Books I had difficulty reading...

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I only ever look at my Bhagavad Gita at random, and read a little bit at a sitting. Not really a book I fancy doing from cover to cover. I think my attitude to the Bible would be similar, but I don't own one.

I was confused by Moby Dick 3 pages in YAWN! but after listening to a Podcast on the teachers website I'm more interested in the story. I can relate part of the audio rereadings to be something one could live by. Who knows perhaps I can dive in with Aspie obsessiveness and get the book done.

I have read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and I actually love his style, the way he switches languages sometimes. There were a few paragraphs that I didn't understand, and others that I understood only partially ( I have experience with French, Spanish, and Portuguese, so I could pretty much guess when it came to Italian, etc...), but I just sort of went with it. I like when a book is challenging, if the author uses a unique style that I am not accustomed to.
I am currently reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. He also has a unique style, and I'm really enjoying it.

That being said, there are certain types of books (religious texts in particular) that are very difficult for me to read. But very rarely do I finish a book and feel like it was not worth the effort I spent understanding it.

Your probably lucky, I've tried several times and by the time I've gotten to the 3rd page I decide that God is either incredibly stupid or horrifically sadistic

I don't try to force myself to read something I just can't see the value in if I don't have to, but revisit it sometime later to see if I still feel the same way. The book will still be there if my perception change, but if I suffered through 800 pages while hating it the entire time that's hard to change. I'll associate the book with the lousy experience I had reading it more than with it's content. While if I'd just read enough to realize I thought the author was a poor writer and had nothing worth saying I have a shorter negative experience to fight against if I try it again.

There were books I had to read for school I absolutely could not stand. My fellow classmates (I refuse to call them my peers as they weren't) seemed to love those books. Some I can now see why it appealed to them, I simply hadn't reached a point in my life where I could see that side of the book that they did. Even when I can now see why they liked them it doesn't mean that I now like the book, I can merely accept that there's other ways from which to view it. Others are still the most utter pieces of crap that I've ever had the displeasure of reading with no redeeming value whatsoever.

I had an NT friend who was into literature. He went into the literature program at Uni, within 2 months he was telling me that he hated it. We stopped mentioning Jane Austen's name anywhere near him as he had to read every Jane Austen novel in existence for one of the required courses. Not that I ever appreciated those books (except the zombie one, I liked the zombie one) to begin with but his hatred just got so intense after that course mentioning her name would send him off on a 2 hour rant. He had to read so much crap he started to lose his appreciation for the stuff he used to love, he was that fed up with 18-19th century literature. I felt a bit bad for him, he really loves books, he just can't stand literature professors.

About the same with me too. I struggle a lot with criminal mysteries, especially Earl Stanley Gardner's and some of Agatha Christie's because of the complicated time sequence (I can't figure out the order in which plot elements happen) and the Theory of Mind elements (she thought he thought she knew, etc.). So I usually enjoy the book up to the end where Hercule Poirot brings everyone in the same room and starts unraveling the mystery - and then I can't follow his train of thoughts so I leave it.

The only book that I ever started without finishing was The Pope's Rhinocerous by Lawrence Norfolk. I made myself read Foucault's Pendulum and have no idea what it was about, despite adoring other works by Umberto Eco - and his reference works on christian iconography are magical.

There are quite a few books that I bought and never started, like the obligatory Brief History of Time. I have an obsessive need to finish anything I start, so I don't start them.

Currently I am reading all the early works by André Norton that appeared on Project Gutenberg, and will be following up with any other mid-20th century science fiction that I can find.

The rest of us can get on with studying literature by enjoying good stories well told.

You can, but nobody will give you a degree for it
For that pleasure you have to suffer a little.

Currently having trouble getting through anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Mostly because every few pages, I go back and reread a few paragraphs, set it down, and go 'gahh! yes!' and lay there and think for the same phase of time it took me to get through those few pages.

Oh dear, I used to try and read things like that.

I found nearly everything in English courses was about impossible to read. Part of it was the stuff - they select on a very different basis from mde.

But more than that t is the presentation, environment, attitude.

You are not there to ENJOY the stuff.

Same with a lot of language teaching. You MAY learn to take it apart, but the system makes it harder to learn to use it,