<p>parents: you probably have read hundreds or thousands of books. there is bound to be one great, ESOTERIC literature. what is it? i’m looking to challenge myself with literature that is</p>
<li>difficult, difficult literature. basically, after re-reading the piece for the fourth time, you suddenly give a yelp “OMG I GET IT!!!”</li>
<li>of course, meaningful</li>
</ol>
<p>please give title and author</p>
<p>Very odd, difficult (in an endurance sense) and LONG:
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace</p>
<p>Esoteric & difficult:
anything by Faulkner</p>
<p>Difficult & extremely rewarding, interesting non-fiction:
The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene</p>
<p>100 years of solitude</p>
<p>One Hundred Years of Solitude: seconded. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is also great by the same author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.</p>
<p>Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Or anything by Pynchon, but this is his masterpiece. </p>
<pre><code>Second on Faulkner, but particularly: Absalom, Absalom
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. Notoriously incomprehensible. Even the GUIDES to F.W. are tough going.
</code></pre>
<p>The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Difficult. Meaningful.</p>
<p>The Mahabharata
Milan Kundera</p>
<p>god, Walden by Henry David Thoreau…I don’t even know how I finished it much less wrote a twenty page paper on it.</p>
<p>I agree with the suggestion of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom.</p>
<p>Dostoyevsky “Idiot” , “Brothers Karamazov” ( not “Crime and Punishment” ) .
Faulkner and Marquez , Hermann Hesse “The Glass Bead Game”, “Siddhartha” , “Steppenwolf” .</p>
<p>Faulkner for sure: I suggest “Sound and the Fury.”</p>
<p>For lots of fun literary styling, Id consider Italo Calvinos If on a Winter Night a Traveler, or Invisible Cities. </p>
<p>Also, almost anything by John Barth: my favorite, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.</p>
<p>The most difficultKant’s "Critique of Pure Reason." Also, very rewarding in that, “I finally got it,” fashion.</p>
<p>I did not find “The Brothers Karamazov” to be particularly difficult, just good…long and meaningful–to say the least.</p>
<p>Faulkner’s language requires intense observation and reflection, as does the narrative voice; it will make you feel smart as you map it out, navigating the lower reaches of ‘sound’ and ‘meaning’, but I’m not sure that is a literary recommendation: The Sound and the Fury. Still, not to be missed is the everyman philosophical reflections and observations of the Father to Quinton buried withinbreathtaking, really.</p>
<p>Im surprised by those who say One Hundred Years of Solitude, it seemed a breezy read to me; in some sense, a traditional narrative with the tropical colors of “magical realism” splashed about, all of which is now run into the ground by so many North American imitators in the “art” world.</p>
<p>A creative alternative from Latin America would be the dense writing of **Carlos Fuentes<a href=“who%20I%20recently%20met”>/b</a> or Jorge Luis Borges and his short stories. The first is a whirlwind, the second a labyrinth.</p>
<p>Not to be missed:
Whittaker Chambers, Witness. I just finished reading it and I now believe it to be one of the greatest works of 20th Century literature. The politics have confused the issue; but if the 20th century had a Hamlet, he may well have been the dark figure of Whittaker Chambers. The writing is breathtakingly beautiful and lucid. Highly recommended. Great literature!</p>
<p>Of course, Thoreau’s Walden: the most difficult book on simplicity ever contemplated…life changing and affirming.</p>
<p>anything by Madame Blavatsky,…hey,FS, you’re no old man waking to the birdsong of a sunday morning or have you traded timezones?</p>
<p>No, simply running through the sound of traffic, past the church, into the quitude of Sunday Morning at Verona park…
…only to arrive back into the hustle-bustle of the internet. </p>
<p>Off to Central Park and the MET in an hour…</p>
<p>enjoy your day, roro.</p>
<p>Madame Blavatsky? How about Gurjeif? Krishnamurti had has first crush on my great, great aunt–Helen Nearing…but he was rejected.:(</p>
<p>for great Scott?</p>
<p> you certainly know your naturalists, Rorosen living the good life, I presume.</p>
<p>fwiw, she so K as something of a jet-setting, but lovable, poseur–Scott, as a man; the way god intended them.</p>
<p>** The Satanic Verses ** by Salman Rushdie. ANYTHING by Rushdie.
