10 Difficult Books I Want To Read Because I'm Insane
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- čas přidán 11. 05. 2024
- The original idea came from @iangubeli
His video: • Ten Difficult Books I ...
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cant wait for future One Piece contents again :D
New OP content likely coming at the end of this week. 😍😍😍
Agree - when I first discovered this channel I binged watched all the One Piece reactions!
Still catching up to Shelly! The physical copies keep getting stolen via never being returned to our library, so I've been waiting for Vols. 12-15 to become available on Libby, and as of this morning am now ready to dive into the next arc. Excited!
It took me four tries, because reading about the Parisian sewers was tedious, but Les Mis turned out really good.
I read The Warden (it doesn't have anything to do with The Way We Live Now... that's a standalone) and thought it was ok.... then i reread it early this year and it's one of my fav books. The relationship between Eleanor and her father....chef's kiss!! And that continues into Barchester Towers but i had to get through a few tough chapters to get to the good stuff of BT. I highly encourage you to not give up on The Warden.
Okay! I won't! I'll try again sometime soon! :)
Scary list 😱! Nowadays, length intimidates me more than style. I’ve transitioned to reading doorstoppers on my Kindle with the page number and percentage hidden during reading sessions. It helps me focus on what’s in front of me and not how much further I have to go. Happy reading!
I love a doorstop on kindle. No lugging around a heavy brick! It’s the best.
read one piece. join us. embrace the cult of the strawhat
Love The Unwomanly Face of War. I agree that it's so heartbreaking to read but it's so good I'll have to revisit it and add the other one book you showed to my list!
I'm determined to finally read The Unwomanly Face of War this year. For sure!
@@Shellyish the audiobook they did for this one is really good if that makes it feel less intimidating.
Do not start with The Warden as your first Trollope. Read: The Way We Live Now, or Can You Forgive Her, or The Claverings. You will love all 3 and really enjoy Trollope. He is one of my favorite authors mainly because of these 3 books.
Oh!!! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Glad to see you adding to the extensive pile of difficult (but wonderful) books across BookTube!
In case you're wondering, this topic of video actually started with the CZcamsr @BookishTexan, and then a bunch of other BookTubers, including myself, contributed their own selection of tough literature across a range of genres. It's been fun to see how widely divergent many lists can be (and yet some key books arise again and again).
Thanks for clarifying the origin of this topic. :)
Yeah, so happy you're planning to read all OP ❤
Me too!!
@@Shellyish you'll be suprised by this manga even more in the future. So excited for your OP videos.
This is a great list. I haven’t heard of some of these, and I haven’t seen these on other lists. Love the cameo partway through
Glad you enjoyed!
It's good to challenge oneself on all accounts--content, length, previous "flops", and style!🧡
I think so too! :)
Best wishes with what yo choose to read. Currently reading the Count of Monte Cristo and on page 1051. Nearly there!
You got this!
Absolutely loved this list! Thanks for tagging me!
P.S. Love how you edit!!
Thank you so much!!
Some good picks in here! For myself, I've tried Don Quixote twice now and still need to go back to it. Which is a shame as i got well over a hundred pages in the last time and i was enjoying it too!
Don Quixote is on my list as well!
My husband just finished Moby Dick on audiobook (he doesn’t do physical books). He loved it but recommended to me (who reads mainly physical books) that if I’m ever going to read it, that I should also do it on audiobook.
He said the chapters going into detail about whales would probably be difficult to get through but he did say they’re actually interesting because of the enthusiasm 😂
I always choose one book per YEAR that I take the whole year to read. Any book can be read when divided into 365 parts. I’m 59 so have read a lot of difficult books this way.
I love this idea! Thank you!!
Currently reading A Suitable Boy with Lindy and Jolene's group. One section a week it is really doable! The Way We Lived Now was EXCELLENT! Loved it.
Wonderful! Bumping up Trollope on my TBR.
Ok, Moby Dick and Proust would be on my list for a video entitled " Books I will never read! " However Perdido Street Station is my favourite book of all time. I really hope you love it -I know people have different taste and that's fine but I REALLY hope you love it.
HA! I did a video a few years ago about books that I refuse to read. Ep!
I second the recommendation on Perdido Street Station. Wow. An incredible novel. I also recommend his third book, The Scar. Phenomenal!
Took me at least three tries to get through Moby Dick. Seems like I usually got stuck on the description of the painting in chapter three. Finally got over the hump and was able to succumb to Melville/Ahab's obsession. While I didn't go in with an interest in whaling, Melville's thorough fascination became contagious. A bit like visiting a museum with a friend as they rush from exhibit to exhibit saying, "Wow! Listen to this!" Eventually it became one of my favorite books. I am slowly working my way through volume one of Proust. Slowness has been the key for me. As soon as I try to speed up I find the words just don't sink in. Also want to give Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' another try.
Oh! That's encouraging. Thank you!
I’m reading a Suitable Boy at the moment, but I’ve stalled with it 😬
Girl!! Pick up some Hardy!!
