recording of Joyce reading Finnegan’s Wake. It was totally different from seeing it on a black and white page.
I've read all of it. I have to agree with Nabokov (the author of "Lolita") that it's not that great. Eliminating plot and character for the most part and reducing a novel basically to word play is just taking away too much. The most difficult novel ever written, but not among the best.
@@johnkrieger185 I’ve never made it through Finnegan’s Wake. I did make it through Ulysses, while I was living in Dublin. That helped. I think it was worth it.
A German critic once praised a German translation of Finnegan's Wake, saying the translator had done the utmost right thing by translating it from Non-English into Non-German.
There’s a similar joke with the German philosopher Heidegger: he’s untranslatable, even in German.
Had I been given that job, it would have been done on a 20-pages-per-round basis, with option to quit the contract after any round, and payment for each round in advance.
That's quite funny.
Same is for an 1962 Italian translation of Ulises. A perfect master piece of literature, worthy of Joyce.
Why should I be interested in reading what is basically literary shit soup?
four easy steps to appreciating Finnegans Wake:
1. Figure out if you appreciate the basic musicality of it, if the sound and vibe of the language alone pleases you. Look up the video of Joyce himself reading the section where washer women are laying out laundry and gossiping. Follow along with the text while he speaks (the video I'm thinking of has a link). You'll get a sense of the bare rhythm of the text and pronunciation wordplay. On the second page Finn McCool is said to have "lived in the broadest way immarginable." Does the idea of a book stuffed with puns like this tickle you? You may be interested.
2. Read everything and anything. Read Joyce's previous books. Read Ellmann's biography of Joyce to get a whole lot of context and analysis you wouldn't otherwise get. Read Samuel Beckett, Joyce's apprentice, who borrows a lot from FW era Joyce but in a far more pared down way (also amazing in his own right). Read some secondaries if you want, like Joseph Campbell's book. Read a bunch about myth and folklore while you're at it, as the themes and story of FW work the way myths do.
3. Get the Oxford edition, not the Penguin. Oxford has a great introductory essay going over the general themes and recurring symbols, as well as a section by section outline of what is actually happening plot-wise in a given set of pages.
4. Read it, enjoying the basic rhythms of the language; don't worry about getting lost so long as you are generally following the outline and recognizing the story beats as they happen while recognizing the thematic point of the language and the story beats. The challenge now will just be connecting your sentence by sentence reading with all of the above; it helps to loosen control and just vibe to it, knowing you have your whole life ahead of you to grind out every minute detail if you want; right now you're just reading it. Read out loud in your worst approximation of an Irish accent.
And really that's the
Clever cat, you are!
I'll bet you a riveting first date.
These are not only almost exactly my conclusions (arrived at after reading Ulysses and then utterly failing at FW), but you put your recommendations also in a very attractive form ... I love that hidden gem!
@@crito451 listen to Joyce reading it.
There is a book club in California that read "Finnegan's Wake".
It took them 28 years.
That's nothing. A man who was convicted for speaking too slowly has just died in prison. He was halfway through his sentence.
I read it over several months. I just set a goal of reading, I think, 10 pages a day. I also read "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" and another guide at the same time.
So they actually finished it? Surely you jest.
Trump said in an interview he read "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake" when he was 12. I believe him.
@@pedroparamo7351 Trump probably couldn't understand the five simplest books ever written.
I read Gravity's Rainbow and I can honestly say the only thing I remember about it is that I finished.
filtered. GR isn't hard
@@greatcoldemptinessWhy do some readers have to be such a pompous ass? Good for you. You read it and didn’t think it was hard. Great. Most people are going to find it very difficult to read and understand, because it is intentionally a difficult book, but that doesn’t make them stupid or a bad reader. OP just made a joke and you decided to be a jerk for no reason. Hope you’re proud of that.
@Cheeses_K_Riced No, it’s just rude and there’s no reason for it.
Same thing, except with Ulysses.
I read it for college.
@greatcoldemptiness no reader has the same reading pace or comprehensiveness as another reader
Infinite Jest is my favorite novel of all time. My first time through I had never read anything like it before and I was enthralled. Like Gravity's Rainbow, it rewards you the second time through. These authors chopped up the narrative in a way that significant details are presented before sometimes many pages later you are provided a reason to recognize their significance. While overall I enjoyed GR, the obscene scenes in that book are over the top for me. I got most of the way through Ulysses and enjoyed it for the most part, but I had help from an explanatory text that I read at the same time. I appreciated Joyce's experimentation, helping usher in modernist literature. Truly, Ulysses has humor as you say - but so does Infinite Jest, in spades - and Gravity's Rainbow as well. I like works of art that make me think, that don't reveal their mysteries so easily, that I can return to again and again and find new things each time. I am now intrigued to check out Finnegan's Wake.
I liked how the entire climax & denouement of Infinite Jest happens off-screen, and he gives you enough knowledge to fill in the blanks and work out what happened. It's really unique how he did it.
You might enjoy Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Michel Tournier's The Ogre
@@condor2279I never finished Infinite Jest, but I intend to sometime (maybe with the assistance of a reader’s guide). I read around 100 pages of the book & I quite enjoyed it. I think (from what I’ve seen) he’s a very good writer.
It grabbed me by the throat and heart when it came out, and I must have read it five times I think, in a predictable response I suppose, given a theme within. I thought it was stupendous stuff, but now many years later I don’t think I’d be quite so receptive. Age has withered me, no doubt.
Possibly I’m too familiar with that type of writing now, and though DFW was its high priest, and a thrilling discovery, I don’t feel as enthused by his vision now I’m that much older. In this regard, I think the book doesn’t quite bear comparison with a few others in my litany pantheon, its power having dimmed rather. But I really hope I’ll revisit the book before I peg out, since the pleasure it once gave me was utterly all-consuming.
I think there's also a cinematic equivalent. There are some films that seemed innovative and brilliant at the time and don't stand up. And others do. Some are just dumb fun and some challenge your brain. I just finished watching a time travel film from 10 years ago (I do like me some time travel) but unlike most of them it was so unexpected I actually spent 10 minutes afterward just trying to lay out the chronology. This day and age you can go online and find somebody who has similar reaction and by God yeah there's a whole thing, a discussion from years ago that I stumbled into amongst all those search results. It's fascinating to read through people's thought processes when they're trying to figure out something ostensibly so turgid you might as well give up. But we don't give up! Forgive the pun but it's time well spent.
On the other hand, "Dubliners" by James Joyce, a collection of short stories, is very readable and quite good. It's hard to believe it's even the same author as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
True, Dubliners is a marvelous book.
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is a pretty straight forward read, as well.
@@kevinlakeman5043 Except towards the end, where it becomes more elliptical and resembles the first part of "Ulysses".
I've found Joyce's short stories much better than Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
@@parkerbrown-nesbit1747 "The Dead" is a masterpiece. Some of the others may also be, but I would not put them on the same level as "Ulysses".
Once I asked my literature teatcher what was the hardest book he ever tried to read, he said immediatly "Ulysses, I took 6 years to finish and I still dont get it".
And just for curiosity, here in Brazil we have a writter called João Guimarães Rosa, who is our James Joyce, he also spoke several lenguages and made a truly masterpiece called "Grande Sertão Veredas", maybe the greatest and hardest brazilian novel.
Wow that is so cool! I’ve never heard of that author before, I’m definitely gonna look him up, thank you for sharing 🙂
No one should ever even try to read "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake." They are pure mental masturbation, and their only value is that they amused Joyce in writing them. The idea that one is writing something of such value that it is worth months or years of somebody else's time to read is such an example of overweening arrogance, pretension, and narcissism that it's disgusting and contemptible.
@@DrawntoBooks You should do video on the five most difficult books that worth the trouble to read. "Das Kapital" would probably be on that list.
O comentário que eu tava procurando haha
@@donnievance1942 hahahahah
"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works." James Joyce
Butterfly: I got only two weeks, sir.
Look, James, you can demand all you want, but y'all spent 17 years writing _Finnegan's Wake,_ so 17 years is about all I'm willing to devote to taking it in. That's a fair trade, if ever there was one.
@@benmcfee I concluded Finnegan's Wake was about Irish surfing dudes.
@@aqdrobert
James Joyce's ghost be like:
"He's bloody right! Feck! Arse! I thought it'd take at least a decade to figure that one! 17 years for nothin'!"
I can underand and appreciate that sentiment...
Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Spirit" also deserves a mention.
It's also non-fiction! So that's an advantage. 🙂
Yeah, I created a reading group for it at my University a year a two ago. Over 14 weeks of consistent focused meetings each week, we only got through the first 25 paragraphs of the introduction as a group. Really good time.
Also, as someone who has now read a lot more of Hegel, I’d recommend new Hegel readers to read his lectures first then go through the little logic and big logic then go through the Phenomenology. A lot of the issue with going straight into the Phenomenology is that it uses a bunch of concepts (from his logic) that are left undefined in the Phenomenology.
