Friday 21 September 2012

The Top 10 Most Difficult Books

Publisher's Weekly, a magazine especially for the book world, recently published this list of "the hardest and most frustrating books ever written":

Barnes, Djuna "Nightwood" - 1936
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" (Phänomenologie des Geistes) - 1807
Heidegger, Martin "Being & Time" (Sein und Zeit) - 1927
Joyce, James "Finnegans Wake" - 1939
McElroy, Joseph "Women & Men" - 1987
Richardson, Samuel "Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady" - 1748
Spenser, Edmund "The Faerie Queene" - 1590
Stein, Gertrude "The Making of Americans" - 1902-11
Swift, Jonathan "A Tale of A Tub" - 1633
Woolf, Virginia "To The Lighthouse" - 1927


 So, far I have only read one of those books, "To the Lighthouse" which was considered very difficult by everyone in our book club. I love reading challenging literature, be it fiction or non-fiction. Would I like to read all of those listed? Probably. Will I managed to read them all in the near future? Probably not, especially when I am looking at my every increasing TBR pile. Still, I will copy the list to my calendar and look out for those books whenever I hit the next bookshop and/or library.

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