How accurate is this?

How accurate is this?

Fairly accurate, in my experience

How the hell is Zettels Traum not gibberish? It's arguably more gibberish than Finnegan's wake

I wouldn't say Swann's Way is as difficult as Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow. It's not super abstract, just requires a lot of focus because the sentences are very long and winding.

>Magic Mountain on the same tier as Zettel's Traum
I was planning on reading that soon, but if it's as difficult as Zettel's Traum I might have to reconsider

The Recognitions and Swann's way should be lower.

It's not even close.

It definitely should be above Finnegans Wake because there is little to be learned from its difficulty. Didn't the author even say he intended it to be essentially a copy of the Wake with more abstractions?

Magic Mountain's a cake-walk, and maybe the best book I've ever read. Go for it user. Just remember to read the John Woods translation.

>John Woods translation
No need, I speak German. I'll keep it on the list. Thanks.

Shit, that's even better. Wish I could read it in German. Maybe some day

To be fair I've never read Gravity's Rainbow, but I kinda have trouble thinking of it on a similar plane of difficulty as some of the other shit on Ultimate or even Hard mode.

Also Dubliners is most definitely entry-level.

I would maybe bump up Clockwork Orange because it's written in its own dialect, I found it harder to read than Lolita personally

Hows the English translation of Zettel's Traum? Is it even worth reading?

John woods is a genius and the translation is great.

rad

I just finished reading 2666 a week or two ago, and while I enjoyed it immensely, I really don't see how anyone could consider it to be as difficult a read as The Waves or even The Sound and the Fury. Maybe I am not completely sure what qualifies as difficulty in this chart, and perhaps it is referring more to thematic nuance than complexity of prose, in which case I am kind of on board with its placement, because the way 2666 plays with death, art, and the posterity of art is definitely interesting as shit, but still I don't think that anything other than that or its length could justify the reputation it has gathered as this precluding work of genius.
A fine book, but more a sort of anti-masterpiece I think.

I don't know

By the time it reaches the last section of the book, it gets pretty hairy. Difficult in a different way from something like Ulysses

Disclaimer: I did read the English translation

Agreed. Read it a few summers ago in between high school and university and even as a relative noobie to reading text analytically I found it very readable.

>I've never read Gravity's Rainbow but here is my opinion on its difficulty
Jesus user.

Do you mean difficult as in like a prosody kinda way, like complex sentences and shit, or more like it's hard to hang on to the plot and the point?

In my defense I've read other Pynchon stuff and most of the novels on this list. I honestly can't imagine it being more difficult than something like Bleak House unless Pynchon really pulls out all the stops (which, again to be fair, it sounds like he does)

Moby Dick, 2666, and Swanns Way are not difficult to read

The John woods translation is an improvement on the German

Well, the book is kind of constructed so as to just break apart in the last section of the book. All the plot threads just fizzle out and fall apart. It's hard to even put into words what happens to Slothrop even though you can kind of intuitively understand it on some level. And maybe I'm stupid, but trying to work out exactly what the whole meta thing at the end was implying took me some time after I'd actually finished the book. That's what the whole Brennschluss stuff throughout was leading up to I guess.

The prosody is difficult but no more so than Woolf. The dfficulty is that you're trying to keep track of a lot of stuff that the book desprately doesn't want you keep track of.

Great book though. Shame it's a meme so no one here reads it

Inaccurate.
>Proust and Tolstoy that high
Must be low attention span

Hmm I feel that. Very excited to get into it, probably going to pick it up after I finish Portrait of an Artist desu (I know i suck for waiting this long to read it)

Honestly I know im gonna sound like a meme but Infinite jest should prolly be bumped up a spot too, with 2666 taken down a spot.

Give it a read, man. As I was kinda speaking to in this post , I think difficulty (when it is not used in the lame-ass, dick-measuring sense) should refer as much to the complexity of the themes explored as the tortuousness or idiosyncrasy of the prose. Gravity's Rainbow has both of these qualities in abundance, and while the prose is certainly inventive (debatably to a Joycean degree) it is really the themes underneath that make it a slippery and worthwhile text to read and revisit. I have also read the majority of Pinecone's stuff (with the sole exception of Against the Day) and I would say GR as a good deal more complicated (in the ways I have already spoken to) than his other stuff, M&D and V. included. So yeah, check it out.

I don't know if you're memeing, but I actually prefer reading in English over German, but it feels wrong. Also, have you read both versions?

fair warning I'm a huge lit pleb and have only read a couple books on this list.