Or anyting written by Derrida
I was thinking Being and Time by Heidegger to be harder because he references Hegel a bunch but at this point we are splitting hairs lol
@@DiotimaMantinea-gc1uwdo you really think that. I read at least hundred pages of both books & I think Hegel is way, way harder
I read Ulysses while living in Dublin. I think you need a knowledge of Dublin and it helps if you’re familiar with Irish music. My friends and I did Bloomsday one year. We hit every pub mentioned in Ulysses, one drink allowed in each pub. By the time the pubs closed, always after the last bus, we staggered home. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience.
You should do the route of don Quixote and/or the route of El Cid, next.
yeah, I've actually heard you can (or at least one point could) use Ulysses as a sort of tour guide for Dublin.
@@kevinschultz6091 No so much now, but back n my day you could. Dublin had really changed.
They're all still in business, a hundred years later?
@@vanhouten64 I did Bloomsday in 1972. Most of Joyce’s pubs were still going. I don’t know how many of them are still there.
My father, an amateur Joyce scholar, is the only person I've ever met who read "Finnegan's Wake." The best explanation he had for it was [paraphrasing from recollection] "Using as many different words as possible to tell a bit of everything about everything in a way that sounds good when read aloud."
This was a lucid and well-written survey of difficult books. In graduate school, I spent an entire semester on “Ulysses,” starting by carefully reading Homer’s “The Odyssey.” If you’re reasonably familiar with that classic, Joyce’s cascade of allusions makes more sense. This was pre-internet, so I had to rely on published articles and guidebooks to decipher the multitude of other allusions and languages. It would be easier to solve the puzzles today by using online material. But (as others have pointed out), the real pleasure of reading this difficult book is Joyce’s masterful wordplay, which often is more accessible if read aloud. Doing so definitely increased my appreciation. Joyce’s quip about professors spending their lives on his book has turned out to be so true. As for “Finnegans Wake,” I agree with William Faulkner’s assessment: “This is a case of the artist getting too close to the divine fire and being electrocuted by it!”
I can't even imagine trying to tackle this one without the internet.
For the non-scholar, I'd actually recommend NOT trying to catch the references and allusions, at least with the Bloom chapters. You can get a lot of mileage out of it just by inhabiting the mind of a character so fully, with writing that sometimes sings, and the fart jokes.
Yes, it’s pretty common from what I’ve heard for English departments to run a course on Ulysses.
Before the Internet, we had annotated versions, which are actually still really nice: You can sit down & just read straight thru without having to open any device in parallel.
William Faulkner is great.
The best way to experience Finnegan's Wake is to have a properly drunk Irishman read it to you.
@@JamesWrightLBC Get a recording of Joyce reading it. The cadence is brilliant. I still don’t have a clue what it means. I’m not sure it means anything, but I love the sound of it.
I remember loving The Sound and The Fury So Much. Thank you for bringing it up, time for a good old reread
A favorite of mine: As I Lay Dying. Getting that urge to re-read now. (I heard the movie version sucked.)
Good to know. It's on my shelf and I haven't read it yet.
I read The Sound and the Fury years ago and didn't think it was especially difficult. I don't think it belongs on this list, do you?
@@jamesbowman6925She gave both Sound and the Fury and Ulysses an 8. That’s nuts. Faulkner is a vastly easier read.
James Joyce was an author who was designed for audiobooks. I've read Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake twice, the first time in paper and the second time by audio, and the listening experience was so rich and satisfying.
I listened to full unabridged audio version as well and this is a good way to begin his book. Homer's work was heard before ever making it to print.
is it in a Dublin accent, English Received Pronunciation, or general midwest American?
Wasn’t it written in a Dubliner accent?
... nice tip. but do you think joyce wrote it with the intention of technology being needed to understand or enjoy it?
i've heard of all these books but only tried to read one; joyce's "Ulysses." i stopped trying after about 5 pages. and those first 5 pages i couldn't decipher with a captain marvel decoder ring. i bought it at a used book store on the cheap. man i love libraries and book stores. they have that great musty smell of intrigue, adventure and knowledge. i hate shopping but book stores and record shops, both practically extinct these days (thanks technology), are the only places i like to browse.
Deanna! What a magnificent staredown we just had. You won of course.
My father used to say that Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" was the hardest book he had ever attempted to read. This is a person who read the entire dictionary from start to finish. Multiple times.
I’ve studied academic philosophy extensively and I struggle to get through a 10 page excerpt of Critique of Pure Reason . Although the work of Logical Positivist A J Ayer was the most incomprehensible
I would say that Kant's writing is what makes the First Critique so hard to read. Rather than its explicit content and ideas. For example, you can get a good secondary reading and Kant's ideas tend to become quite comprehensible over time and with more experience. That doesn't mean the content is not also difficult. But Kant's approach certainly didn't help readers. Now Hegel by comparison is just crazy difficult on both the conceptual and the textual level. And not because he was a terrible or dry writer. Even if you do find a secondary work that makes Hegel somewhat more digestible... it normally comes at the expense of much of Hegel's own intentions and ambitions. Put 5 of the top Hegel scholars in the world into one room... and you will end up with at least 6 or 7 incompatible interpretations of what Hegel was trying to convey! 😄
Read this at college. Once I got past the initial style of writing, it was actually quite readable and definitely thought-provoking.
The best way to get through Germans is by learning German language and familiarising with classical German literature. In the words of gadamer, Germans really love their long drawn out sentences and soulful obscurities. And when you translate that to English, it becomes difficult.
@shahsadsaadu5817 I guess the reason I found it so decidedly readable was that I do speak German. It was my first language, though apart from the first 2 years of my life, I've lived in the UK. I read it at college too, which makes a difference. You're more inclined to really give things a go when everyone else around you is doing the same
Great video; of these I’ve only read “Ulysses", but I loved your take on these...uh...classics.
Thank you!
After the first read through, Sound And Fury is not that bad. I have gotten to the point where I can tell where we are and who is telling the story in about any part. The beauty of the writing is what got me through the first read. The writing is intoxicating. It is one of the books that has shaped the way I think about reality since I first read it almost 50 years ago.
I got about half way through V and knew I was missing something important and started over. I had missed the point entirely the first time but had still enjoyed it. It has a lot of very funny parts. It was like reading an all night BS session in college back when everybody was high on something.
The Sound and the Fury is a terrific book and well worth the effort to read and comprehend.
That book is beautiful
I agree. Did a Faulkner seminar in which we read 17 of his 20 or so novels. Sound & the Fury and Absalom, Absalom were my personal favories, though I could not blame anyone for having completely different ones. And I love the short story, The Bear. Spent a couple of years with a lot of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, & Dos Passos... and in the library's closed stacks with all the literary criticsm about them and their works was. A couple of the best years of my life. Told myself I would read Finnegan's Wake for retirement. Well, I'm here and I know that's not going to happen. As much as I love Joyce...
The Sound and the Fury is genuis.
@@evelynmayton470: I could not agree more!
I couldn't pass page 30. I might give it a try again some day.
I feel like Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (the Name of the Rose guy) has a spot in such a list.
Skip the whole first section. After that, it's a terrific & pretty normal novel. Then read the first section, & it'll make sense. Try it!
In the St Patrick's day parade in Toronto in 2004, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, there was a float celebrating it, followed by groups such as "People That Tried to Read Ulysses"where there were about 100 people marching. Then it was "People That Finished Ulysses" with about 20 people in that group. Then there was the group, "People That Understood Ulysses." There was no one in that group.
LOL!
Honestly I low-key hate this attitude to Ulysses. Loads of people read, love and understand the book! It pays off a little effort with a lot of payback. I recently reread a chapter and I was glowing afterwards: it's so funny, creative, playful and human.
Though I do understand it's not for a lot of people and that's fine too
@@drts6955 it's not for me and neither is Heart of Darkness- what a slog that was!
Actually, I think Ulysses is not that difficult to read - as long as you accept that you you will not understand or even fail to notice many (perhaps most) of the hidden allusions, that is. Still, it is a comprehensible story, and if you have some knowledge of English (or European) literature (which I do only on a rather basic level, unfortunately) you will even appreciate the different styles of narration in the different chapters. Unfortunately, I do not know much about Homer's story so I cannot grasp the parallels between the two. Anyway, this book is highly entertaining and fun. Finnegan's wake, on the other hand, is a completely different level of madness - I still have not found access to this one (sadly).
At the high school where I worked, there was a paper bound Finnegan’s Wake in the fiction section. It survived “weeding” by three long serving librarians. I hope it is still there. A librarian’s little joke.
I guess the dumb Southerners, if it's in the USA, did not consider it subversive.
As a former teacher-librarian who did weeding, I could never get rid of classics, no matter how old they were looking and knowing they’d never, ever be read by staff or students. I just couldn’t. It seemed like a crime, morally wrong, a loss of our history.
