Writers and readers around the world agree that some books are harder to read than others. On the web's largest book site, Goodreads, millions of readers share information about books with one another. Based on their reviews, we have selected the most complex literary works in history and compiled list of the hardest to read books in the world.
10. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Genre: short story, adventure.
The story of the protagonist's journey into the wilds of the Black Continent and his own heart opens the list of the most difficult books to understand. The main difficulty is the allegorical way of narration, its versatility and abundance of meanings. As well as verbose and lengthy explanations of the author, what exactly he means.
9. "Endless Joke" by David Foster Wallace
Genre: humor, satire, science fiction.
The volume of the book (it has more than a thousand pages) is just "flowers" in comparison with everything else. Readers will find alternative timelines, intertwining and diverging, more than two hundred characters and a non-linear narrative structure. And a huge number of footnotes (there are more than 388 of them). Many of them have their own footnotes, and so on ad infinitum.
If you decide to test your nerves for the endless joke, we recommend that you first find on the Internet an approximate chronology of the narrative, a list of characters and a description of the world in which the book takes place. It is not surprising that Endless Joke was translated into Russian only in 2018, almost a quarter of a century after the book was written.
8. "Crime and Punishment", Fyodor Dostoevsky
Genre: philosophical novel, crime, psychological realism.
The first (but not the last) book by a Russian-speaking author in the list of the most difficult books. The hardest thing for readers to overcome is the first hundred and a half pages, when Raskolnikov wanders about the disgusting yellow Petersburg in delirium.
And according to English-speaking readers, the most difficult thing in the book is the names. For a foreign ear, ordinary Russian names are too long and poorly remembered. Some admitted that they had to write the characters on a separate sheet and constantly check with him in an attempt to figure out who is who.
7. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez
Genre: magical realism, family saga epic fantasy.
A rare book covers such a wide layer of time as in the famous novel by Marquez. It describes the life of seven generations. And so that the reader does not doze off, the names of the characters are regularly repeated: for example, more than half of the male population of the book is named Aureliano. Try to understand who is who here, especially if the background of the book is magical realism, where the mundane and mundane are intricately intertwined with the magical and the magical.
6. "War and Peace", Leo Tolstoy
Genre: love story, military prose, history.
This book made it to the list of the most difficult to read literary works for one and only reason - the number of pages.
If you do not take into account the size of War and Peace, as well as the author's regular attempts to hit philosophy (which many readers quickly skim through), then the novel itself is very interesting. There is everything here - noble lovers, attempts at suicide, bed scenes mixed with pictures of suffering and death, and large-scale battles and mores of various strata of society. Many readers, who have reached the last page with their last strength, exclaim in ecstasy: "This is the best book of them all that we have read!"
5. "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon
Genre: satire, science fiction, history.
Quantum mechanics, animal mass extinction and speculative metaphysics are not topics for average minds. It's no easier with the structure of the narrative: one gets the impression that Pynchon tried to write as dense and rich as possible. As if his goal was to cram into 700 pages something that another author could not tell even for 2000.
Musical interludes, when the characters sing, dilute the intensity of the narrative a little, and they do it often and with pleasure. As for the rest, the text is full of hints, allusions and hidden quotes, so while reading you will have to constantly turn to the help of Google and other search engines. The novel was translated into Russian only in 2012, 39 years after its creation.
4. "Moby Dick", Gourmet Mellville
Genre: epic, adventure.
Many readers have two problems with the famous Moby Dick novel.
- First, the book is a bizarre mixture of a classic novel, essays, free flight of thought, quasi-scientific passages (for example, a boring chapter on sea animals), theatrical monologues and dialogues, and even a production drama about the hardships of slaughtering whales in the Arctic Ocean. Only the brain has tuned in to one type of storytelling, and now the action in Moby Dick takes a sharp turn.
- The second difficulty is the outdated concept of an allegory novel, which went out of fashion in the 18th century. At the same time, the symbolic language in Melville's book is difficult to guess. Perhaps this is the secret of her charm.
3. "Sound and Fury" by William Faulkner
Genre: gothic, modernism, home fiction.
In one of the most difficult literary works to read, the first part is the most difficult. There, the narration is conducted on behalf of a person with special needs. He can hardly imagine the passage of time and sometimes jumps from the past to the present and back literally in one sentence.
Many readers have compared the first part of this novel to a journey in a thick fog: it is not clear what is happening around at all, and people, trees and animals are equally indistinguishable dark silhouettes.
But if the reader is stubborn enough, by the fourth part the fog will dissipate and it will become more interesting to read.
2. "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce
Genre: experimental "word-creation, mythological and comic" novel.
There is practically no plot in "Wake". The entire book is a continuous stream of consciousness, in which the author tried to capture in words the complex, fluid matter of sleep.
And to make the reader "more fun", Joyce was engaged in word creation, puns and inserted foreign words into the text. Almost a hundred years have passed since the book was written, and literary scholars continue to argue what all this means at all. It is said that by the end of the book, Joyce himself had difficulty understanding his own work. This is not surprising, because he worked on the book for 16 years and by the end he completely forgot what he was talking about at the beginning.
1. "Ulysses" by James Joyce
Genre: modernist novel.
Topping the list of the most difficult literary works in history is another book by the Irish writer James Joyce.
It is considered a masterpiece and a model of modernist stream-of-consciousness prose.Reading "Ulysses" is a little easier than the second place in the rating, "Finnegans Wake", despite Joyce's attempts in one day of an ordinary Dublin resident to concentrate all the days of humanity from the beginning of time to the end of the century. The novel has a more or less understandable structure and even has a semblance of a plot.
However, in his work, Joyce played with the reader heartily, scattering parodies, allusions and many puzzles in abundance throughout the text. Literary critics are still struggling to resolve them.