Back in 2009, The Millions started its "Difficult Books" series--devoted to identifying the hardest and most frustrating books ever written, as well as what made them so hard and frustrating. The two curators, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, have selected the most difficult of the most difficult, telling us about the 10 literary Mt. Everests waiting out there for you to climb, should you be so bold. If you can somehow read all 10, you probably ascend to the being immediately above Homo sapiens. How many have you read? What books would you add? Let us know in the comments!

Emily's Picks

A Tale of A Tub by Jonathan Swift - The first difficulty: The superabundant references to obsolete cultural squabbles (some obscure even in Swift’s eighteenth-century England) and then there’s the narratorial persona: an impoverished, syphilitic madman who cuts pieces out of his manuscript and his fellow citizens remorselessly. His compulsive digressiveness is deliberately baffling, but more baffling still is that this satire, aimed at “the Abuses and Corruptions in Learning and Religion” and written by a conservative, Anglican clergyman, ends finding nothing sacred. If you can bear it (and the 100s of footnotes you’ll need to understand its historical context), it’s the ultimate expression of cultural alienation and despair.

The Phenomenology of the Spirit by G.F. Hegel - Do you enjoy a good intellectual gobsmack every now and again? If so, Hegel’s your man and this book, a classic of German idealism and unquestionably one of the most important works of modern philosophy, is a fine place to start. Hegel’s refutation of Kantian idealism, history of consciousness, and quintessential explanation of the process of the dialectic is hard to understand and harder still to retain (“goes through you like lentils,” as one Stanford professor described it to me), due first and foremost to the breadth of its subject and its terminology. The book’s nearly impenetrable without a good edition and guide or two: The Oxford UP edition is widely considered the best (and don’t skip the notes and foreward) and the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook’s commentary by Robert Stern makes good warm-up reading; also good (and free) are J.M. Bernstein’s lecture notes for his UC Berkeley graduate course on the Phenomenology, available at BernsteinTapes.com.

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even queasy-making—to be set adrift in other minds, with their private rhythms and associative patterns. It feels, at times, like being occupied by an alien consciousness. Some readers don’t ever find their sea-legs with Woolf.  The trick is to surrender yourself (true with other high modernists too), to let the prose wash over you and take you where it will—not to worry too much about understanding a dogmatic way.

Being & Time by Martin Heidegger - Being & Time is probably the hardest book I've ever read. To contradict what I said vis-a-vis Joyce, I don't feel comfortable as a reader of Heidegger letting things wash over me. Literary meaning and philosophical meaning are different beasts, and Being & Time, with its intentionally obtrusive neologisms, isn't meant to be dreamlike. It aims instead to be, among other things, a new kind of science, or a new foundation on which to build the sciences - an understanding of what it means "to be." Heiddeger gets a lot of things shockingly right, and yet the book's abstractness and rigor mean that most of his discoveries remain well-kept secrets. Even reading the first half in a graduate-level seminar, it took me over a year to get through this one. Was persevering worth it? Well, it changed my life. I don't know how much more a reader can ask for.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser - The difficulty and the pleasure of reading Spenser's masterpiece arise from a common source: its semiotic promiscuity. The Faerie Queene is allegory to the power of allegory. Or it is allegory drunk out of its mind on sugary wine, dressed up in layers of costumery, made to run singing through the garden of Eden at four o' clock in the morning before falling down in a heap at sunrise to make silver love to itself. Or it's the product of that lovemaking, tenor and vehicle copulating so variously and complexly that each becomes the other. There is much madness here, not least in the sheer hubris of Spenser's plan. (Like Heidegger, he only finished half of his magnum opus.) The Faerie Queene is also, bizarrely, a work of exquisite poetic control, hundreds upon hundreds of perfectly turned stanzas. I read it in college. It was hard as hell, and I forgot the plot even while I was reading, but many of its images remain burned into my brain ten years later.

The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein - I've been working my way through The Making of Americans for many summers now. I keep getting several hundred pages in, switching to something else, and then, as with Heidegger, returning to find I've lost the thread. But what Heidegger describes, Stein evokes; to read even a page of The Making of Americans is to be thrown into a unique state of attunement. The fineness of attention its exquisite narrative tedium promotes is like an antidote to the shallows of the internet. Beyond the page, birds sing louder, sunlight grows thicker, car horns bare their souls. "The first stunningly original disaster of Modernism," someone wrote about this book, and while I'm not sure it was intended as a compliment, it makes me wish there were more disasters like this.

