That difficult book on your shelf that you can't bring yourself to take up

>notoriously complex text that philosophers continue to grapple with over two centuries later
>some user on Veeky Forums says its not hard and that I just don't understand German writing

ok

>This why you can go

Me understand you say.
Me think you right.
Thank you.

You are stupid.

The ideas are difficult to grasp. When most people complain about CPS, however, it's the actual reading of it they lament.

Content is not one in the same with readability.

I guess I lost the argument, huh? Typos, heh...

...

It's Hegel's Science of Logic, but I don't have the Philosophical education to tackle it yet so I'm fine. For now.

It's not a difficult book really, just long; kinda like Don Quixote.

I meant the ideas rather than the style. Though Kant is supposed to be a famously flat and humorless writer too.

That one will probably remain forever unread. I've taken 3 seminars on Hegel's logic, with two of the worlds leading experts, have an extensive background in philosophy (including quite a lot of Kant) and I find it fucking impossible.

Same with me brah.

The parts dealing with mathematical infinity are... something.

Moby Dick & Don Quixote

I want to brush my reading chops a little bit more before tackling them, but I definitely will.

Don Quixote is literally HS level bruh
still the best novel ever made

Moby Dick is a large and epic book, but its easily digestible. Melville is a poetic-prose kind of guy so its hardly a slog, except maybe during the whaling lore. Plus it has short chapters.

If you feel like you need to do some prep, I'd recommend reading some of the transcendentalists main essays and poems beforehand:

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance, Nature, Circles
Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobedience
Whitman - Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

That should be enough to give Moby Dick some scope

This always cracks me up too

Fuck you, literally one word omitted

The extended and antiquated English makes it hard to focus sometimes, it may be the translation I have (B&N Classic). I finished the first part at least and loved it.

I think you're being very disingenuous with DQ being high-school tier. But then again I didn't finish HS lol

With Moby Dick it really is about the length, same as Quixote. The prose doesn't bother me and I really enjoy it, its just sometimes I'd go onto finish something else and forget about it.

Strange I've managed to keep reading Musashi consistently though, and its longer than both of them.

Thanks for the reccs though, I think I'll enjoy them.

Tractatus only book I have given up reading because I wasn't getting it at all and I have read plenty of Kant Hegel and so on. will give it another go sometime

Capital isn't difficult it's just really long and poorl edited

That's nonsense. Being and Time is much more difficult than Sartre's and they really don't have anything to do with each other.

I was like this for a while. Then I started reading it upside down and it makes much more sense. In all seriousness, read the derivative statements back toward the overarching ones and this might help. Also just read a synopsis first.

OK, what's the difference

Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus

Madness and Civilisation.

I'm enjoying it and considering Foucault's arguments a lot recently, but Christ lads is it a struggle to read.

Enten eller(Aut aut in some countries) by Kierkegaard
Not hard, but I feel like I need to read more about the plays that A talks about before continuing

>>That difficult book on your shelf that you can't bring yourself to take up

life

This

About a dozen books and plays in French and Spanish that I haven't been reading on account of me being a bit shit at French and Spanish.

Du contrat social
It's in french and I know I'll have to look up words a decent amount and I don't want to

Nausea by Sartre
Started like 5-6 times but I just can't bring myself to get past the first chapter. It's just so fucking boring.

Phenomenology of Spirit
The Dialectic of Enlightenment
The World as Will and Representation

I'm not educated enough to really comprehend them.

The last 600 pages of Infinite Jest. I read the last 15 pages and several analyses of the ending which pretty much spoiled the main plot for me (which I kind of anticipated anyway after the first 150 pages). I'm just kind of going through it to bask in DFW's great writing, with zero intentions in finishing it. I hear other people who quit IJ in the middle find themselves going back to it after reading Consider The Lobster and learning more about DFW. I can see that.

bought 'phenomenology of spirit' when i was a bit younger and just getting into lit.

...it's still sitting there unread. now i know just enough to be legitimately afraid of diving in earnestly. i didn't know that there were many many levels to this shit. in five years i might take a tentative stab at it, lol.

flows nicely after chapter 3 i believe

Tbh, Sartre is only a decent writer and philosopher. However, I read La Nausée on a night train that was basically empty. The combination of the darkness and silence really increased the feelings of pointlessness and I ended up feeling really weird. Try and do the same.

what the fuck

It's much easier 200 pages in after he's laid out the actual foundations of his philosophy and started applying it. Have you read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume? Those are almost required reading.