“Weeding” would take more stamina than I could muster. Often the books discarded from the library found their way to my classroom, where I had my own collection of 250+ Book Club book sets. Book Club , which can be as challenging and transformative as you want, can be the best of pedagogies if taken seriously. My colleagues finally adopted it, and watered it down to the point that it wasn’t worth much. Book Club also allows you to compensate for the shortcomings of a official core literature, in our case almost exclusively DWEM.@@learningisfun2108
@@learningisfun2108and maybe, just maybe, some dreamy-eyed kid would pick up that Dead Souls or Anna Karenina, or even Master and Margarita.
@learningisfun2108 I mean even if the school gets rid of it that doesn’t mean no one can ever read it
I LOVE this video, especially the sections on Joyce. Quite apart from the actual content, your delivery is spot on. Difficult as they are, I love 'Ulysses' and' Finnegans Wake'. In comparison with 'Finnegan's Wake', 'Ulysses is fairly straightforward - but to be honest, I read them mainly for the fun of the language.
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea 😂
Gravity's Rainbow may be confoundingly difficult in some ways. But I recall parts that were utterly beautiful, and others that were utterly, utterly hilarious. A character looks out over a city at sunrise and sees "crystals growing in the morning's beaker." Some great writing.
Yea it's kind of sad the poster wrote it off without giving a try. Also kind of weird they rated the difficulty without reading it now that I am thinking about it.
@@hfjdksalablebecause most “booktubers” just like talking about how much they like books
And those crystals are the condensation trails of V-2 rockets coming at him. Beauty and terror as identical.
There once was a rocket called V2, to pilot which you did not need to. You just pushed a button and it would leave nothing but stiffs and big holes, and debris, too. (That's what I remember from the 1.5 years I spent reading Gravity's Rainbow.)
@@philpollack8140oh, bro... You forgot the part about the banana peal? That's tragic. 😂🤣
After reading one of Stephen Hawking's books, I looked at the 'Further reading" section at the end. It recommended a book by Roger Penrose, which I subsequently bought. It was a lengthy book, and the first sentence in the preface read ( I'll never forget this) - "In order to appreciate the work in this book, it is necessary to have a firm grasp of mathematics, so the first seventeen chapters of this book are dedicated to mathematics".
After returning to the store that same day, I pointed this sentence out to the girl who sold me the book...and I had no trouble getting my money back.
🤣
I'll bet that was "The Emperor's New Mind"
A nice story, but it doesn't add up.
Gasp, a maths pun - and a good 1 2. @@davidcopson5800
Are you talking about The Road to Reality? I keep a copy handy on my bedstand right next to Finnegans Wake😂
It really is worth the time, especially if you want to understand what modern physics is for real, not just conceptual abstractions.
Emperors New Mind is a good one too. Dr. Penrose is a great science communicator, but he does ask a bit from his audience. Like: study math intensely for a few years. That kind if thing😂
Of all of these, I think _Ulysses_ is the only one I've attempted. I bought it and decided to read it, and probably got 100 pages in. Thank you, thank you!
It's the one that sounds most interesting actually.
@@SugarSnapDragonit's very interesting. James Joyce doesn't pull any punches telling the story he wants to tell how he wants to tell it, a habit that saw Ulysses banned in the US for around 10 years (book burnings and all) until a Supreme Court decision said that the book was not p*rn*graphy.
I struggled with The Brothers Karamozov. It is not that it's some unreadable thing, but it is difficult ( much more so that Crime and Punishment), and it's just so damn dark. It's worth it in the end, but boy, was that a trudge for me.
I’m reading this right now actually. I love Russian literature, I agree it is dark though, and a trudge, some nights I just can’t even pick it up. But I still love it!
@DrawntoBooks Mine was made worse as it was a read for high school. I re-read it on my own which was better. This teacher's summer reading was "The Agony and the Ecstacy" if that tells one anything. 🤣
I spent half a year - at least - on C+P. Was it worth it? No.
Now I am going through Dr. Zhivago, which is lighter, but anything but a page turner, I must say.
Brothers Karamozov- the one book I found too depressing to finish.
I struggled with "The Idiot." Not impossible to understand just boring.
I'm currently reading Finnegans Wake, and it is much easier to read than I initially thought. It is pretty much impossible to understand everything thats going on, but if you are willing to go through a few pages without much comprehension, then you'll still be rewarded with a ton of poetic language and very witty puns. It's only as hard as you want it to be, I guess, depending on how deep you want to go.
Exactly, it's a book to "read" not a book to read.
I've been reading it for over 20 years, now. I'm about halfway through.
Ahmensch3115 Yes, that is how to read and enjoy Finnegan's Wake. Like dipping into a poetic river of often fun images and symbols, many basic at their heart: like Rivers, Circles of Life, etc., chickens and eggs, birth and seeds, and so on...
Yes it's fun@@carlcushmanhybels8159
Just as we couldn't 'catch and hold' any River, and wouldn't really want to. FW: Better to enjoy the River flow, dipping in where and when one can.
I read Finnegans Wake when I was still in high school. I loved it. The reason I read it was because I heard portions of it read over the radio by a woman with a gorgeous Irish accent. Somehow, sentences that were incredibly confusing when read on a page came across to me when she spoke them aloud with that musical Irish voice. I can't say that I understood them in any objective sense, but they made emotional sense, and they were beautiful. I never fully recaptured that feeling when I just read it from the pages, but the feeling still lingered, sort of hovering over the passages I read. Finnegans Wake isn't a novel, it's a kind of weird epic song, incomprehensible in the same way as those bizarre ancient Irish epics like Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, and Táin Bó Cúailnge. I should go back and see if I can find an audiobook of it, but it would HAVE to be read by an Irish colleen, preferably one with long, blazing red hair. Judging from the comments before me, some other people had a similar experience.
This ! It's not history, it's not a news report. It's ART. It's poetic prose. Nobody is supposed to read it fast and if you don't like words and you don't have an aesthetic feeling for them, just don't bother. There's lots of good books out there that won't tax your vocabulary or make you think, if that's what you want.
I read Gravities Rainbow. I was astounded at the breadth and depth of his knowledge of WW2 history and facts. I enjoyed it very much. I thought remembrance of things past was much more difficult.
One of my favorite books.
Yes, I'm very surprised Remembrance of Things Past is not on this list. The Sound and the Fury is casual beach reading compared to Proust.
It’s a terrific novel.
*Gravity's
Remembrance of Things past is beautiful, but very hard to read.
Lists like these always make me appreciate the writing of Virginia Woolf, even when she isn't mentioned. Despite how notoriously difficult stream-of-consciousness writing is to read, I have always found Woolf's writing very readable while still having as much substance as anything by Faulkner who is the only other stream-of-consciousness writer I regard at being at her level (I have yet to read Joyce).
That's why Woolf is great, and also why she doesn't end up here. Because she writes the style so efficiently that it doesn't confuse, it just enhances the story.
@@DrawntoBooks idk - It might be that I came to Joyce first, and therefore am more used to his style with stream of consciousness, but I do find Woolf's style more confusing than Joyce's - I have just recently read "To The Lighthouse" and the fact that you keep switching whose head you are in there made it quite difficult for me to get through.
Funny story. I once almost got into a fistfight over Woolf (I said, “faux intellectual twaddle”) vs Faulkner (she said, “baby talk gibberish “).
Nabokov hated Faulkner's book. And what if he was right?
books
Reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" gave me a bit of a brain cramp. The explorations of "quality" made me feel like I had been using my brain for a doorstop. And then, Henry James's "Portrait of a Lady" was an infuriating experience. His use of endless subordinate clauses is like...a dental drill pouring acid on a human face...waiting for the Cleveland Browns to find a quarterback.
Thank you. I was going to submit Henry James, but you beat me to it.
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are both so worth the effort. Actually Joe Campbell co authored a book titled A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake that is very helpful. Thanks for making this video and encouraging us all to keep on reading!!
A very useful companion book.
You can't really read the book, it's more of an archeology... it's digging for clues and relics.... and there are definitely far far better books on Finnegans Wake than Campbell's A Skeleton Key!
Maybe "Ulysses" because in that book there are vivid characters and a story. There are none in "Finnegan Wake" and without thise, it is not worth trying to decipher Joyce's wordplay.
Check out Tindall's book. It's also very helpful.
"The Sound and the Fury" was one of the most amazing reading experiences I had in high school. It remains one of the most important milestones in my life for myriad reasons. I love that exasperating but ingenious deconstruction of the "normal" storytelling process. I'm so glad I stuck with it until the entire picture began to develop like a Polaroid photo. And, yes, I love both Joyce books, too.
The sound in the fury makes much more sense if you have read Faulkner‘s other books set in Yuknapatawpaw county.