I did just finish infinite jest recently and I was completely blown away by it. Where should I go from here?

Rad dude, I'll hopefully be starting it sometime in the next month. I know it's corny and cliché, but all these maximalist postmodern novels are so fun to read and think about, really looking forward to GR for sure.

>the harder the better, regardless of actual merits

the difficulty of moby-dick is overstated

I agree with this. Just finished 2666 a few night ago. It was an easy read -- if a little repetitive during the chapter about the murders. Then again it served a purpose to desensitize the reader before the final wonderful chapter about Archimboldi. Amazing to recount how ignorant the academics really were about who the writer was.

In terms of difficulty and depth Ulysses still triumphs overall for me. And this is coming from someone who's read it three times. Each time it unfolds itself in a new way. For me, it's become something of an endless book -- akin to Borges' book of sand.

Where's Ada in this mix?

I've never read IJ, but Wallace was a big Delillo fan and there's a lot of thematic crossover, so if you haven't read him yet, I'd give him a spin.

Yeah, but I'm not great at German so that could be it

>i've read other Pynchon stuff

what, Lot 49? V?

it's way tougher

Actually yeah, Lot 49 + V, and one his short stories, "Entropy," though that doesn't super duper count.

I can definitely recognize GR as being harder, it's just the inclusion of it in "Ultimate Mode" that's causing me some hesitation.

probably

Whom are you quoting?

>A chart that rates the status of books by how hard/tedious they are to read rather than how good or enjoyable they are
The epitome of Veeky Forums

That is one American teenager in their second year at a private liberal arts college's horrible idea of what literature looks like based on attending a private high school and being taught to perform intellectualism rather than actually be smart, and then going to a college that makes the problem 500x worse

OP pic is the equivalent of a philistine engineering major's idea of advanced science. It's retarded, full of problems, and way too self-confident

Ok

every book on this list (except on the road) is excellent and worth your time.maybe not slaughterhouse five but whatever

Thanks I'll do that

oh i guess infinite jest is kinda pointless too

This board likes to talk about Women and Men but I don't think anyone's actually read it. Damn thing took me two months of some of the most grueling reading I've ever done. That McElroy isn't discussed more broadly is honestly a tradgedy; dude is one of the most heavily stylized and adept writers out there.

You're part of the board and you've apparently read it

got me

Why are The Magic Mountain and Swann's Way in ultimate mode? There is nothing difficult about those books

where did you find it and how much did it cost?

I never understand why War and Peace is seen as as hard book. It's long sure but not a hard read in any way shape or form.

>There is nothing difficult about those books
They clearly either went over your head or, and this is more likely, you didn't read them.

"Books that are hard to read" and "Books about which a lot can be said" are separate categories. If they aren't, then The Bible is the hardest to read book of all time.

This.

>tfw Crime and Punishment is entry level

The Magic Mountain is a book any retard can "read." You can point your dead retard eyes at the page and follow the pretty images in your head because the language is cogent, the style is realistic, and the narrative is simple. Understanding the significance of those images is completely different. They are all, every one of them, riddled with symbolism, intricate philosophical digressions, both hidden and obvious allegory, and a tone of irony that constantly undercuts the narrator and his characters. It's not so much a book "about which a lot can be said," though that's true, but rather it's a book that says a lot, and it does so in a subtle and deliberately ambiguous way.

Reading House of Leaves is kind of hard to do. It's long, the author use cheap typographical gimmicks to make his words harder to read, and the story is nonsensical, cliched, and boring. But that doesn't make it an intelligent and difficult book in the same way that a thirty-page argument between the allegorical representation of humanism and the embodiment of bourgeois naivety on the philosophical implications of spacetime in the modern Europe is intelligent and difficult.

Reading books is very very easy. Anybody can read book, there's no art to it. Understanding and interacting with the book is the difficult part, and The Magic Mountain is a difficult book to understand and interact with, as is the Bible, by the way.

Sure, simple stories can be full of ideas and complex stories can have no point at all. But isn't it obvious that the list is measuring the stylistic difficulty of the narrative rather than the complexity of the ideas it deals with?

Wanna read Women & Men so bad.

Why cant someone just reprint it already

I borrowed it from my university library so it wasn't too much of a hassle.

>IJ
>Moderate level
pick one and only one.

I choose moderate level

Sorry I'll stop reading