Hardest Book U've Ever Read?

[Guest Absinthe.]

I love Jules Verne. He's probably the only sci-fi author that I love to read.

1984 was very hard for me to read. I actually loved Animal Farm but when I got to the part where the main character starts writing and doing 'thoughtcrime' I skipped to the end of 1984 and when I saw "I love Big Brother" I just couldn't read anymore.

Well, I was around 9 at the time I was attempting to read it. ahaha, maybe I'll give it a go again sometime.

Agree with you on the 1984, I managed to finish it, but I was confused on a few bits in the book.

[xstarBURST]

Italo Calvino? i think thats the author's name but I found that his "If on a winter's night a traveller" was really hard to get into because every chapter would change into something else and then every 2nd chapter would be i guess the "main story".

[luluponyazn]

Especially when everything is an allegory to Italian culture, going through the back for the endnotes after every line was the most obnoxious thing in the world. It sounds pretty in Italian though.

Catch-22 was difficult especially in the beginning and I had to drag myself to the end of the book. Toooo many characters to keep up with. Good novel though.

I'm waiting for someone to say Twilight or any of her cringe-inducing books...

Here I am to say Twilight!!

My friend kept recommending it to me for over a year, saying that it is even better than Harry Potter.

I finally gave in and read it in senior year. Biggest Mistake. I kept finding myself waking up with the book next to me and no pages flipped. When Bella was locked in the dance room, I kept anticipating some action (very necessary at this point to keep me interested), and then poof, the chapter ended with her lying in bed in the next second. I wanted to slap myself at the time.

Even though I found a lot of classic books difficult to read at the time (Scarlet Letter...), it felt worthwhile afterwards because the book meant something. With Twilight, I felt it was a horrible waste of whatever hours I kept reading and falling asleep through it, and I will never get those hours back... ToT

One of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment. I even had a small crush on Raskolnikov at the time. hahaha

[Guest dorkafied!]

twilight, couldnt even read one full page i stopped

after a few sentences -__-

keeper and me. it was terrible, and hard to read.

[Guest BrightCloset]

Pride and Prejudice

>.<;;

It may have been easy for others, but not for me. I cried. Bad. T.T

I would have to agree.

Haha...

>.<

[Guest heil]

I really had difficulty reading A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It had sooo many characters and I had difficulty keeping up with them. I gave up after a 3 pages. And Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was really depressing. I gave up after a page. There's just something about the way she writes it.

[Guest GwendolynGuillotine]

Some of the most challenging books were actually some of my most favourite books. For instance, if I didn't do my research on the time period and lifestyle Jane Austen and Bronte had lived in, the book would indeed be a bit difficult! But once you got used to their language and ask a lot of curious questions to an expert, those books tends to turn a lot easier than you think. The story then becomes more enjoyable!

I can't read Shakespeare's plays alone.

[Guest angelcadex]

Don't remember the titles...but my Freshman year I read a bunch of books for researching for my NHD. They were all about the time of the reign of Augustus over the Roman Empire. Oh man what a guessing game lol

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Ugh.

Haha I love Dickens. So clever.

[Guest Jrock~Kitty]

Oiii... I have to admit I haven't read too many books (I'd say the most novels I've read in a year is 13/14, and that was in 8th grade when we were allowed to read whatever we liked for credit xD). Um, well, I don't think the Decameron is a hard book to read, but it's really long and I can start, but never finish it . I think the extremely small print makes me believe it may be a "hard" book to read.

twilight, couldnt even read one full page i stopped

after a few sentences -__-

keeper and me. it was terrible, and hard to read.

Hahaha! I think your connotation of hard is different from that to which this thread is referring >p. IMO, Twilight is also...terribly hard to read.

[Guest juiceybox]

pride and prejudice was very difficult for me to grasp.. it took me almost 3/4 into the book before i finally understood a little of it. T_T

[Guest tmpeeps]

huh...

I actually liked LOTR, and Shakespeare's plays are fairly easy once you get into it...somewhat

but, I couldn't really stand The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins or any Jane Austen books

they really bore me to tears

[Guest Narda]

Paradise Lost.

I was literally lost and I havent even finished it.

Dante's Inferno.

I thank Sparknotes but even with it, I couldn't appreciate the whole thing.

~edit: Shakespeare, Othello W/O sidenotes.

[Guest car_shrimp.]

i would def say.. lord of the flies.

its just toooo deep, imo.

like i hate having to read "in between the lines"

[~creampuff~]

We had to read Heart of Darkness in class and it is such a difficult book to grasp in my opinion. If you are a writer, you'll probably love the writing style, but otherwise it's so hard to get through. I quit after the first couple of pages.

[Guest Momo]

I really had difficulty reading A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It had sooo many characters and I had difficulty keeping up with them. I gave up after a 3 pages.

This is my vote too. Read it for pleasure ( ) in college and was able to finish it but I still don't know what it was about.

[Guest marasshi]

This is my vote too. Read it for pleasure ( ) in college and was able to finish it but I still don't know what it was about.

It's one of my favorite books but I have to admit that the first time I read it I just kept flipping back to the family tree at the beginning. It also took me a couple of tries to get going with the rest of the book (I was stuck at the first few pages as well), but after everything sunk in, it just blew my mind. It's that amazing.

(I love Garcia Marquez's care and involvement with detail. It makes everything so much more believable.)

[Kennedy]

Ahem.

I liked The Catcher in the Rye. And I went in depth with the Bible in school and there's a lot of interesting stories in there, especially the Old Testament. Everything in there is kind of epic to me.

I recently read Jane Eyre for school. I really didn't enjoy it, descriptions or plot wise or love story wise. And I read Member of the Wedding last summer. I freaking hated it.

I usually like reading books with main characters who are really smart and sarcastic.

[Guest DarkAngelInLove]

Scarlet Letter

my gosh I actually fell asleep while reading it!

but romanticism is hard in general

i don't like romanticism

fyi i'm a literature major

[stupid.ity]

lol...you're gonna laugh at me but....

LORD OF THE FLIES.

I finished it in two days and didn't understand any of it...

[touchthesky]

^ LOL MAILIA... i hate that book. i thought it was so creepy

i had to read Brave New World for summer reading. i read one chapter and it took me two hours & gave up... i HATE science fiction

and this other book...i think it's called The Phantom Tollbooth