A masterpiece. Not difficult at all. It is somehow a shame to call this book this way.
@@ΓιώργοςΜεταξάκης-ξ2ο I agree that it's a masterpiece. But I've noticed that lots of people agree with her that it's a difficult read. I loved it myself.
I read this in college. And once I got the rhythm of the stream of consciousness chapter, I fell in love with it.
Found it not difficult so much as bothersome to read. His 'Absalom, Absalom', however, is on my list of the ten best novels I've ever read. Got so drawn into it that it was like swimming underwater, holding my breath. Had to take a break every now and then, to get air. And then back in. (His 'As I Lay Dying' is far better IMHO than TSatF, and is funny to boot.)
Another contender just based on writing is The Silmarillion. While technically a cohesive narrative, it's more like it's Tolkien's behind-the-scenes outlines for a whole series of books smashed together. Besides the complexity of the events and character relations, it's also written in this extremely dry old-fashioned English that's sometimes hard to wrap your head around.
To be fair, The Silmarillion was never really intended for publication.
All of Tolkien's works were really an excuse for him to enjoy his penultimate nerd's nerd personal hobby: creating languages. He just loved to create languages, and he knew how history, geography, folklore, and time affected all real-world languages, so Arda and Middle Earth were mostly just his way to build those real-world influences into his created languages. When he was originally writing The Hobbit, he intended to write a stand-alone fun fantasy story with no intention of it being part of the Middle Earth saga, but he just couldn't help putting so much of it in, especially the songs and poetry.
On my fourth read-through of Finnegans Wake currently. The first time took about a year with an average of roughly two pages a day. Felt I understand about 20 pages worth of it, but what I did get was stunningly beautiful, a way of linking what things feel like to experience with the abstract concepts and symbols the words represent.
The second read-through blew my head off. I've never found so much in a single work to enjoy in any piece of art, not just literature.
On the third read-through I compiled my own version of the text out of some of the more poetic and comprehensible passages, which comes in around a hundred pages.
For the fourth read-through I'm now supplementing it with the Naxos recording read by Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan. At this point it's just an endless wormhole of ideas and inspiration. Hope you get into it one day as it's well worth it!
Wow, four times, that's so cool that you love it so much! I read that it's the kind of book that you can explore for your whole lifetime, I'm just super impressed you understand any of it
@@DrawntoBooks What I've found helpful is not actively trying to understand it. Just try to hear the music in the language itself and let it wash over you. The less you struggle to understand the more clear it becomes with repeated exposure. It's a kaleidoscope, so whatever patterns your mind is able to grab in the moment is what you'll see. Cheers!
Get Joseph Campbell’s Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake.
Was it not Ulysses for which Campbell wrote skeleton key? (What do I know?) May I add, read in a group and read aloud. No requirements for group membership, but the more varied the experience of the members, th3 more fun it will be.
@@TimDchubs1
👍
Hegel deserves to be on the list. I haven't read Phenomenology, but I have read Elements of the Philosophy of Right and it felt like an achievement to be able to dissect and analyse it.
revisiting phenomenology after reading joyce, hegel seems to me to be downright explicit. of course there are concepts which are difficult to grasp, but the language itself, i would argue, is as clear as it could reasonably be expected to be
I wouldn't call it hard in the same way. Hegel is hard because he's unconventional in a way but he's not ambiguous. Once you become acquainted to hegelian philosophy it all becomes pretty clear, not so hard. But I think it's very hard to do it on your own just by reading his works. You have to follow a course on it. At least that's how I became familiar with it. When I started the course, I really thought it would be the hardest of my classes, but now it turns out it might be one of the easiest.
If you're interested I might give you infos and explain stuff to help you in your reading.
Edit : it's also a matter of practice. As my teacher says, it's a bit like a new language you have to learn.
Philosophy isn't really fiction
@@fluffysheap The word ‘(Fiction)’ in the title has been added since I made my comment.
Finnegans Wake, Finnegans Wake, it's going to be Finnegans Wake! I've tried. More than once. I have made it 14 pages in...max
This may sound a little crazy, but I tried to pour through Joyce's Finnegans Wake a month ago while taking help from my 13-year-old cousin. I seriously took every input he gave, and tried to view each paragraph, heck, each word through that lens. We couldn't get past page one but we did make a couple of fun discoveries on the way 😂😂
*paw through, not pour through.
Pore, not pour.
@@johnkrieger185 This needs pause for thought.
@@johnkrieger185 poor
Por favor. @@yeohi
I think the key to "read" Finnegans Wake is in what you said about the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. Joyce is not using language to convey meaning, but to convey music, in all its parameters: melody (sentences), harmony (clusters of words), timbre (the different languages, rhythm (word spacing & punctuation), etc. So, the book works more as a symphony, than as a novel. You don't listen to Beethoven's Fifth to rationalize every note that is being plucked, but to submerge in the mass of sounds & flow with the music. That approach to Finnegans Wake make it very enjoyable, in spite of you understanding what is going on (which does not mean that it's utter nonesense, but rather that the motifs are scattered all along the work). It was something not unusual in its time: Kandinski made music with his paintings, Schoenberg was thinking his music in terms of colors, &c. As you said, Joyce is, in his core, very playful, & if you let go with the flow of it, eventually will be able to play with him in the game he's proposing. It's quite intimidating at first, for certain.
He is writing a normal novel, with all the imagery there, you have to understand it like any other book. It is not a symphony, This is simply false. It is only true for Book II ch 2, that's it, that represents the most abstract and deepest part of sleep.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 ok.
I think that your comment is very intriguing. Not sure that I agree 100% but I like the thought. I feel like I am letting go of many other forms of knowing this work if I try to fit it into any type of category. I especially balk at the "dreaming" idea. Okay, yes it represents stream of consciousness and the dream realm is it's playground but this book is so much more than that. The symphony is only a tiny part of the experience, but the idea definitely resonates in the work. I will file it for later reference as I continue to coax meaning from the pages. Thank you.
@@anthonybrakus5280 Yeah, I mean, of course musicality is only an aspect of how Joyce employs words, but it's a major one, imo.
It's also very evident for me, as another commenter pointed out (alas in what I perceived as a very rude manner, that's why I parried that conversation), that there is a syntactic/narrative progression of the work (otherwise it would be utter nonesense), but that's also the case in musical composition. The concept of 'programmatic music', developed by romantic composers delves deep into that idea: take, for instance, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", where by the mere modulations of the melodies for the Tzar's Anthem & the Marsellaise, he depicts not only the Franco-Russian war, but also which faction is winning or losing at each point of the work. Cesar Frank's "The Accursed Hunter" is another exemplar case of orchestral music having a heavy narrative inclination.
My point is that it's clear that Joyce's main composition concern was not using words for clarity of exposition or anything akin, so trying to brute force comprehension as if the work were a very compact riddle (which seems to be a common approach among those frustrated with this book) is by no means the best way to read it, let alone enjoying it.
A musical approach is the one that was useful for me, & I find that the clues suggesting such an approach are quite evident in the book, but in the end it is only an example of how to approach the book not from a syntactic/narrative centered position.
I'm sorry if my words become entangled at some point. I'm afraid it's not a very easy idea I'm trying to convey, & English is not my native language. I would struggle to express this point in Spanish as well.
Regards!
I think I understand what you are saying. I definitely find the same kind of revelatory nuance in musical ideas. I really learned a lot about the mathematical abstractions present in Bach's work. I read another masterpiece of Western art called "Goedel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid" which spelled out the clear relationship of math ideas with Bach's work. He introduced the concept of homeomorphism and showed how a piece by Bach is homomorphic to a concept in number theory. It's truly a once in a hundred years type of work.
I have a small selection from my library that I keep on the night stand next to my bed for quick access... Finnegans Wake, The Road to Reality, The Bible, Complete Shakespeare, Goedel, Escher, Bach and a few others that change depending on what I am currently interested in (usually math or physics related). I'm a musician and love music. I have studied a lot of compositional theory, but I wish I knew more about historical theory and artist's intention. The ideas you shared about 1812 Overture are wonderful. Some day I will make the time to learn more in that area. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with me. I am always glad to learn and the things you have so far talked about are quite fascinating. 👍🏾
I don’t mean to be that obnoxious guy here, and I’m not trashing anyone who struggled with this book, but I don’t find Sound and the Fury to be nearly as difficult as many people claim. By the end of the book, you will start to understand everything. Upon a second read, you will get it. It’s fragmented and stream of consciousness, but the answers are mostly all there. If I would pick a Faulkner book to put on this list, it would without a doubt be Absalom Absalom; a brilliant novel, truly, but one of the more difficult books I’ve read. That said, it is worth your time but I would recommend doing Sound and the Fury first for story reasons. If you’re unfamiliar with Faulkner, try As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, or Sanctuary.
