What's the hardest piece of literature you've read?

What's the hardest piece of literature you've read?
There's a non English classic prose which is infamous for having extremely long sentences, but I don't know of any comparable example in English.

I read 50 shades of Grey. I was hard for days.

There's no such thing as "hard to read", what you're lacking is comprehension.

That's what I meant obviously.

Voynich manuscript was hard to read.

I first read the Count of Monte Cristo when I was about 15 years old. I have never read anything since then that was so hard to comprehend. I didnt understand what the fuck was going on plot-wise, and I dropped it around when Edmond first met Villefort.

I recently found my old copy and i've been re-reading it again (i'm 22 now). It makes perfect sense, there is nothing at all difficult about the book. Its actually pretty comfy. Its pretty funny to think back on how retarded I must have been 7 years ago.

The only books I read in those days were the Harry Potter and Eragon series.

So yeah, the point I want to make is that reading Harry Potter makes you illiterate

The texts burned at the old library in Alexandria are hard to read since they no longer exist in the present. QED.

Books can be hard to read if they are long and boring, e.g., TAoCP.

The Zodiac Killer's stuff was hard to read.

Finnegan's Wake. Holy hell.

Martinani Minei Felicis Capellae De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philolgiae cum VII Liberalibus Artibus

It's a nightmare. I cannot describe how difficult and stultifying this work is. It's actually bad for your brain, I think, sort of like huffing glue. It makes Finnegan's Wake look like Animorphs.

>When holy marriages were arising amongst the gods, blessed with numerous progeny, and their noble children and all the ethereal multitude of sweet descendants, too, enjoyed amongst themselves the heavenly union and pact, and the high deities were especially blessed by nuptial addition, and, the matter being divulged to the world, loquacious humanity was relating these marriages high and low, and particularly the poets, following the Oeagrian lyre and the sweet-speaking eld of the blind Maeonian, sung them oft by pages of epic and lyric, and they said nothing was sweeter to Jove among his ethereal pleasures than his only wife, and there was a more ready Faith in these things, the which Faith, urged by haruspicy, calls the aged priests to witness, that, when implacable Jupiter denies many sacrificial victims, and the vows of men hang in an ambiguity of foaming worries, they succeed when his wife is persuaded, and whatever he has decreed by his disclosed opinion, guarded in the thread of the Parcae, he removes, softened by the embrace and command of his persuasive spouse - And not only did they relate the marriage of the king of the gods: they told of one for Dis, one for Portunus, and certainly Gradivus burns with love for a Nereid wife named Neria - Aesculapius has an equal passion of his own - and under a similar persuasion the most solemn and senior of the gods is portrayed with Ops, Cybele whom he charmed - Janus marvels at Argiona with both his faces; the Queen of Memphis bestowed nothing on her husband, but that overcome by constant grief she was never able to find him.

Just one sentence out of something that goes on for ever and ever and ever, traveling from the Astral Plains, to the meanest points of Latin grammar and everything inbetween.

On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury? I heard of the book once but I could never find a translation of it. Where'd you find this gem?

Being a Classicist desu. I do not remember, particularly, when I first found this satura. I want to say it was a comment on a comment on a letter of Cicero to Atticus which drew me to it.

It is definitely bizarre and seriously under-appreciated.

These bespectacled Teutons hate it because it doesn't read like Cicero, but it isn't meant to.

It is meant to entice the reader with its very aberrance, its queer references to Etruscan mythology, etc.

The poetry is good trending towards "quite good", and even in individual lines "excellent", and this fact alone ought to have made critics more liberal towards the excesseses of its prose.

But here we are. I don't think there is any passage that cannot be matched by something equally extravagant and florid in, say, Hawthorne's novels.

I love the glosses of the Carolingians. THEY where fascinated by this work for its very obscurity and darkest paganism, and I feel the same way about it. It takes so much effort to read (let alone to translate, which requires much sweat) that I love it the more. It preserves details of the Tuscan religion that survive nowhere else, and mystical, neoplatonic/pythagorean ideas that may not have survived so robustly in Xianity without it.

book made out of diamonds

Also there is a wooden and literal translation by William Stahl, who devoted the last years of his life to the project, and came to hate his author deeply. There's a French translation by some Frenchmen or other. I'm not much impressed by either, as far as something representing the feel of the original goes. There's also an Old High German translation/gloss from olden times but I can't read any of it. The Latin translations of this German translation of a Latin text, provided to me by Koppius, have greatly aided my understanding.

Parmenides by Plato. Only those who mediate to the sacred forms and utilize the divine Craftsman's geometry with excellent proficiency can comprehend a slight of it.

I done already did that with a whole bunchload of lysergic acid diethylamide, good times, I'm still poor as hell, reading Latin/Greek for fun and being a poor faggot, almost like a black person, almost.

>Also there is a wooden and literal translation by William Stahl
Drats. But oh, I just happened to read about the book (I think I read it somewhere as a footnote while browsing a catalog of Vossius' lib., but this was a while ago.) Thank you for the name, I'll be certain to look it up.

I'm just an amateur, really. You can't really plot my knowledge of the classics on a gradient as I will disappear beyond the line. Not sure what grabs me about it either.

10/10
This, how do people read it without a thesaurus, annotations, or extensive research prior to reading it?

War and Peace might also be up there for me. I couldn't bring myself to finish it out of boredom.

Yeah me too, we're already pretending, most of the professors I've had haven't been able to read Latin for shit, let alone Greek, they're just bullshitters and frauds. I'm less of a bullshitter than than so breddy gud.

Dubs checked.

'Atlas shrugged' was rough going: keeping track of all the characters without an appendix (like LOTR has), and figuring out how much of the political diatribe I could skip and not miss anything.

Kek, great post.

Jesus christ, how learned are you, user? And what is someone like you doing on mother fucking 4 chan?

that looks disgusting.

The hell is that fish? That egg looks offensively chalky, and sour cream is disgusting.

The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne was pretty insanely annoyingly difficult for me, I don't know why, maybe I'm just a retard. The long sentences and floridness of it (alluded to ) drove me crazy. Pages and pages describing single scenes like fucking priest sitting in forest. Nothing ever happens in the whole book, it's just like a few single ideas described in relentless dallying and loitering prose. Then again, I'm also a retard and have been known to struggle over longer sentences, in general. Fuck my attention span ...

No idea, got it when /hr/ wasn't 90% celeb threads.

where else would reclusive autists congregate?

You don't read Finnegans Wake the way you'd read a normal book. There was a massive amount of thought put into every passage, yes, but no one person was meant to understand the entire book.

May your studies of the forms lead you to grow closer to out-of-this-realm paradise with the omnipotent Craftsman in the divinely geometric after-life, friend.

ok, that's a relief. So, what are the recommended ways to read it? should I just make a new thread about it? Are joyce's other works crafted with the same intent?

Looks like pickled herring to me. Scandanavians and Slavs love that shit.

In fact, that's exactly what it is and the pic comes from wikipedia's page on pickled herring.

I just went into it blind (after reading Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses though). If you think of it as a dream it makes more sense than trying to understand everything in coherent waking terms.

And no, it's completely different from all his earlier books. Though it does attempt to do for sleeping/subconscious thought what Ulysses tries to do for waking thought, so they could be thought of as companion pieces in that sense.

I'd say just read his first three before it and hop in after that.

I love the surreal though which is what is driving me to read it. Even in thinking of those terms, I still feel compelled to at least understand the outlying vocab and foreign words, that might be too laborious, dunno. I'm not far in yet.