I share many of the author's delights. I would add another source of "short little difficult books": old books, written in an old form of your modern language.

My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I ended learning them by rote.

Even translated, some short books from a very different culture far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin" or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.

A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Páramo" the reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality. Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more about style tricks.

I don't have anything to say about the overall subject of this post because I am terrible at reading difficult books but do want to chime in to say that Exercises in Style is pretty fun to read (it's the same dumb story told 99 times in different ways, most just a page or so long).

I happened to have been assigned Moby Dick in 9th grade English class. Foolishly put off reading it until the night before the book report was due. Got about 1/3 of the way through and went through life thinking it was boring. Fast forward decades, I'm now reading it for real. It hilarious, it's pause encouraging, I love it! (And I'm still only 1/3 through.)

> Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my life.

I sometimes half-jokingly maintain that Moby-Dick was really written as part of an early BOOK-IT [1] reading incentive program to improve literacy among whalers by disguising a novel as a cetological guidebook.

There are entire chapters devoted to the harpooning process, sperm whale anatomy, maritime legal disputes over whale harvesting, etc.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!

One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand Bascule, or read it "normally".

Nice little article.

Another personal suggestion in this vein: The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin (trans. Sally Laird), which consists entirely of unattributed dialogue. It's challenging at first but once you get a feel for the rhythm and start recognizing characters by how they speak, it becomes a really charming read.

Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, Penguin Classics (1981 edition).

Extremely tortuous phraseology. But I finished it, with gritted teeth at 15.

I have long since abandoned the desire to finish every book I start. Life is too short.

"The Righteous Mind" by Haidt is interesting to me on the difficulty scale. From any technical analysis (like grammar, sentence structure etc), it's not difficult at all. It wasn't boring to me, and I didn't really get stuck on anything in particular, but it still took me two weeks to finish it.

"Short little difficult plays" - Anything by Ionesco: Rhinoceros, The Leader, etc., etc.

The non-fiction version of this would be to read primary sources from long ago or written in specialized language. I'm reminded of Cal Newport's advice to ease into challenging books by first reading a secondary source which explains the nuance of the primary source. Something like An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn before reading the Odyssey itself.

It's been somewhat disappointing researching the reading habits of people who read many books a year. For the reader who tears through ebooks on Kindle Unlimited, they mostly read genre fiction in a few categories. The same thing has been happening to me. I used to challenge myself to read "the classics" but lately before bad I reach for genre fiction written at an 8th grade level.

For many, reading is just another form of entertainment. Maybe call it the hollywoodification of books? While it's far better form of entertainment than TikTok or Instagram, the true potential is in its ability to make us smarter by challenging our thoughts and dieas.

When books are seen as just another entertainment product in a saturated marketplace, why chose something which makes you struggle?

Knut Hansun's Mysteries was difficult like this for me. I think I'm glad I read it but I wouldn't have made it through my reading if Growth of the Soil hadn't been so damn good.

What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?

Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.

If anyone is looking for a reading list, or even just a book-downloading-binge list, I pulled 18 titles off of this one. There are, of course, even more, but if you're doing that then you probably already have the McCarthy and Dick titles. Usually HN loses on any given day, but with a score like that I doubt all the other sites I skim will be able to beat it even together.

I've been slogging through Blood Meridian for the past couple of months, only taking little sips of content here and there, but it finally clicked for me last night and I'm fully engaged with it. And man was it worth the effort. The way he paints scenes with just the right amount of words is pretty amazing. I'd love to see this book adapted onto film.

I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was.

A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":

Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition. It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would recommend prioritizing reading the Fictions and The Aleph collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with would be "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", and "The Immortal". If you want slightly more sentimental, "The Circular Ruins" is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is hilarious.

If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a "novel", Nabokov's Pale Fire is a great read and a good introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you might think.

Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at first, but some of them, especially Seven American Nights, Forlesen, and the trio of stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, are similar to Pale Fire insofar as they are far more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story collections, there's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, Forlesen, Seven American Nights, Death of the Island Doctor), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" (Tracking Song, The Doctor of Death Island), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.

If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. He was influenced by Burroughs (Naked Lunch would be another recommendation here if you can stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will challenge its reader in many ways. It's very interesting to go straight from this into Crash, which covers a lot of the same material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say The Atrocity Exhibition deserves this praise(?) just as much, even if it's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political stunt pulled using one of its sections (called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan) belong more to the Situationists' games than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything Baudrillard even pointed to.

> why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob!

Ok, this nerd-sniped me. Are we saying this now? Feels like a reference. Found it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

WTF? If the term is about superficial depth wouldn't the bros be into like, abridged graphic-novel adaptations of difficult Russian classics, and not actually diving into genuinely difficult stuff regardless of quality? Shouldn't highbrow literary types sneer with greater cleverness or at least clarity?

> I also find it strange to even worry about “pretentious” readers or “brodernists” hyping themselves up to read some new, huge tome (Schattenfroh this season it seems) in an age when few people read anything at all. Reading a very long book always takes some dedication, some challenging of yourself. So what?

Ok good, TFA actually does get it