There's no explanation for why I read Gravity's Rainbow the first time. Without a chart of
the characters, I was adrift for most of it, even as I was catching hold of some of the
better vignettes. The second reading was a revelation as it became as easy as pie to fit
not only the characters together, but their organizations as well. Pynchon runs a pretty
tight ship.
On the third reading I had the pleasure of remembering these small stories within the
story, as they were coming up for review. In one of them, the tragedy of an isolated
submarine and its skeleton crew sees them "so lonely that their only hope was that
they might die of it."
Something that could be useful to anyone reading GR would be an index, but who ever
heard of that in a novel? Still, if one could look up the entry at Byron The Bulb, the risk
of addiction to GR would go way up. It is an intensely humane and ghastly and hilarious
story, and so is Gravity's Rainbow.
EDIT: The adjectives chosen by the Pulitzer board are an embarrassment; they're finding "unreadable" a book they haven't read. The "turgid" crack reminds me of William Hazlitt's lamentable misfire while criticizing Samuel Johnson: "He always writes on stilts,"
indicating that William looked into Johnson about as diligently as the board looked into Pynchon.
I agree. Not nearly as difficult as Ulysses or F. Wake. There was a story. One needs to realise it has vignettes, many brilliant. Like the conversation between two skin cells discussing what it will be like to rise to the surface and die. I'm read it only once and need to give it another shot. I admire you for giving it three tries. Couldnt get through Mason and Dixon. Vineland was readable but not fascinating. Same goes for Inherent Vice. At least its a story. I shall have to tryn "Against the Day'.
Well said
These books are pretty nuts. Remembrances of Lost Time was the most difficulty book I've ever read personally; there's sentences that go on for entire paragraphs.
I've still never read it, but I read a fascinating book by Lydia Davis where she talks about translating it, and all the challenges Proust's French poses for making it both understandable in English and true to the spirit of the original. Basically, he's as difficult to read in French as in translation!
I read an excerpt of it in World Lit, and that was enough for me. It was the dullest thing I ever read; how can someone write such a long book about trying to fall asleep?
I read the first one. Swann's Way. Definitely some long sentences. But it had its moments, and great prose. Still, it wasn't fun enough to make me want to read the other six or so books. I almost never read a whole book series because I never get drawn in that much. Although I did read the Book of the Dun Cow trilogy.
@@theboombody I'm finishing the Dark Tower series now; it's probably the first series to really hook me in, but some books are better than others. If you're real adventurous, Gormanghast is a bit slow but worth the time because it has such flashes of brilliance
My 1st college English professor (1970 or so) told me if you can read The Sound and the Fury you can read anything. I read it. He also suggested I try Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.. I tried. Ulysses would be a bridge too far.
I would add "Riddley Walker", a post-apocalyptic novel written in a devolved form of English that is difficult to understand at first, but gets easier as you continue to read it...
I first encountered it as a play in Manchester back in the Eighties, starring a young David Threlfall, which made the book easier to understand.
@@PsilocybinCocktail I went to see that at the Royal Exchange as well.
Glad someone mentioned this one.
My copy's on a shelf... gathering dust...
I really enjoyed "Riddley Walker," read it twice so far and the second time was much more comprehensible than the first. A fun fact is that the author, Russell Hoban, wrote a series of children's picture books about a badger named Frances ("Bedtime for Frances" is one - that should give you a sense of the intended audience). When I read "Riddley" the first time, I was astonished that the same man had written both. Check them out, especially to read to a child aloud.
Fantastic book.
Somewhere at the bottom of the Baltic Sea lies a copy of "House of Leaves", thrown off a cruise ship by a PHD in biochemistry fully capable of completing and understanding it.
He's as green as it gets and still he dispatched it to the deep.
I really liked this. It also reads like a poem. And I don't blame the biochemistry PhD: the sea will claim its own; those that were meant for the deep, like a house of leaves, to the deep will reach
I loved House of Leaves! It's an amazing story about relationships among families, friends, lovers, and people who never truly meet - and it's bursting at the seams with Easter eggs. But I have to admit that it helps to take notes when you're reading it. 😉
Very illegal to throw things off of cruse ships
I actually found House of Leaves very easy to understand. Now granted, it's a thick and involved read but it all made sense to me. But that's my take
So you're the one. 😀@@grapefruitm00n
I love "Ulysses". It isn't as hard to read as people think. It's funny, clever, and well worth it.
I'm not brave enough to tackle "Finnegan's Wake" yet.
Here's the key to Finnegan's Wake: read it aloud. You'll be surprised at how much you get when you hear the words spoken.
👍
I once tried reading it and didn’t get far. Then I heard a recording of a passage (read, I think, by Joyce himself), and oddly enough, it made perfect sense!
I knew someone that read it aloud on the street. Most people thought he was a preacher, until they listened more carefully!
I bailed on Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, and Finnegan's Wake. Life is already too short to read all the books I would like to read. I read Ulysses because it was assigned in an Irish Renaissance class and was glad for the experience. The Sound and the Fury I would not put on the list. I loved how the succeeding narratives filled in the blanks left by Benjy. It remains one of my favorites.
The Sound and the Fury is my favorite Faulkner, although I had to read it in a class.
They endured.
Agree, life is too short for all these dang books!
Also, hello fellow Coloradan 😄
It was Faulkner's favorite book of his, by which I mean, he felt like he came closest to succeeding hin his aims with it.@@Snardbafulator
I read all of the books you mentioned - along with well over 100 others - within my last year of High School, which was actually my Junior year. Yes, graduated me a year earlier basically they didn't know what else to do with me. I loved Ulysses " Too deep for rme Stevie..." and I loved Finnegans'Wake "...riverrun, past Eve and Adams..." is twoeasy....“Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.”...It was his 'great comic book' as he liked to call it. Yes - difficult, beastly bites by buggery! BTW: great video, really, great.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski definitely needs an honorable mention.
I love House of Leaves, but I suspect its reputation is a bit harshly earned. It can definitely be read a fair number of ways, but once you sit down and make an actual choice on how you approach it, it becomes a lot more manageable. I think for most it's the simple fact that you want to read it straight-through as a novel, but the format goes out of its way to distract you from that.
I found myself somewhat disappointed then when I realized how little most of this narratives have to do with the resolution.
House of Leaves is demonstrably less complex or "difficult" than any of these books
That's why I said honorable mention, only. Honestly, you "readers" are the most arrogant lot out there.
Great read.
I had been curious about it from the time it first came out. But I did wonder if it was more "style over substance." I just don't have the mental energy for that. I am willing to deal with an unconventional writing style if the story is well done and has a strong conclusion. But to go through a bunch of hassle just to be disappointed in the end? Ugh.@@melvinshaw7574
Once upon a time, I was tripping on LSD and idly flipped through Ulysses. Up to that point out had been impenetrable. I was not sure that I was really reading what I was reading because it was funny and lucid. Some kind of S&M scene between a husband and wife. So, I bookmarked the page and resolved to look at it again when I was sober. I was astonished that it was definitely there and just as weird and wonderful as it was when I had been tripping.
I bought "Finnegans Wake" second hand in a bookstore, and found on its first page a note written by its former owner:
“Once you get past the first hundred pages, it’s a concentrate of pure delight.”
... I guess I'll never know.
😂😭
Both Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are hilarious. The Sound and the Fury is not as hard as its reputation. Joyce is funny -- and Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is incredible.
Funny you say that - I actually agree with Nabokov that the last section of Ulysses is the weakest of the 18.
For sure! IJ riffs on GR. In my own mind, I've conflated them into 'Bananas Foster Wallace'.
@@Tolstoy111it’s beautiful and makes the whole novel worth it. It rids itself of all the confusing stylistic choices, and becomes 100% Raw and honest and we finally see what this whole book was about… why were followed these guys wandering the streets for 17 episodes.
@@samw5767 Bannana Breakfast!
@@CalcprofOh, crap. I just realized who Donald Trump and Elon Musk sound like.
I took a graduate class that just studied Ulysses. The best way I figured out how to approach it was to first follow along with an audio book, then I read it again while looking at the Gifford Annotations and the Hastings Guide. Then I began to see character motivations, heartbreaking loss, Stephen's entire journey, and I wrote a short screenplay dissecting Molly's "Penelope" episode, and then presented a different paper on why the "Circe" episode was written as a play. Ulysses is my second favorite novel.
What's your first?
@@DrawntoBooks Finally!! I have often thrown out there similar stuff that the OP did here, and almost never is there the proper response. When someone finishes a comment with "...And then she finished second. To another women by the way. A women you may have heard of" the correct thing to do is ask for the name of the winning women! Good job, Drawn2Books.
@@DrawntoBooks Dune by Frank Herbert. I've loved that book since I was fourteen years old and I've read it five times in my life. I'm on the older side. 😉
The golden age of science fiction is need 14@@a.gunter2893
sometimes 13
My father rarely spoke of his college days in the engineering school at Stanford. Everything to do with engineering came easy to him, but he also took a required English class that he mentioned more than once over the years. He was so proud to have gotten through "Ulysses"!
