Most Difficult Book You've Ever Read?

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For me it was Moby Dick, by Melville, hands down. I read the whole thing, though I could barely get past "Call me Ishmael."

How about you?

The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky can be very hard to follow, idiosyncratic, and seemingly meandering. Also probably the longest single book I've ever read. I'm a huge Dostoevsky fan though.

I was obsessed with Russian writers for years but I never made it through Ayn Rynds(sp?)Atlas Shrugged(I could barely force myself to sit through the stilted dialogue of the movie...yikes.

You have to have patience to read Dostoevsky...and a note pad to take notes as you go. I tried reading The Idiot and failed. I've yet to try War and Peace.

I felt the Lord of the Rings books were fairly challenging to read, as well as Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain books...

I bought War and Peace a few years ago for one euro and thought I was getting a good deal, but I've never seriously tried to read it. The task just seems too daunting.

This one:



Really, probably The Exorcist when I was about 11. It also scared the crap out of me to boot.

None, as my reading skills are above most peoples. I don't really like reading Shakespeare because of the language barrier and I don't read classics much because I struggle to focus on them. (I'm only 16, so I'm allowed to feel that way for a couple more years )
But I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 3 3/4 hours, so really I'm a good reader. I do like 15-18th century poetry, so it not the language. I guess I just don't like Emma by Jane Austin or A Midsummer Night's Dream much

I liked A Midsummer's Nights Dream. It was the first Shakespearean play I read but it was a very long time ago.

I just thought the ending was so cliche and I just didn't like it. I've read better anyways.

Last of the Mohicans ... never did finish it. I've found that a lot of older novels are really difficult for me to read. I also find the "Wheel of Time" series difficult, for the same reasons. Way too descriptive. I have to force myself to keep slogging through page after page of descriptive text. I think that whole series could have been condensed to 4 or 5 books.

I think all of Shakespeare's plays have a bit of clichés in them, but can't say for sure because I haven't read all of them. of the ones I read my favourite was Othello.

The most difficult was Lady Macbeth, which I tried to read after A Midsummer's Night Dream for school, but didn't finish it.

Shakespeare tends to sound cliché because he's the one who started a lot of the clichés.

The hardest book I ever read was an advanced physics textbook. Kind of interesting but the notation sucked and it was very dense. Not enough pictures.

A physics textbook without pictures isn't a very good textbook, IMO. The author would have to be a pretty good descriptive writer to get the images across in words.

I tried reading an old book that collected a few works of Lenin one time. Complicated economic theories poorly translated from Russian makes a hell of a read!

But really, I read about 50 pages and just gave up. Fairly useless material to try and absorb anyway.

the divine comedy by Dante Alighieri, i just finished it yesterday, it is a great book, but it is composed of a 100 poems so it is kinda hard to read, also he sometimes refers to characters by different titles like "master" or "guide" so that was kind of confusing