Writers and readers around the world agree on one thing: some books are harder to read than others. On Goodreads, the web's largest book site, millions of readers share information about books with each other. Based on their reviews, we've selected the most challenging literary works in history and compiled a list list of the most difficult books in the world.
10. "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad
Genre: novella, adventure.
The list of the most difficult books to understand opens with the story of the protagonist's journey into the depths of the Dark Continent and his own heart. The main difficulty lies in the allegorical narrative, its multifaceted nature, and the abundance of meanings. Also included are the author's verbose and lengthy explanations of what exactly he means.
9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Genre: humor, satire, science fiction.
The book's length (over a thousand pages) is mere "peanuts" compared to everything else. Readers will encounter alternate timelines, intertwining and diverging, more than two hundred characters, and a nonlinear narrative structure. And a huge number of footnotes (over 388 in total). Many of these have their own footnotes, and so on ad infinitum.
If you decide to test your nerves with Infinite Jest, we recommend first finding a rough timeline of the story, a list of characters, and a description of the world the book takes place in online. It's no surprise that Infinite Jest wasn't translated into Russian until 2018, almost a quarter century after its creation.
8. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Genre: philosophical novel, crime, psychological realism.
The first (but not the last) book by a Russian-language author on the list of most difficult books. The hardest part for readers is getting through the first hundred-odd pages, when Raskolnikov wanders through a disgustingly yellow Petersburg in a delirium.
According to English-speaking readers, the hardest part of the book is the names. To a foreign ear, ordinary Russian names are too long and difficult to remember. Some admitted that they had to write out the characters on a separate sheet of paper and constantly refer to it to figure out who was who.
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Genre: Magical realism, family saga, epic fantasy.
Rarely does a book cover such a vast span of time as Márquez's famous novel. It describes the lives of seven generations. And to keep the reader alert, the characters' names are regularly repeated: for example, more than half of the book's male population are named Aureliano. It's hard to figure out who's who, especially given the book's magical realism, where the mundane and everyday are intricately intertwined with the magical and wondrous.
6. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
Genre: romance novel, war fiction, history.
This book made it onto the list of the most difficult literary works to read for one reason only – its page count.
Putting aside the length of War and Peace and the author's regular forays into philosophy (which many readers quickly skim), the novel itself is quite engaging. It has everything—noble lovers, suicide attempts, sex scenes interspersed with scenes of suffering and death, large-scale battles, and the mores of various social strata. Many readers, struggling to get to the last page, exclaim in ecstasy: "This is the best book we've ever read!"
5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Genre: satire, science fiction, history.
Quantum mechanics, mass extinctions, and speculative metaphysics are not topics for the average mind. The narrative structure is no easier: one gets the impression that Pynchon was trying to write as densely and richly as possible. It's as if his goal was to cram into 700 pages what another author couldn't convey in 2,000.
The intensity of the narrative is somewhat broken up by musical interludes, where the characters sing frequently and with relish. Otherwise, the text is full of hints, allusions, and hidden quotes, so you'll have to constantly resort to Google and other search engines while reading. The novel was translated into Russian only in 2012, 39 years after its creation.
4. Moby Dick, Gourmand Mellville
Genre: epic, adventure.
Many readers have two problems with the famous novel Moby Dick.
- First, the book is a bizarre mixture of classic novel, essay, free-flowing thought, quasi-scientific passages (like the tedious chapter on marine animals), theatrical monologues and dialogues, and even an industrial drama about the hardships of whale slaughter in the Arctic Ocean. Just when your brain is primed for one type of narrative, the action in Moby-Dick takes a sharp turn.
- The second difficulty is the outdated concept of the allegorical novel, which fell out of fashion back in the 18th century. Melville's symbolic language, however, is difficult to decipher. Perhaps this is the secret of its charm.
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Genre: Gothic, modernism, domestic fiction.
In one of the most difficult literary works to read, the first section is the most challenging. It's narrated by a person with developmental disabilities. He struggles to grasp the flow of time and sometimes jumps from past to present and back again in the space of a single sentence.
Many readers have compared the first part of this novel to a journey through thick fog: it is unclear what is happening around you, and people, trees, and animals appear as equally indistinguishable dark silhouettes.
But if the reader is stubborn enough, by the fourth part the fog will clear and reading will become more interesting.
2. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Genre: an experimental "word-creating, mythological and comic" novel.
There's practically no plot in "The Wake." The entire book is a continuous stream of consciousness, in which the author attempted to capture in words the complex, fluid matter of sleep.
To make things more enjoyable for the reader, Joyce indulged in word-creation, punning, and inserting foreign words into the text. Almost a hundred years have passed since the book was written, and literary scholars continue to debate the meaning of all this. It is said that by the end of the book, Joyce himself was barely understanding his own work. This is unsurprising, since he worked on the book for 16 years and by the end had completely forgotten what he had said at the beginning.
1. "Ulysses" by James Joyce
Genre: modernist novel.
The top spot on the list of the most difficult literary works in history is occupied by another book by Irish writer James Joyce.
It is considered a masterpiece and an example of modernist "stream-of-consciousness" prose. Ulysses is slightly easier to read than the second-placed novel, Finnegans Wake, despite Joyce's attempt to condense all the days of humanity from the beginning of time to the end of time into a single day of an ordinary Dubliner. The novel has a more or less clear structure and even has the semblance of a plot.
However, Joyce played with the reader in his work, scattering parodies, allusions, and numerous puzzles throughout the text. Literary scholars are still struggling to solve them.