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Who is the hardest read?

Stewart said:
So you'd rather read "James blushed when he realised his faux paux, which means mistake." ?
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I'm not talking about general phrases that any well-read person knows. I'm talking about more-than-two-word phrases, or an entire sentence. Not all of us know more than a couple of languages. I compare it to a movie where two characters suddenly talk in another language, and you don't have subtitles to tell you what is being said. Stop being snide. :p AND, it's "faux pas".
 
Miss Shelf said:
-and books that lack punctuation such as quotation marks when people are speaking, I'm sailing along and suddenly become aware that I'm reading a conversation and have to go back and figure out who is saying what and what's being spoken and what's not. It gets to be too much trouble to keep reading. I've seen more and more books use this style-what, is it getting too expensive to print quotation marks?
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I have noticed this becoming more and more popular. I hate it, and I really have to think twice before reading something in that style. It's almost as if the writer is too lazy or something. Perhaps it's meant to be trendy and cool or whatever.
 
I think my hardest read so far has been Kierkegaard. It is in Danish but its in an old form of Danish and then his looong senteces and making up of new concepts. But once I got the hang of his way of expressing himself, then I simply loved his language and I managed to see just how ironic and funny he is at times.
I am still reading Dostojevsky and dont find him hard at all. I enjoy his language.
To me its worse when a book is written in a " ordinary language" but somehow just so hard to finish anyway, due to the style of writing. I still have Vikram Seth´s "A suitable boy" on my shelf. I have read about half of the book but cant seem to finish it. Yet. I dont know why it is like this as I do enjoy reading whatever he is saying.

Flower
 
Miss Shelf said:
-books where people use phrases in a foreign language and the author doesn't bother to translate for us.
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Lolita comes to mind, although personally I didn't have a problem with the French.

Dialects are very difficult and annoying to me. "Der Hauptmann von Köpenick" by Carl Zuckmayer, or "Rose Bernd" by Gerhart Hauptmann really put me off because the characters always speak in dialects and sometimes I could hardly understand them. Not to mention Faulkner: reading in a foreign language has enough difficulties already, dialects make it even harder.
 
My hardest read was Moby Dick by Melville. I tried when I was 15 or so and I'm hoping I won't have a problem with it when I try again soon. When I first pick up a Dickens it takes me a few pages to get used to his sentence structure but once I do it feels very natural. The only worry I have about War and Peace is keeping track of all the characters.
 
Miss Shelf said:
regardless of when the style was first used, I didn't notice it increasing in popularity till fairly recently. I enjoy Paddy Doyle's books, and it took me a while to get used to it, but I still prefer quotation marks-I'm lazy. :)
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Do you mean Roddy Doyle. I've read all his books and it is a bit annoying.
 
Oooh, I really didn't like Sergeant Lamb's America by Robert Graves. What a snore. In retrospect, it had the consistency of cold oatmeal. Historical novel set in the American Revolution from the perspective of a British soldier. ZZzzzzzz.
 
Miss Shelf said:
-and books that lack punctuation such as quotation marks when people are speaking, I'm sailing along and suddenly become aware that I'm reading a conversation and have to go back and figure out who is saying what and what's being spoken and what's not. It gets to be too much trouble to keep reading. I've seen more and more books use this style-what, is it getting too expensive to print quotation marks?
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I couldn't agree more - these types of books just annoy me so much. This actually ruined a few books for me - I'm sure that I would have enjoyed Angela's Ashes a lot more had it had speech marks in it. Next thing you know they'll be missing out full-stops because it's cool and hip :rolleyes:
 
oh well im german and im a a passionated reader. Thogh, i must say,ive read a few books where i end up reading a passages over and over again~_~.
For Instance, Immanuel Kant his essay about Enlightment,Kafka,
mainly old literature from german authors is pretty difficault to understand,Heinrich Böll with sentences that are pages long,my english teacher said that she hated reading james joyce.She was always saying if you are famous you can do anything even if it sucks.
 
When I tried my hand at James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, I couldn't get past the first sentence...its almost like he doesn't believe in putting words together in a familiar pattern that creates intelligent speech!! :confused:

I am also one who can't stand it when writers use untranslated foreign phrases, which my favorite author (Agatha Christie) does lots with French.

But, by far the most difficult book I've tried to read, which well nigh "broke me brain", was The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, by John Owen, a 17th Century theologian. His phrasing is so unusual, and I thought I'd be able to "get it" because I love reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible!! Go figure!!
 
I've read Saramago (Blindness), Shakespeare, Joyce, Hardy, Melville, Defoe, etc, but the one that slayed me was (wait for it) Welsh.

Irvine Welsh' Porn, the sequel to Trainspotting, I just gave up on, after 30 or so pages. That accent killed me.
 
By the way...
Let me vocalize my cogitation of abhorrence toward authors who display a predilection for using ostentatious and meretricious verbiage---LOL! I can't stand those authors who use lots of "dictionary words" either...like Elizabeth Peters for example (not to be confused with Ellis Peters, who I love!).
 
Martin said:
Irvine Welsh' Porn, the sequel to Trainspotting, I just gave up on, after 30 or so pages. That accent killed me.
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I actually gave up on Welsh during Trainspotting because of the heavy accent throughout the book.
 
Bluraven said:
By the way...
Let me vocalize my cogitation of abhorrence toward authors who display a predilection for using ostentatious and meretricious verbiage---LOL! ...
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You're inflicting corporal punishment on a deceased ruminant ungulate! And that is akin to creating canine vocalizations in the proximity of an inappropriate deciduous connifer. However, I am sufficiently sagatious to recognize that now that you have done so, it is fruitless to grow lacrimous as a reaction to precipitously departed lacteal fluid.
 
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