Have you ever tried reading a book that turned out to be too difficult for you to read?

Have you ever tried reading a book that turned out to be too difficult for you to read?

Thus Spake Zarathustra, read to the end regardless and probably barely took in half of what he was saying. Maybe because I only really read history.

This and the Birth of Tragedy.

Only two Nietzsche books that fucked me up.

Not too difficult, but the first few times I tried to read Cold Mountain I really couldn't get in to it. Waited a few years, picked it up, and was hooked by the end of the first paragraph.

Was 15 and tackled Ulysses in English and I'm not a native speaker. It was extremely funny and I borrowed it because it's modernist and complex and I was experimenting with stream of consciousness writing at the time but after a few pages I figured out I'm probably missing A LOT so I put the book down and never dared to return.

Oops, failed to elaborate, I had a weird phase where every work of art had to be avantgarde and modernist and complex but had no idea how to properly experience such works. Don't know if I have now, at least with literature.

Tried Ulysses several years back and while I forced myself through the whole book I'm certain I missed a lot. Wonder how I'd fare these days.

Moby Dick when I was 11 years old, couldn't advance beyond the 5th page I think.

I may give it a try later on since we just recently re-found the book

i gotta admit i still have a hard time reading heidegger. probably also because i don't speak german and i think (regardless of what people say) reading an author in his original language is different than reading him translated, esp. with one like him

but i also think this guy's philosophy is also pretty obscure in general/hard to get, the way he words things makes it seem like he tried to make it all as hard to get as possible on purpose...

i mean, i can understand some of his general philosophical 'project' (change of perspective about metaphysics, the question of Being and stuff) but there are still plenty of stuff that seem incomprehensible to me no matter how many times i re-read them

The Unvanquished, not because the concepts are beyond me, but because the prose is undigestable. It just drains the mind to read.

I jumped into Foucault's stuff without really knowing ahead of time what to expect from his prose. I forced myself through Volume I of History of Sexuality and didn't really understand what the fuck I just read.

i tried Leibinitz philosophy and i couldn't pass the first page.

>prose
can someone please explain to me what the hell prose is?

Mrs. Dalloway put me to sleep three times before becoming my favorite book

I got Ulysses from the library when I was like 7 cause I thought it was a biography about the president.

It didn't go well.

For some reason I always put down any fiction by aldous huxley after a few pages because it seems he's trying as hard as he can to lose my attention.

Shhh. None of us really know.

professionals

that pikachu pisses me off.

i couldn't read finnegans wake without a guide.

Yes.

The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. I could make it through Naked Lunch but I couldn't follow the story in Soft Machine, so I gave up.

You could easily just look it up you walnut.

infinite jest. had to read it 3 times while writing in a dedicated notebook just to keep up.

i don't believe you

That book should be re-named "Birth of Melodrama"

Three Sisters by Chejov. Holy shit, I didn't pass scene 3, boring and nonse for me.
And, when I was like 12 years old, I tried Don Quijote, but I didn't understand that old spanish.

Neuromancer: it wasn't too difficult, but holy shit was it tedius

prose is just writing that's not in verse
they mean the style of the prose

The pikachu pisses me off too. I found that picture in a thread that I got banned for on a gender non binary group on facebook when I made this thread saying privilege isn't a fucking thing, just because someone's white doesn't automatically mean they're worse off than a black person, or vice versa. So I got this huge slough of idiots telling me basically to check my privilege and I got banned from the group and I hardly even said anything to them.

I fucking hate the stupid idea of privilege. Stop reminding yourself that you should be leery of your good life for arbitrary fucking reasons like your gender or race and just live your fucking life. Those people are so fucking stupid. They literally act like just because I'm white I have it better than other people, after I literally made a thread saying I am tired of thinking about the world's problems because it was making it hard for me to sleep, and they literally told me "it must be nice having all that white privilege". They're fucking brainwashed morons.

Towards the end it got really bad, couldn't follow what was happening.

Who is this genital gymnast?

i read the birth of tragedy when i was literally 14 or 15

I read the Stranger and Nausea when I was at college and thought I was into existentialism, so I got myself Being and Nothingness by Sartre. Never got past the second page.

Anathema by Neal Stephenson. Good ideas, too much exposition.

Anathem *
Dirty phone poster

34 here. I may be wrong, but I am a pretty voracious reader and have been since I was 5, and I get nothing out of Joyce. But then I have never found beauty in prose except in authors like Hume and Gibbon

your parents must be so proud. go you.

>tfw in advanced german in uni but every german book i try to read is too hard

Currently reading thus spoke Zarathrustha. It's hard and I'm only 30 pages in. Doesn't help that its the first time I'm reading something by Nietzsche

My wife went to spain to study spanish Veeky Forums and she had to go for help every day to get through medieval stuff.

First time reading Book of the New Sun when I was 18.

No idea what was going on.

The Canterbury Tales in its original text/language.

Nabokov's Ada. I'll pick it up in my native tongue, and see what happens

>in uni but every german book i try to read is too hard
I gave up on german when after living there for one year I still couldn't read the little prince

Sause?

A book of Deleuze/Guattari essays.

Gravity's Rainbow

>I fucking hate the stupid idea of privilege.
well privilege is a real thing. Problem is it's essentially just a shibboleth for retarded ideologues so most people who talk about it are cunts, e.g. the people in your story.

The first 150 pages of Shadow of the Torturer was really rough, it got easier once I got the hang of it though and BOTNS ended up being my favorite book, but even near the end it was harder to read than an average book.

The course of human history can be characterized by violence and exploitation. I remember the Roman patricians who utilized their privileges over the plebeians to great extent, and indeed all the great Roman accomplishments are achieved by the patricians and equestrians (with exceptions). What they neglect to address is any society is implicitly hierarchical, with some privileged group parasitizing on the main body in order to accomplish the most audacious projects.

In this sense privilege is good! The recent argument against it contains the unspoken premise that equality is needed at any cost (a Nietzschean inversion of values if I've ever seen one). Privilege delineates the continuation of a society's apex, an elite group that has been refined over the ages, without whom greatness would not be possible.