Women & Men by Joseph McElroy - In this space I could put any number of postmodern meganovels - a subgenre I've been smitten with for many years now. There's William Gaddis' JR, which is easier than people make it out to be, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which is harder. There's The Recognitions and Mason & Dixon. There's William H. Gass' The Tunnel - verbally lucid, but morally arduous. Of the lot, though, I'd like to shine the spotlight again on Joseph McElroy'sWomen & Men. It is longer than any of the foregoing, and, in the idiosyncracies of its prose, on par with the hardest. Parts of it, anyway. Its temperament, though, is completely sui generis - warm, humanist, synthetic rather than analytic. As I wrote for the L.A. Timesa few years back, it's like an entirely different version of what comes after Modernism. It's a weird and wonderful book, and I can't wait to dive into it again.

Emily Colette Wilkinson is a critic living in Washington, DC. Her reviews have received commendations from The Society of Professional Journalists and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

I enjoyed To the Lighthouse; struggled (when much younger) with The Tale of a Tub and Clarissa - have never attempted the others.

 Read none of those, so good for you Penny for achieving one and trying others.  As one who hasn't even read any Jane Austin (personal choice!), I think I may give them all a miss.......

Well I read To the Lighthouse and didn't enjoy it - I suspect I didn't get it at all and I don't think I'm tempted by any of the others LOL

I won't be adding nay of them to my wishlist - I like my reading to be easy and effortless pleasure!

Not even attempted any of them but could probably agree that Finnegan's Wake should be there.  Having been dragged through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also by James Joyce for English A Level I'm happy to say I will never have to read another book by him again.

Not read any and probably won't in the future either. Thanks for the warning about them.

I've tried with Joyce, not those one but Ulysses - don't ask me what it was about.  Also The Golden Bowl by Henry James - the language was almost impenetrable.

tolly18:

I enjoyed To the Lighthouse; struggled (when much younger) with The Tale of a Tub and Clarissa - have never attempted the others.

I liked To The Lighthouse too.  I think I may have studied The Tale Of A Tub at university, but I can't remember anything about it.  Haven't read Clarissa, but ploughed through another Samuel Richardson book, Pamela, as a student.  Life's too short to attempt Ulllyses or Finnegan's Wake, but I do love James Joyce's short story collection, Dubliners.  In my opinion, one of the best short story collections ever written.

Have never even heard of any of them, I like my reading to be easy, although I like to be challenged sometimes in my thinking, these would be a different ball point entirely!

 Am happy to say I've never heard of any of them!  I don't mind a challenging book at times but I do like to enjoy what I'm reading.

 I've wanted to read Clarissa since I saw the TV adaptation with Sean Bean (swoon - why she didn't give into him is beyond me!!!) but the size of the book is - WOW - rather large.  I may have to see if I can get it in 3 or 4 volumes from the library - or this could be an ideal challenege for a Kindle!!

I've read To the Lighthouse but I suspect I overlooked the point as I can't really recall it....must read it again!

I too have never heard of any of them and doubt I'll be rushing out to get any of them either.

alison44:

I liked To The Lighthouse too.  I think I may have studied The Tale Of A Tub at university, but I can't remember anything about it.  Haven't read Clarissa, but ploughed through another Samuel Richardson book, Pamela, as a student.  Life's too short to attempt Ulllyses or Finnegan's Wake, but I do love James Joyce's short story collection, Dubliners.  In my opinion, one of the best short story collections ever written.

I enjoyed To The Lighthouse as well, but then I've read Mrs Dalloway several times and never tire of it. I reread TTL in the spring, ahead of 'doing' it with our second year students. On the whole, they loathed it, but then I got them doing some writing based on it and some of it was rather good!

I agree about Dubliners - a very good short story collection. I've managed Ulysses, which I found fascinating if a little bewildering in parts, but haven't attempted Finnegan's Wake. Some of the others I haven't even heard of. Nightwood? Interesting description: "funny, dirty, absurd". I'm almost tempted to search it out!

I haven't read any of them, I think To the Lighthouse is in the tbr somewhere.  I'll give anything a go though, so wouldn't say no to trying!