As he should’ve been!
I think you should also have mentioned "The waste land" by T.S. Eliott. It is basically a poem-novel featuring time shifts, language shifts, full of literary references both modern and ancient.
It is basically Joyce, but in verses.
The only thing at all difficult about The Waste Land is knowing the allusions. Much, much easier than Joyce and much, much shorter. He even gives you notes!
The Waste Land is so much better written!
I was a member of the National Forensics League in high school, and read a section of this for poetry interpretation competition. It always scored high with the judges (most of whom were English teachers).
I love that poem; it is amazing. Made a huge impression on me.
Waste Land and Ulysses were published in same year of 1922. Both authors admitted a debt to Wagner (each work containing numerous references) and were striving to make literature have the same visceral power as Wagner's music.
Yes ! Just the opening three lines ;
' April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land / Mixing memory and desire....
Samuel Beckett's "Trilogy" - Stream of consciousness, but icy and clipped, with that consciousness slowly dissolving throughout. Joyce's protege, but the minimalist to JJ's maximalist. Beautiful prose!
👍
First book was great, second less so. I can't believe the third was written for any other reason than to make a trilogy.
Fail better!@@johnkrieger185
The problem with Finnegans Wake is not that it's meaningless, but rather that it is too meaningful. Too many meanings are compressed into each sentence.
A similar confusion surrounded Ulysses when it was first published. Most critics believed it to be utterly unstructured, like modern life. It is on the other hand fiendishly over- structured, but the structure is hidden, buried in the prose. Each chapter has its own colour, symbol, art, or science, and corresponds to a part of the body and a part of the Odyssey.
I use Finnegans Wake as a type of I-ching. Open it at random and see what meaning it can hold for the news of the day or whatever. This makes reading it way more fun. It's like a huge goldmine, but you have to tunnel through a lot of rock to get to the ore.
"The problem with Finnegans Wake is not that it's meaningless, but rather that it is too meaningful." This sums it up well.
It's "Finnegans" not "Finnegan's." There's a reason why it's written that way. Update: Here's a hint-"vicus of recirculation → ricorso, Giambattista Vico's concept of circular history"
Which is...? It's okay; I think you can get away with spoiling this one.
It’s wordplay. Can be read as the wake of Finnegan (if there’s an apostrophe, and what one would understand if it was said aloud), but because there’s no apostrophe, it cna be read as a command for Finnegans (pl) to wake.
However, since there’s no punctuation for “Finnegans, wake!” either, then it is deliberately open to interpretation and (probably) making the point that punctuation is as important as the language which it punctuates… yet our dreams and thoughts have no punctuation…
@@duncanklf Thank you! I won't lie, now not only does that make sense, but I think it's going to improve the reading experience. Kind of sets the mood to know that he's playing word games right from the title on!
as if **that** was the biggest issue one could have with Mr. Joyce's tome.
"Rise and fall and rise again, sleeping and waking, death and resurrection..."
I really enjoyed reading Derrida although it's not easy to read full page sentences with heavy footnotes. It was a real mental training to juggle the complex details he includes and relationships between them.♡ Thank you Derrida♡
Having twice attempted to read Derrida's _Of Grammatology_, I consider that book unreadable. As I do Foucault, & numerous other French "literary critics".
But in another way, I would also consider the works of Marquis de Sade unreadable. The man has managed to take a subject that should be endlessly interesting -- bizarre & kinky sex -- & made it BORING. Anyone who defends de Sade as having intellectual value is not talking about what's de Sade wrote, but what they want him to have written. (And said person likely didn't read de Sade.)
@@llywrch7116 Could Sade been trying to keep from running afoul of the censors? Just a thought. Derrida also could have been trying to preserve his legacy...by being obscure.
@@JJ-tu1kg He's a theorist of literature. Beyond that, f*** if I can figure out what he says.
@@raylopez99 De Sade definitely ran afoul of the censors. Spent time in the Bastille for his books.
As for Derrida, the French historian Emmanuel Ladurie once commented in a Q & A session, "Ambiguity has its uses. Look at Derrida."
That some literature faculty continue to assign and even revere Derrida is one of the great mysteries of life on earth. What a waste of time; in graduate school, however, you don’t know any better, and haven’t learned to think for yourself about such authors and their alleged importance. So you struggle to get through one or another such book, and at the end of the day all the jumbled, turgid, incomprehensible prose is gone forever from memory.
I read Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the end of Ulysses loud to myself several times after another. The fourth time, I suddenly felt like I was in another person's brain.
Other honorable mentions.
Beckett’s trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, the unnameable
William Gaddis: the recognitions, jr
Robert musil: the man without qualities
Proust: remembrance of things past
Any of the four Chinese classics, especially the story of the stone
Tale of the genji
I'd add Late Henry James to the list as well. I am reading the Recognitions atm and don't get the difficulty hype. JR on the other hand, looks genuinely obtuse,
@@funlesbian Funny, I was once obsessed with SBeckett, especially his 'Trilogy', yet am unable to read James. Have tried again and again and am simply unable to slip in, as it were.
@@castelodeossos3947 i swear (late) James is the real modernist final boss. Finnegans Wake is a DLC side quest
I was going to suggest all strange away by Beckett, it's short and not necessarily difficult to get through, but from what i remember the language use was quite special(its been a few years since I read it). It always pops into my head when people talk about books that are difficult, even though I really enjoyed it. 😂 I just think a lot of people might not bother after the first page or so.
Clockwork Orange
Nice list. I've read and studied 4 out of 5 (Including my university senior thesis on Ulysses, independent study on Gravity's Rainbow, a graduate class on Finnegan's Wake, and The Sound and the Fury just for fun). Infinite Jest is on my short list to read soon.
I'm currently readying Finnegans wake , slowly making my way to the end but I'm determined.
Such a great video! We had to read Ulysses for class this semester, and while I found it to be a puzzle, it was quite good! I love Thomas Pynchon, I would highly recommend Mason & Dixon by him
Thank you! I think Ulysses would be fun to read in a class, it was probably really nice to have people to talk to about it while reading. Mason & Dixon sound interesting, thanks for the rec, I'd like to read him, just not Gravity's Rainbow 😬
@@DrawntoBooks All Pynchon, including his "lighter" novels The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, partakes of all the stuff that Pynchon haters hate about Gravity's Rainbow (and Pynchon haters hate _a lot)._ Including buckets of sexual ick and extremely tacky humor. Awesome ;)
what uni ?? what course??
@@sakshamdwivedi4273 it was Modernist era class
Russel Hoban's novel _Riddley Walker_ deserves mention here. It's written entirely in first person from the title character's viewpoint, but in a hypothetical British dialect of the far distant future. It's definitely a challenging read, though ultimately very rewarding.
I love that book. Most of his work in fact. Vastly underrated writer IMO. :-)
@@nodroGnotlrahC it's a masterpiece. No other work of fiction has had such a powerful effect on me. Amazing originality and imagination of concept!
Thanks for adding dear old Really, once you are four or five pages in, you will pick up Riddley’s speech, and his spelling which is phonetic. The dialect lets Hoban create all sorts of wordplay. He has invented quite an interesting world, with Neolithic farms, except for all the metal to be had everywhere; two religions; mythologies. The place names are all based on Kent, the farm practices on Butser Ancient Farm, the puppet show on Punch, the central legend of Elsa based on a wall painting in Canterbury, the green man is more common in old British churches than the cross.
Readers should also enjoy Hobans book for older children, The Mouse and his Child.
You might like Clockwork Orange then.
The first time I read it, I didn’t know there was a glossary of Nadsat at the back. I managed pretty well. The film is excellent as well. The angry middle aged white guys that descended on the Capitol J6 make me think of Alex and his droogs.@@talastra
I thought there was something wrong with me when I could not complete Ulysses after two attempts. Now I know.
Finnegans Wake is an obscure, willfully difficult waste of time. Its also unique and rock n roll! Hearing it on audiobook , read by an irish person is a great experience. I have listened to parts of it many times. I don't understand most of it but it is pleasant to hear. It doesn't matter to me which bit i hear or read or what order it is in.
Good points. Reminds me of how in Asia certain wealthy people collect hardback books...so they can put them on bookshelves to impress visitors, never intending to read them.
@@raylopez99Everyone does that in the west. That's why you talk to people about books rather than giving them a thumbs up when you see it on their shelf. If they can't say anything about it you know who you're dealing with
@@sunkintree true...a f'en ilierate...a 'visual lerner' of the Yt variety!
"The Castle" by Kafka should be on any most-difficult-to-read book list. That novel will most certainly put your patience to the test.
Took me two years to finish, and I love Kafka. 😅
I think it is fitting that it is unfinished.