If you ever figure out ** Foucault’s Pendulum ** by Umberto Eco, let me know.</p>
<p>I agree Faulkner’s tough. Also agree with the mental “mapping” as he plays with timelines. Also agree that he’s tremendously rewarding and worth the effort. Ever if you don’t fully “get it,” just relax and enjoy the lush language, delivered by a master. A unique American voice. I like “The Sound and the Fury” best of what I’ve read of him so far. </p>
<p>Likewise Pynchon. I’ve read “V.” but none of his others.</p>
<p>Another difficult author worthy of a reader’s full attention: James Joyce. Many consider “Ulysses” the most challenging novel ever written in English. The more knowledge you bring to the reading, the more you’ll get out of it, specificially the Bible, Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce’s biography, Irish history, and early 20th century Dublin. Probably no book continues to arouse, vex, delight, shock, and infuriate more readers than “Ulysses.” The “action” takes place over the course of one day, the biggest of ideas played out on the tiniest of stages. People have built careers on Joyce commentary. That said, if you’re simply a lover of language, you can appreciate Joyce. I recommend starting with “The Dubliners” or “Portrait of the Artist.”</p>
<p>I also love Umberto Eco, either “The Name of the Rose” or “Foucault’s Pendulum.”</p>
<p>I recommend reading a companion commentary along with any of these books. Not absolutely necessary but it’ll probably greatly enhance the experience. </p>
<p>Nonfiction, difficult for laity if you’re not thoroughly up on your physics (as I’m not) but still comprehensible: “A Brief History of Time” by Hawking and (seconding) “The Elegant Universe” by Greene.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
<p>Faulkner or Henry James.</p>
<p>In college, I took a course devoted to Ulysses, taught by a professor I really respected and enjoyed. It was still a tough book to read and I felt pretty much overwhelmed, until we had the marathon-reading-aloud session about three weeks from the end of the semester (when we’d finished analyzing the book chapter-by-chapter, but not as a whole book). <em>Hearing</em> the book read changed it from a chore into a pleasure. Someday I’ll reread it. Or maybe I’ll buy it on tape and drive across the country with it.</p>
<p>Faulkner’s great, but start with As I Lay Dying, then work up to The Sound and the Fury. The “I got it” moments are easier to come by in the former, since the shifts in point of view are much more frequent (and more obvious), the narrative more linear and straightforward. </p>
<p>Other works to consider:</p>
<p>How about Lolita? An astounding novel–and one that’s often misunderstood. My advice is to read it through once for the story and style, then go back and read Alfred Appel’s annotated version. Appel’s notes guide you through the enormous intricacy of Nabokov’s motifs and subtexts, and his introduction is superb, an illuminating look at how Nabokov’s literary gamesmanship, often seen as cold and clever, is driven by a remarkably humane and joyful metaphysics. </p>
<p>Moby-Dick. Duh. This is, without a doubt, one of the greatest novels ever written. The first draft was completed in 18 months, a testament to the passion that fueled Melville, and you can feel the heat of his vision on every page. It’s not easy, and people sometimes get bogged down in the philosophical reflections of the cetology chapters, but it’s a transcendent, sublme work of art (and those are terms I try not to use too lightly).</p>
<p>More recent stuff:</p>
<p>Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy’s trying to keep the tradition of great literature alive, and he’s doing a pretty damn good job of it. If you think epics were a thing of the past, this book will change your mind. The style is unapologetically lofty and biblical, the content horrifically violent, but the novel is unforgettable. The subtitle of the novel (“The Evening Redness in the West”) speaks to the breadth of McCarthy’s artistic ambitions. For him, westerns are really Westerns; McCarthy may write about cowboys and indians, but he’s really concerned about the necessity of violence and the habits of mind–and their consequences–that mark the Western world. Not that McCarthy is some trying to save the world through his fiction; no, he’s a fatalist who drives a Ford F-350, and his indians are no less rapacious and cruel than his cowboys. Finally, the main character in Blood Meridian is “the judge,” a 7-foot hairless albino whose seeming omniscience is matched only by his utter heartlessness. Way scarier than any horror novel you’ve ever read. </p>
<p>Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan. I’m a slow reader, but I finished this book in one frenzied sitting on a plane ride from Orlando to LA. It’s a historical novel about the founding of Tasmania (where Flanagan is from), but its concerns are contemporary and wide-ranging. The novel can get tricky at times–as the title suggests, there is a book within a book here–but it’s written with incredible energy and momentum. If you decide to read this, try to track down an original hardcover edition. Gould writes his forbidden Book of Fish while imprisoned in a cliffside jail cell that nearly fills with water every high tide. As a result, he has to improvise when it comes to ink, using everything from his own blood to ground up sea urchins. In the original cloth edition, the chapters were printed in colors that corresponded to the impromptu ink. A cool touch–and a sign, I think, that Grove Presss realized it had a little masterpiece on its hands, a work worth the expense.</p>
<p>The Sportswriter. No literary pyrotechnics here. Richard Ford’s style is straightforward, his narrative linear, but this is a great book, as good a novel about being a middle-aged white guy as you’re likely to find. That may sound like foreign ground for someone just starting out, but some of my most thoughtful, most literate students have really liked and admired this book. This stems in part, I think, from the fact that Ford sees his character’s middle age as a kind of analogue for America itself (the sequel to The Sportwriter is called Independence Day, in case you think I’m reaching here). After 9/11, when the mainstream pundits were proudly declaring the “death of irony,” I have to admit that I was scoffing inside, thinking how Richard Ford was writing about this very thing, oh, about fifteen years before. As was Don DeLillo in White Noise, published the same year.</p>
<p>OK, I’m rambling now. Happy reading.</p>