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What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc) (5 Viewers)

bassistx

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Anything by Shakespeare without those things on the side that translate the words into Modern English lol.
 

scarybunny

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Just started Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, and it's really hard to digest.

The sentences are looooooooong winded and it's hard to tell what's relevant to the story and what's a side note.

And I have to read it because I'm doing a presentation on it (complete with tutorial paper and reflection essay). Shit.
 

emiliieee

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

all books because i'm illiterate LOL

and shakespeare coz its so hard to read it doesnt make any freaking sense
 

gouge.away

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

Ulysses - James Joyce

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil actually gave me a headache.
 

fernando

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

Nietzsche is wonderful. -eee-
 

KFunk

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Hands down -----> Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Bright guy, but a terrible writer. I only made it about 20 pages after reading the introduction before I gave up. The ideas are complex enough without having to deal with paragraph length sentences the whole time. His sentences have the nested story structure of 1001 Arabian Nights. For example:

"The same is the case with the internal intuition, not only because, in the internal intuition, the representation of the external senses constitutes the material with which the mind is occupied; but because time, in which we place, and which itself antecedes the consciousness of, these representations in experience, and which, as the formal condition of the mode according to which objects are placed in the mind, lies at the foundation of them, contains relations of the successive, the co-existant, and of that which always must be co-existent with succession, the permanent."

Fuck Kant (Edit: or, in all fairness to Kant, fuck the translator).
 
Last edited:

Taskan

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

100 years of solitude
 
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Hands down, A Clockwork Orange. I understood it after awhile but only through the words in their context. Example of the language used:


5. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.
 

turmionkat

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i-love-maynard said:
Hands down, A Clockwork Orange. I understood it after awhile but only through the words in their context. Example of the language used:


5. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.
Thats actually a really easy book once you get the "A Clockwork Orange" dictionary. By the time I finished it i could fluently speak their language.

1984 by George Orwell- has alot of big words so it was hard for me to read it to its maximum awesomeness.

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh- Amazingly good book, but its really complicated, twisted and messed up because it "is written entirely in Welsh's trademark Edinburgh Scots dialect"
 

lala2

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LOTR was hard for me. Especially as I made the mistake of watching Fellowship first before reading the book, but I still think TTT and Return of the King was difficult even before watching the movie.
 

Graney

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

The Two Towers is impossibly boring. Tolkien in general is a snooze. Overrated as a popular writer.
 

hopethisworks

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

KFunk said:
Hands down -----> Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Bright guy, but a terrible writer. I only made it about 20 pages after reading the introduction before I gave up. The ideas are complex enough without having to deal with paragraph length sentences the whole time. His sentences have the nested story structure of 1001 Arabian Nights. For example:

"The same is the case with the internal intuition, not only because, in the internal intuition, the representation of the external senses constitutes the material with which the mind is occupied; but because time, in which we place, and which itself antecedes the consciousness of, these representations in experience, and which, as the formal condition of the mode according to which objects are placed in the mind, lies at the foundation of them, contains relations of the successive, the co-existant, and of that which always must be co-existent with succession, the permanent."

Fuck Kant (Edit: or, in all fairness to Kant, fuck the translator).
LOL, I agree! Voltaire is really simpler and says the same things after all (all illuministic stuff like metaphysic is shit, etc).

And fuck Hegel too (even more complicated and senseless than Kant).

And fuck all those accademicals morons who made them famous.

:haha:
 

terminator69

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

It's been a while since i actually read abook but I think the last one I had trouble with was To Kill a Mockingbird... then i watched the movie and understood it.
 

Tulipa

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

gouge.away said:
Ulysses - James Joyce
I actually really enjoyed reading that. Once I got into it, it was one of those books I couldn't put down.

Kafka has always bugged me. I can appreciate him but it takes me forever to finish his works and I have to force myself to read a lot of it.
 

A High Way Man

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Re: What's the most difficult book you've ever read (or tried to)? (Lacan, Joyce, etc

Gravity's Rainbow.
 

gk0608

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Lord of the flies - William Golding

It was like having my eye poked out by a blunt pencil...actually I'd rather have my eye poked out by a blunt pencil than ever read that book again
 

scarybunny

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i-love-maynard said:
Hands down, A Clockwork Orange. I understood it after awhile but only through the words in their context. Example of the language used:


5. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.
Yeah it takes some getting used to, but I loved it. There's a point to the language, at least.

Read ch2 of Absalom. Fuck Faulkner. Fuck Faulkner in the ass.
 

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