Short Little Difficult Books

I sometimes half-jokingly maintain that Moby-Dick was really written as part of an early BOOK-IT [1] reading incentive program to improve literacy among whalers by disguising a novel as a cetological guidebook.

There are entire chapters devoted to the harpooning process, sperm whale anatomy, maritime legal disputes over whale harvesting, etc.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!

Another personal suggestion in this vein: The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin (trans. Sally Laird), which consists entirely of unattributed dialogue. It's challenging at first but once you get a feel for the rhythm and start recognizing characters by how they speak, it becomes a really charming read.

Ok, this nerd-sniped me. Are we saying this now? Feels like a reference. Found it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

WTF? If the term is about superficial depth wouldn't the bros be into like, abridged graphic-novel adaptations of difficult Russian classics, and not actually diving into genuinely difficult stuff regardless of quality? Shouldn't highbrow literary types sneer with greater cleverness or at least clarity?

> I also find it strange to even worry about “pretentious” readers or “brodernists” hyping themselves up to read some new, huge tome (Schattenfroh this season it seems) in an age when few people read anything at all. Reading a very long book always takes some dedication, some challenging of yourself. So what?

Ok good, TFA actually does get it

My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100). Both books require some motivation to get used to their respective languages. After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose ; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent. Roland was harder to grasp, I had to use a specialized dictionary, but it's a concise and epic tale, and I read some verses so many times I ended learning them by rote.

Even translated, some short books from a very different culture far in the past can be challenging. For instance "Eugene Onegin" or "Gilgamesh". As a counterpoint, "The art of war" is an easy read, though written 2300 years ago in a small kingdom of China.

A last comment: the author conflate books that are difficult because of a technicality in their writing, and those that are strange in their story. The translations of Abe Kobo or Kafka I've read had nothing difficult in their words, but the surrealist plots were very unsettling. In "Pedro Páramo" the reader feels lost in a harsh world and unsure of reality. Meanwhile, Perec's "La disparition" or Becket's "Molloy" are more about style tricks.

It's been somewhat disappointing researching the reading habits of people who read many books a year. For the reader who tears through ebooks on Kindle Unlimited, they mostly read genre fiction in a few categories. The same thing has been happening to me. I used to challenge myself to read "the classics" but lately before bad I reach for genre fiction written at an 8th grade level.

For many, reading is just another form of entertainment. Maybe call it the hollywoodification of books? While it's far better form of entertainment than TikTok or Instagram, the true potential is in its ability to make us smarter by challenging our thoughts and dieas.

When books are seen as just another entertainment product in a saturated marketplace, why chose something which makes you struggle?

* Exit, Voice and Loyalty - about how organizations and people work. Easily the best social science book I've ever read

* Art & Fear - gives a much better model for creating software than most books

Am I doing something wrong here?

In particular various kinds of formal experimentation can be quite fun and I wouldn't perceive them as difficult at all (especially in shorter form). I read a short story in multiple-choice form years ago and loved it. I've read most of Milorad Pavic's books, all of which have unusual formal structures (e.g., Dictionary of the Khazars has the nonlinear structure of a cross-referenced dictionary or encyclopedia). Some were a bit baffling (they also can fall into the "confusing events, surrealist dream logic, and elliptical plots" category) but I didn't find them difficult exactly.

One of the more common practical difficulties that can add friction to a book is a complex storyline with many characters who can be hard to keep track of. But this won't make the book as a whole feel super difficult as long as the content is worth it. War and Peace is a classic example of this, with multiple intersecting storylines and a large cast of characters. A Suitable Boy is a modern example in a similar vein.

But I think a lot of times when people say a book is difficult they just mean either "gosh I actually kind of have to pay attention to this" or "this is really long". To me those things actually are positive qualities if the content of the book is good, since they just make it richer. My favorite novel is In Search of Lost Time, which is one of the quintessential "difficult" books, but if you get into its rhythm, most of it is blissfully engrossing.

A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":

Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition. It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would recommend prioritizing reading the Fictions and The Aleph collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with would be "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", and "The Immortal". If you want slightly more sentimental, "The Circular Ruins" is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is hilarious.

If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a "novel", Nabokov's Pale Fire is a great read and a good introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you might think.

Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at first, but some of them, especially Seven American Nights, Forlesen, and the trio of stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, are similar to Pale Fire insofar as they are far more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story collections, there's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, Forlesen, Seven American Nights, Death of the Island Doctor), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" (Tracking Song, The Doctor of Death Island), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.

If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. He was influenced by Burroughs (Naked Lunch would be another recommendation here if you can stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will challenge its reader in many ways. It's very interesting to go straight from this into Crash, which covers a lot of the same material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say The Atrocity Exhibition deserves this praise(?) just as much, even if it's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political stunt pulled using one of its sections (called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan) belong more to the Situationists' games than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything Baudrillard even pointed to.

Extremely tortuous phraseology. But I finished it, with gritted teeth at 15.

I have long since abandoned the desire to finish every book I start. Life is too short.