The joke : The Castle is such an elusive a read that even Kafka didn’t finish it …
When I finished it I wrote in my diary that after such a hermetic book I need something opposite, so I picked 'Who Killed Palomino Molero' by Llosa. And yes, they are both splendid and thought provoking books with opposite grades of difficulty
Not difficult at all. Quite entertaining, actually.
Perfect countdown. I have never been able to get more than 50 pages in to Finnigan’s Wake.
In the scifi world, Samuel Delany's Dhalgren also hops on the postmodern train. A great term for Gravity's Rainbow: "maximalism" - long and complex, digressive. To me, Gravity's Rainbow isn't much different from an epic fantasy, with lots of subplots and characters and flashbacks, and long descriptions of locations, clothing, and food.
+1 for _Dhalgren._ Imma make my third attempt, probably next year.
Dahlgren was the only book I ever threw into the garbage. Literally. I might have acted in haste, but with conviction.
I love Dahlgren. It's definitely a difficult read though. Hard to get traction and build momentum. Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series feels similar to me. Then there are the Burroughs cut-up novels. This are actually easy to read once you learn to read Burroughs. In my experience, reading his books chronologically gets you ready for the cut up novels.
Loved Dhalgren.. it was my second Delany book I think after The Einstein Intersection I seem to remember
Gave this one a try years ago and made it about a third of the way through (IIRC). Tough going for sure. I'd like to try again (maybe with some help) if I can find my copy...
This one is another loop, right?
Infinite Jest is like a dimestore pulp novel in complexity compared to The Recognitions or Women and Men. It's actually pretty easy to read for the most part, just really really long. All the others on this list def deserve a space in top difficult books though.
Yeah I can see that, IJ is really just difficult because of all the disruption. You’re the second person to mention those other two though, Women and Men sounds insanely difficult.
@@DrawntoBooks I'm a major William Gaddis fan (I share his views on the bad effects technique has on art) and The Recognitions is gut-bustingly difficult (although quite rewarding). My favorite of his is his short, apocalyptic barnburner Carpenter's Gothic. All his themes. His answer to The Crying of Lot 49.
When reading Ulysses: "It's not like your Taylor Swift knowledge will go very far". Brilliant!
That was really fun. You're an intelligent, and natural critic. Great picks for the top five. I have to admit, I love how DFW uses footnotes. As most, I initially found it annoying, but then I grew to enjoy getting lost, and having difficulty getting back into the headspace of the story proper. I actually try to seek out new authors who can do this now. David Mitchell comes close.
Thank you very much! DFW was such an interesting guy, I actually love the idea too, I wonder now with kindle books if that changes the reading experience drastically.
Not footnotes exactly, but Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert uses a lot of Appendixes to further explain various aspects of plot, character genealogy, and terminology employed in his Dune saga. I found myself going back and forth to understand the highly dense first book which had a lot of concepts I had to wrap my head around. Super fun time
Or DFW was a pompous twit who confused obscurity and density with depth and complexity.
@@affanshikoh5069just finished reading last night 😊
I’m sorry but could you specify what you mean by “enjoy getting lost?” I personally don’t find confusion to be a positive for storytelling, even if it’s revealed at the end what it all is.
Finnegans Wake is a lot of fun if you can let go and just immerse yourself in the current of words. Even when basic comprehension fails there tends to be plenty of elements in the text to enjoy in terms of wordplay. It's a pleasure to read on its own terms, full of interesting references, layered puns and bawdy jokes. As you read you'll find plenty of meaning will emerge from the text, even if the majority of the book evades immediate comprehension. It's meant to be a dreamlike experience and it excels at it.
You right. I loved both the ulisses and the wake
I spend eight hours a day having a dreamlike experience, why would I want to waste my conscious hours pretending to be asleep? Finnegan's Wake is just the end point of Joyce's mad experiments with language. It's spawned countless knock-offs over the years and the net result of his influence has been entirely negative. The point of prose is to communicate, if you want to do something else then you always have music, or even poetry to work with. Why on earth would you read a long novel if you can't understand the greater part of it? Unfortunately, people (especially young people) seem to think they have to profess a fascination with Joyce or they aren't one of the cool kids, but the work is utter garbage. Go and read Flann O'Brien if you want something genuinely interesting, don't fall for Joyce and his blarney.
👍
I very much hope you create more videos. I just discovered your channel and love your work. Thank you for taking the time to do these.
Thank you very much! I am definitely creating more videos :)
When I read some of these in lit class, what I found interesting was that if a student wrote like any of them, the student would fail the class. Sometimes I think we confuse mindless babble with great literature and philosophical insight. But it's just mindless babble.
You think Ulysses is mindless babble?
You have to understand that these authors were deliberately experimenting and playing with the form in which they wrote. They had already proven themselves to be brilliant writers before deviating into experimental territory. To use an analogy, if you were to watch a professional golfer deliberately slice the ball around a tree, you could say "I slice the ball like that all the time and people say I'm bad at golf." The difference is that the professional used the slice in a very self-conscious, purposeful, and deliberate way. He's aware of what he's doing, why he's doing it, and how far he needs to deviate from a normal swing. The bad golfer is not. The same applies to these modern and post-modern experiments in literature. An inexperienced student writer trying to pull off Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness or Joycean wordplay will probably fall flat on his face because he lacks the fundamentals and depth of knowledge of these masters. On the same note- someone like Joyce was so profoundly well-read in the Western canon it would make most modern literary students' heads spin.
Maybe they are mindless babble. Maybe, just maybe, the way our schools teach and grade writing is too formal and strict, and doesn't allow people to step outside the box and write in a more creative way. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow one summer, got halfway through and was totally lost. That Xmas my bonus was a big bag of the wacky tabaccy, and I subsequently finished GR in about 3 weeks. It's a blast. Easier to read in the chunky paperback edition than the massive tomes you usually see.
Read Joyces poems. You won't regret it. I am a vocalist and reading his poetry compelled me to sing it as I read. It was the only time I composed a musical score and I thank my fellow Dubliner for that. Now I will go back to singing the works of those who no longer compose and who have long since decomposed.
Joyce's works (all of them) are among the slim portion of the written word that I feel are much better to hear than to read. But the person doing the reading absolutely has to have an Irish accent to get the most out of the (almost?) musical composition.
Another thing that makes The Sound And The Fury difficult to read: Two characters have the same name, and it being all stream of consciousness, it is really hard to figure out a) that there are two Quentins, and when you know, b) which Quentin is talked about at the moment.
Also two Jasons, and Benji's name was originally Maury, after Mrs. Compson's dissolute brother. His name was changed to Benjamin at age two or three when his mental impediments became too obvious to ignore.
Once you realize that the characters are idiots and liars you can stop trying to figure out exactly who’s who and what’s going on.
I love Infinite Jest and have read it 3 times, and it is a very difficult read. Extremely funny, prescient and unique. The footnotes are really part of the book, not afterthoughts. We lost a great one when DFWallace left this life.
Could not agree more. We are poorer for his absence.
Yes, truly heartbreaking. He was an extraordinary teacher as well. His students adored him. And he wasn't easy!
@@cerealkiillar Did you know him or some of his students?
@@bnconbrio I co-taught Grammar for Writers with him at ISU back in the 90s. I knew him well.
The Pale King is still worth it.
I read The Sound and the Fury when I was 18, and since over 15 times. Ulisses 37 years old, is my favorite. Finegan just
once. It's realy tough, couldn't listen to the music of the text. A Greek friend, Nikephoros.
I began “Ulysses” in high school on a sort of dare from my English literature teacher; I finished it the summer between junior and senior years in university. 😂 . I actually read it again a few years ago while on extended vacation and found it to be much more comprehensible. Speaking of university days, I knew a young woman who was a drama student and she memorized “Molly’s soliloquy” for her MFA performance piece.
I AM going to read Ulysses, dammit. It's lying on the bed next to me.
Me too! 😆
hahaha, aren't we all. 😂😂
Ben mcevoys guide
I read it twice. Was on a very long holiday, and it was the only acceptable reading.
I've tried 3 times. Furthest I've gotten is about 150 pages. The language can be beautiful, but the story is impossible to follow.
Having entered into the drafting stage in the 1910, its surprising Tolkien's "The Silmirillion" didn't get so much as an honorable mention. Tolkien created 7 languages for his legendarium, several of which are taught at University for foreign language credit, including Quenya. Also, its complex narrative structure, cartography, extensive world-building, and expansive prehistoric lore, which is foundational to his most notable works, absolutely makes "The Silmirillion "one of the most difficult books to read.
I'd say, this video is an easy take on pop literature's most difficult reads. It has all of 'em. Infinite Jest. Gravity's Rainbow. Faulkner. Ulysses. All of them are easy reads. Of course, Finnigan's Wake is number one because it's widely accepted as the most difficult book ever written. The creator of this video has no original input whatsoever.