Looks like everyone who failed to start with the Greeks is congregating in this thread huh

...

[Spoiler]the brothers Karamazov[/spoiler]

You aren't making a very good first impression here

I just feel like most of it goes over my head and I'll be confused half way through the book. I'm not stupid by any means, I'm just afraid of not understanding its deeper themes. Probably due to the anxiety I suffer

the manga is better desu

A tale of two cities.

I have owned this book for about five years, and have never got past the second chapter. I keep reading about how it is Dicken's best novel, but i always find another book to read whenever i finish the one i'm reading. For example, i'm reading the plague, and planning to read TCOL49 after.

>come post a hard book you're waiting to read
>Wait there actually are no hard books everyone in this thread is just stupid

Actually finishing Infinite Jest. I'm 350 pages in, but I just got Dostoevsky, Melville, Plato, and Cervantes, and I feel like, having understood the concepts and theme of IJ so far, my time would be better served in these formative years of my literary journey reading more classics (I've already read Homer & Joyce).

His ideas make more sense if you have any experience with bookkeeping, or, more generally making tables for functions.

If I ever had any interest in reading Hegel's books, you destroyed it. Thanks for saving me time.

I agree. Started reading >pic related last year. Didn't want to take margin notes so I used loose leaf. Ended up writing a ton, getting lost and giving up after page 80.

Took two courses on Kant in college. Dude can go fuck himself. There's no reason for that type of prose.

The whole "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" is bullshit anyways, which is essentially what the categorical imperative is. For instance, if I don't cheat on my gf because I don't want her to cheat on me/ I don't want other people cheating on their spouses, then I'm basically living my life in fear. I'd only be doing good things/not doing bad things because I don't want bad shit to happen to me. It's in line with the idea of karma which is also bullshit. You should be a good person because you have feelings and empathy, not because of some goddamn golden rule based on fear and "Oh I should live my life how I want everyone else to live".

Idk. It's been a while since I read that shit but I remember it being ridiculously abstract and dense. I'm sure I misinterpreted it, but there's no way that I just "don't understand German writing". You're a faggot for even entertaining that idea.

I don't get it, and I don't like it.

I got half way thru Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations with a supplementary thing, but havent tried returning to it in a year. Every time, its just read the same 2 pages and go, ahh screw it.

The largest problem with Kantian ethics is, as described by Jonathan Haidt in the book The Righteous Mind, "Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative. 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.'" The Kant quote is from Grounding For the Metaphysics of Morals. You simply can't create a universal system of ethics, and you don't need to in order to live ethically (see existential ethics/The Ethics of Ambiguity-Beauvoir). That being said, Kant's work has immense historical value as it has influenced basically the past 250 years of philosophy.

If you're interested in Wittgenstein, you should check out the blue book, which contains a lot of his notes on the philosophy of language, truth, etc.

>i'll give you a topic

I read History of Sexuality and Discipline & Punish. Pretty thin and "easy." Still, I got a lot out of them. I would read Madness, it LOOKS like it's up my alley, but I have a feeling I know exactly where Michel will go with it only for having read those other two already.

Hey. If I'm outta line: Foucault disciples of Veeky Forums let me know.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

>I'm not stupid
ok buddy

Apparently I'm not sophisticated for this book yet.

A book of ancient texts such as the epic of Gilgamesh, illiad, etc.
Can't bring myself to read it at all and it's borrowed so I have to return it soon.
Fuck, I'll probably motivate myself to just fucking read it and get over it.
But god damn...

War and Peace.

I started it when I was in middle school, got bored with it, returned to it in college but someone spilled coffee on the first 1/5ish of the book and now I can't work up the willpower and I've never been able to care about old rich Russian drama and politics.

