Great post. I might add Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) and The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky -- not syntactically difficult but a long novel that requires some effort. I'd remove The Greenlanders -- a wonderful novel, but not especially long and not a difficult read.
I'm in the middle of a year-long project to read Ulysses -- steady progress!
I've since learned about a few more--I'll do an update at some point. I'm thinking of reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling but that's going to take a major commitment. Ulysses: I bounced off it the first couple of times--I was too young. It's good to have an outline/guide to go with, really helps. What's going on chapter by chapter, what the prose is up to, what connects it to The Odyssey, etc. Parts are difficult, but lots of it is a pure joy. Somebody did a similar breakdown for J R, which was very helpful--who's talking, where the scene breaks are, and so on. That one is like 800 pages of unattributed dialog, but a great read ultimately, hilarious.
You hit the nail on the head with your rationale for reading these books. I spent a good few months listening to J R by Gaddis, and it never ceased to amaze me that it had been 1) written, 2) read by an editor who let it be, 3) published, and 4) honored! (The audiobook, by the way, was a tour de force for the narrator, and a fascinating study in whether it is possible to make more sense of a book like that via a narrator or by seeing the page. I did hear him make mistakes of attribution from time to time, using one character voice even though I could tell it was another character, which is whole nother layer of access to Gaddis' dense, hilarious text.) I felt the same when I read Pale Fire – yes, I know, Nabokov – but that book would never be published today. Would Saul Bellow be published today? Not just because there are so few readers willing to take them on but also because most of these writers were smart, often wickedly so, and I think they leave a lot of folks in the dust.
Great post! I'd add The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt to the list! Maybe the full Septology by Jon Fosse (though I haven't read it yet - it just seems daunting).
Eliot was more of a thinker than Trollope, and Middlemarch does take a commitment, but I still put it in the Big but Not Terribly Hard category. By the way, couple years ago I ran into a book called142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (Rosemary Ashton, 2006) . . . it was where John Chapman lived and became a nexus for literati of the time, including Marian Evans, who wrote for, and helped put out, the Westminster Review. Kind of a group portrait but it helps shed a lot of light on Eliot and her fellow writers. See if you can find a copy. [And thanks for subscribing! I hope you're well.]
I am writing, running, and forty pound lighter (the reason I'm still running at 70). You might subscribe to my blog: Imperfect Patience, janpriddyoregon
Great post. I might add Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) and The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky -- not syntactically difficult but a long novel that requires some effort. I'd remove The Greenlanders -- a wonderful novel, but not especially long and not a difficult read.
I'm in the middle of a year-long project to read Ulysses -- steady progress!
I've since learned about a few more--I'll do an update at some point. I'm thinking of reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling but that's going to take a major commitment. Ulysses: I bounced off it the first couple of times--I was too young. It's good to have an outline/guide to go with, really helps. What's going on chapter by chapter, what the prose is up to, what connects it to The Odyssey, etc. Parts are difficult, but lots of it is a pure joy. Somebody did a similar breakdown for J R, which was very helpful--who's talking, where the scene breaks are, and so on. That one is like 800 pages of unattributed dialog, but a great read ultimately, hilarious.
Anyway, thanks for responding!
Haven't read it but what about O Lost, Wolfe's original manuscript for Look Homeward Angel?
You hit the nail on the head with your rationale for reading these books. I spent a good few months listening to J R by Gaddis, and it never ceased to amaze me that it had been 1) written, 2) read by an editor who let it be, 3) published, and 4) honored! (The audiobook, by the way, was a tour de force for the narrator, and a fascinating study in whether it is possible to make more sense of a book like that via a narrator or by seeing the page. I did hear him make mistakes of attribution from time to time, using one character voice even though I could tell it was another character, which is whole nother layer of access to Gaddis' dense, hilarious text.) I felt the same when I read Pale Fire – yes, I know, Nabokov – but that book would never be published today. Would Saul Bellow be published today? Not just because there are so few readers willing to take them on but also because most of these writers were smart, often wickedly so, and I think they leave a lot of folks in the dust.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Great post! I'd add The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt to the list! Maybe the full Septology by Jon Fosse (though I haven't read it yet - it just seems daunting).
Thanks! Good to hear from you. I'll check them out.
OK, OK, I'll get on it. Gaddis I guess.
Buckle up!
You might try J R--it's really funny [remember what I said about "wearing headphones"].
Middlemarch is not Big Hard? I've read it twice.
Eliot was more of a thinker than Trollope, and Middlemarch does take a commitment, but I still put it in the Big but Not Terribly Hard category. By the way, couple years ago I ran into a book called142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (Rosemary Ashton, 2006) . . . it was where John Chapman lived and became a nexus for literati of the time, including Marian Evans, who wrote for, and helped put out, the Westminster Review. Kind of a group portrait but it helps shed a lot of light on Eliot and her fellow writers. See if you can find a copy. [And thanks for subscribing! I hope you're well.]
I am writing, running, and forty pound lighter (the reason I'm still running at 70). You might subscribe to my blog: Imperfect Patience, janpriddyoregon