I don't think The Silmarillion is that difficult. It's more challenging than LOTR, but it's far from one of the hardest-to-read books ever written: its language is dry, but the events are not too difficult to follow for anyone who's comfortable with the high fantasy genre.
The most difficult aspect is the sheer number of invented place and character names to keep track of - but helpfully, the book includes an index so you can easily remind yourself of characters and places.
Frequently flicking back and forth between the story and the index means it's slow going, but not really difficult.
@@variousthings6470I agree. I remember struggling a little bit at the beginning, but when I got used to the writing style I was hooked. Loved It.
@@variousthings6470Yes, you need to read with a finger in the index pages to keep track of who everyone is. The main thing that makes it hard to read is that (not being a novel) the writing is boring.
Yeah the Silmarillion is difficult mainly because it reads as an in-world history not as a novel. Personally I had the most difficulty with remembering all the characters (especially the Valar and what their role in Middle Earth was.)
This is a good list for hard fiction books. Comparable lists can be made for philosophy and poetry. My vote is for The Waste Land by TS Elliot in the poetry arena. Plato’s Parmenides, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Lacan’s Ecrits, and Derrida’s On Grammatology are also up there for philosophy.
Moral of the story: these famously hard texts are all comprehensible because even elitist geniuses want to be understood by other elites.
Eliot is readable. I just had to keep going back after I learned more. Four Quartets made sense on my first read after grad school. If you want something up there with The Wake poetry-wise, I say Late-Celan is the closest from my experience. They say native German readers feel like they’re reading a translation from what he does to language.
IMHO, Lacan and Derrida are, mostly, actual hoaxes. They try to seem complicated, obscure and wise writers because they fake their knowledges. All these weird (invented) "mathematic" formulae are a complete nonsense.
The book, "Gadamer on Celan" is fantastic. Hans-Georg Gadamer is probably Heidegger's best student, and he reads poetry well IMO@@gibsonraymonda
Brilliant analysis of hard to read books. Thanks. Enjoyed Dubliners. Finnegan's Wake was impossible. Enjoyed James Joyce's Ulysses drama on BBC radio 4.
Loved this video. I was surprised by the inclusion of The Sound and the Fury. It's a favorite of mine, and while I found it challenging, I didn't find it particularly difficult. (This from a guy who attempted Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, and just couldn't do it.)
Same. I think the book gets a reputation for being inscrutable since it starts out with Benjy's perspective, and probably puts a lot of people off from the get-go with that. The rest isn't notably difficult.
@@cr1197 I agree, which is a shame, because his voice is so poignant. You just have to take your time.
The Illuminatus Trilogy is hard to read despite being so delicious, but only because it jumps back and forth in time and has a huge cast of characters. They're so much fun to read though, and on re-readings you'll catch many new things each time.
I read it and then I said “what did I just read?”
I gave up about 2/3rds through, I couldn't keep track after every break in reading
I've read plenty of hard books. I've read The Sound and the Fury, I've tried some of the others mentioned in this video. I've got better things to do. Gardening is as good an intellectual exercise, it engages the other muscles in the body, and it is much more rewarding in both the short and long term.
I’ve read them all. William Gaddis’ The Recognitions is in the same league of difficulty. Finnegan’s Wake is only difficult if you think there is something there. If there isn’t anything there, then it is trivially easy, but a bit pointless. I vacillate on which I believe.
The difficulty of Ulysses is widely overstated. I would instead say that it’s quite rich, but it’s not like you can’t understand it if you take a little time with it. And it’s very funny. Also, only the last chapter is pure stream of consciousness.
All of them are worth reading, with the possible exception of Finnegan’s Wake. Also, for other reasons, I would include Proust’s A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, which is genuinely difficult to comprehend, even though it doesn’t have some of the obvious obfuscations in these books.
Finnegans Wake has no apostrophe. Its title is a pun, like almost everything else in the book.
I really feel like Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake solely for himself and to flex, so I kind of fall on the "there's nothing there" side of things. Proust is someone I would like to read someday and he definitely could have been on this list! As for The Recognitions, I've never heard of that one, it sounds loooong.
Agree about The Recognitions. I got about 3/5 of the way through but could not bear to continue. Ulysses is one of my top three. Could not get into Sound and the Fury. Haven't tied the others (yet!). 😅
I agree with you about Ulysses being not that difficult. In fact I have a theory that FW was written only to prove what "unintelligible" really means, and to contrast it with the relatively accessible Ulysses.
Proust is in no way difficult to comprehend. He says exactly what he means, as clearly as he can. Most of it is philosophical musing rather than action, and he lets the sentences run on as long as he likes, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to understand.
And Finnegans Wake is not an exercise in incomprehensibility; it’s a book about archetypes rather than specifics, equating all possible histories with each other (world history, personal history, myths and stories, etc) as a sort of epic pun, and thus written entirely in puns. Every word in it does have an intended meaning - several intended meanings. The comprehensibility problem arises not because Joyce specifically wanted to be incomprehensible but, I think, because he didn’t fully understand how serious the risk of being incomprehensible was, since HE always knew what he meant by everything, so it all seemed “gettable” to him. So he just kept complicating his puns and allusions for years, without quite realizing how far from an audience he had wandered.
Though the book does still have an audience. Just a very very small one. If you want to start getting to know it, search around online for guides and summaries and you’ll find them. Happy Commenting Everybody!
I've read excerpts of "Finnegan's Wake" and was well aware of the danger posed to my mental well-being, so, I have not attempted the full thing. On the other hand, I have read "Ulyssess" cover to cover although it took me five attempts and over 40 years to do so. I couldn't not read one of the most important books of the 20th century. Love it or hate it, this books impact was immense. The rules on obscenity changed due to this book, largely because of its' difficulty. The judge who decided that "Ulyssess" was not obscene stated that (and I paraphrase here) no one could possibly read this as pornography. Many of the books we read today would not have been allowed under the old obscenity laws if James Joyce had not paved the way. Take warning, in the U.S. there is an attempt to roll back the clock to where a select group of people decide what you can and can't read.
I read The Sound and the Fury in high school. Being from Mississippi I was eager to read Faulkner. After that introduction I never picked up another of his books.
What introduction? It's in four sections of about the same length. The first section is very different from the others.
@@Tolstoy111 THE SOUND AND THE FURY WAS MY INTRODUCTION TO FAULKNER!!!!!
@@lorenstribling6096 ah ok! Anyway it’s a wonderful novel. You just have to be prepared for modernism in full bloom.
@@Tolstoy111 I was 14 or 15 and I don't think the teacher had ever read the book herself. I just remember her saying how important it was. And then we got to read the book. And figure it out ourselves.
@@lorenstribling6096 oh my that’s too young for it
“The Golden Bowl” by Henry James was probably the most difficult novel I read in college. Probably not as difficult as these 5, but it was still very challenging.
I’ve enjoyed sending sentences from James’s novels to a friend who’s an English professor at a prestigious college and asking him to explain what they, the sentences, mean. I’ve never gotten answer.
I would have said James. I remember looking at one of his novels and finding it took me ages to read even a single page. I can normally speed read. The language was just so opaque.
@@iankemp1131 Later in life, he started dictating his novels to a secretary who typed them. When you do that you lose a sense of the shape and contour of a phrase.
I posted this before I finished the video but knew in my heart it would be mentioned in it:
"Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?" - H.G. Wells, in a letter to his friend, James Joyce
I didn’t enjoy Infinite Bore but found the best way to read it was to just resist the compulsion to check the footnotes/appendix and simply press on through the main narrative first.
I don’t agree with the post about Ulysses being tough- it’s really not, just kind of a rip-off of Flaubert’s Temptations Of St Anthony” at the end, after an otherwise pretty simple story.
A tough novel you might have added was “The Confidence Man” by Melville. So subtle it’s like reading mud.
Thanks for your detailed review! I'd throw an honorary mention to 'Dhalgren', by Samuel R. Delaney. It's far more understandable than the one's you've listed, but to gain that understanding you have to suffer through some significant psychological torment, including embarrassing and uncomfortable dinner parties in nearly empty housing developments. It borrows from Finnegan's Wake by starting with the last half of a sentence and ending (after perhaps a thousand pages) with the first half of the same sentence. I read it every few years - it is a painful literary masterpiece.
I read dhalgren last year, it took me like seven months and I feel like an absolute idiot for not understanding it.
read delaney's times square red--times square blue and dahlgren makes more sense
@@appaatemomo-freePalestine Maybe, but the porn was hot; I'm pretty sure that's why it was Delany's best-selling novel. Also, yes. Free Palestine.
Try Nova and Einstein Intersection (both quite short)@@richardkatz2811
@@talastra Fair, though the sex scenes were definitely a mixed bag for me. Thanks for your support for Palestine
Crikey - I own all of those books and have not been able to read any of them. I feel a little bit comforted by your analysis. Thank you.