Been trying to work up the courage for this one, I'm just not sure I could fully appreciate the prose and preserve the novelty during a first read through at the same time

I personally feel the entire narrative of that idea changes depending on whether you look at it selflessly or selfishly. If the only reason you do it is because you don't want that exact thing done to you and not doing it is somehow a deterrent of it happening to you then you're missing the point. However, if you just wanted to make life better for other people by treating them to the same desires you have, knowing full well that bad things can and will still happen to you, then I think you're doing what the idea intends

did i fuck up when i bought being and nothingness as my first philosophy book?

What were you thinking?

nah just read the wiki summary and spout a few big words at random or concepts with friends and you'll fit in as a pseud in no time.

what do you think you fucking dunce, you're skipping thousand years of philosophy for what purpose?

This post really saddens me because you've already lost and you don't even know it. You're a cautionary tale in un-self awareness

The trick to enjoy Kant is to pretend he never wrote the Critic of Practical Reason

Faust part 2.
I didn't find the first difficult but I felt I missed a lot since it wasn't the 10/10 must read classic I was assuming it would've been, like The Odyssey, Moby Dick, Don Quixote etc

Seriously?
Epic of Gilgamesh is like 150 pages.
Iliad has a lot of action and great characters and is 300 or so pages.

The difficulty comes from it being French. I figure that if I'm constantly looking shit up while reading Maupassant, I'm probably not ready for this yet.

It's so easy to miss so much when it comes to Faust.
It's my favourite book, above those others that you mentioned, though the language also is a big part (I speak German, I don't know how good the translations are).

The Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses is up next.

I'm very very slowly going through The King James Bible hoping it will help be appreciate other works, like Faust and in a year or 4 I will get around to reading both again.

is this hard to read

Having trouble with this one. There's some big words in there!

The title in English

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

It is a tough read but the prose makes it do-able. I thought Ithaca and Circe was far more frustrating

I don't read so... all of them? The especially Hegel

I can't even type

Circe is fun as fuck though and goes by quickly. And Ithaca is best episode.

I'll check it out. Thanks

Well i can say that its not a book to read 1 or 2 times. Its a book to read countless of times. The first time i read Faust i got almost nothing. Then i tried again couple months after and then i started o think i got the point. After that i bought the best translation known in my language (and it waa expensive) with heavy footnotes, background insights either from the translator and Goethe(this edition is filled with Goethes correpondences with schiller and cia about the subjects in Faust) just then i really got it, even though i feel that i need to read it about 3 more times to completly get it.

I made all this effort because in the first time i read Faust, i felt like Goethe was trying to say something big, working on subjects that i myself are very thrilled for. But i guess it was in part because it was basically my very first contact with high poetry.

There's a bunch of people trying to read Heidegger's Being and Time here.

All of you should first read his short essay "What is Metaphysics?" and check your understanding with lectures on YouTube before trying it.

I just finished that. It starts off very fun and as it progresses I began to understand less and less, until I was left with finnegans-wake-esque prose.

So far, circe just seems to be a jumbled mess of characters that can't be distinguished as hallucinations or not.

It takes a bit to pick up, but it all comes together beautifully to be honest. It's a really vanilla example of existentialism.

You don't suffer from anxiety. But rather the fear of being stupid.

The 'Myth of Sisyphus' has been a bit of a grueling, difficult experience. I suppose it's been challenging because I like to read to relax before bed and this is absolutely not the kind of book that you doze off to sleep with. It's not so much the actual concepts that I struggle with, but the references to other philosophers and schools of thought with which I'm completely unfamiliar.

I put it down about a week ago and started reading 'Fear and Trembling' instead. Slightly less dense prose, but still nothing I can plow through with any reasonable speed if I'm interested in actually comprehending what's being said. These are the first two philosophy books I've chosen to read. Fairly content with my choices so far. Up next are Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' and 'On the Genealogy of Morals'.

Spinozas ethics
I just don't get it, its so overly complicated

I can subscribe to this.

Birth of Tragedy will be completely impossible without knowing some Greek tragedy (I had read only Bacchae, Prometheus, and Philoctetus for my first read through and I was more or less fine; the sort of "point" of the entire book is basically the plot of Bacchae though).

Genealogy will be a slog without at least a cursory understanding of Plato, but you should be okay as long as you check unknown references with the stanford wiki. First time through it seems a little red pill-y but Nietzsche even trashes red pill-ers directly by the end, it's his best work imo.

Have you read Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground yet? That might be a better choice than BoT.