I know. I know. 🫣
Long books are my challenge books now. I can’t imagine ever trying A Suitable Boy no matter how well it is done.
That’s interesting. Why do you think that is?
😂 “what books have kicked your b… hiney” 🤣
I have Proust on my TBR still. I thought last year I would do it, but it never happened.
😂😂😂
Ah, after Alana Estelle's video on Proust I've been wanting to pick up his books as well! Anthony Trollope is a personal favorite, which came out of nowhere a few years ago. Like other commenters, I think you should just dive into the book you're interested in.
Awe! Thank you!
I know you said you do buddy with certain people, but I can do a read along for Tess of the D’ubervilles. It was amazing. I read it years ago, it’s one of my favorites. The adaptation! OMG! It has to be the one with Oliver Milburn.
Sounds great! I'd definitely be in!
I read Svetlana's Chyrnobl prayer, and it was good but also hard to get through some parts because of the descriptions given of stuff. I want to get her Unwomenly Faces book.
I've taught The Warden in the past. It went over well with the students. I've just started rereading the 12 novel series A Dance to the Music of Time series by Anthony Powell (4th time through though the later novels are weak). Also the WWII novel From Here to Eternity (865 pages). I'm teaching Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge this term. Your list looks great!
Thanks, Steve!
Against all the odds I’ve actually read one of these! Moby Dick which was much easier to read than I expected.
I’ve had both Ducks, Newburyport and A Suitable Boy for ages but haven’t plucked up the courage for either yet.
Why are these particularly long books to intimidating?
Trollope is pure delight! If the Warden isnt for you id try something else. He really is too much fun to miss out on, in my opinion!
I think I'm going to take your advice! :)
In 2025 I plan to devote my sole focus on In Search…Hefty block is Ducks… the book froze up on my kindle so I got my money back … the incessant refrain kept me hooked…Tristram Shandy is the cat’s pajamas…I’ve only gotten half way through Moby on two occasions…I got lost in the eddies… it was like a bible to my atheist anachronistic buddy …Jude is beautiful … a couple titles I didn’t recognize… Perdido St & Splendor …
Great topic, Shelly, love your take on things. I dnf'd Proust a long time ago and never picked it up again. Maybe your reviews will be encouraging!
No interest in Ducks or Alexievich, but based on the Storygraph blurb, Suitable Boy sounds like a great story, and it's going on my tbr. If anyone has done this one on audiobook, would you recommend listening vs. reading this title? (Ditto for Sunne in Splendor).
My masters focused on 19th century literature (English and American), and Trollope was never a big part of that. I'm sure I read The Warden, but don't really remember it.
I wish I'd known about Misery May last year when they were doing Hardy, but he's on my tbr.
Like Moby Dick, I think One Piece just takes time to get the most out of it. It wouldn't be fun to try and rush it.
I believe that A Suitable Boy infamously doesn't have an audiobook which is odd. I know some people prefer Trollope to Dickens even though Trollope is much less known these days.
@@ShellyishI did see on Storygraph that there is a BBC radio play recording of Suitable Boy, but I imagine it's not very easy to get hold of.
And oh, personally I don't think I'll be switching from Team Dickens to Team Trollope, but am glad there's something for every one 😄
Try Moby Dick as an audiobook..I tried Kafka's The castle and put it down..
Try Tristan and the Classics for some great Thomas Hardy reviews. He's terrific!!
Proust is wonderful. I wouldn't call ISOLT "stream of consciousness" - at least not in the James Joyce or Virginia Woolf sense. He's just flowing through his memories but the events depicted follow each other in a very straightforward manner.
Hm. Interesting. ISOLT is considered an early example of stream of consciousness which is why it's probably easier to read than Joyce and Woolf.
I have so many Thomas Hardy books on my bookshelves! I keep putting them off. 😆❤📚
Same, girl, same.
Go for it ASAP, you won’t regret it!!!
@@christinefortner7725 Thank you! I'll add one to June's tbr! Favorite?
It's my goal to read A Suitable Boy this summer, I really want to get lost in that book and I just need to read it!
Same!
Good luck!
Thanks!
I think I sent my copy of 'A Suitable Boy' to a charity shop, bought it on a whim, never got around to reading it, the sheer size of it! Maybe I'll try an audio copy. So many books I have that are size inhibiting: 'The Eighth Life' arrived in the post, I had no idea it was that long, so it's still sitting there. The usual suspects, in an optimistic moment I bought 'Moby Dick' one of these days...
Oh, The Eighth Life is a chunkster. That one scares me too.
I read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and the style was very complicated, and the content was brutal so it was a double whammy. It felt like reading a book in a foreign language that I only know a handful of words and phrases. It hurt my head, but I did preservere.
How wonderful! McBride’s strange and brutal book was put on my radar last year and I’ve wanted to read it ever since.
Adore Hardy & Trollope, hope you will too!
Yay! Thank you!
The warden was hard! It took me all last summer to finish!
It legit scares me.
You can watch The Way We Live Now first--it is excellent and then makes the book more fun to read.
Great suggestion! Thank you!
listen to the audiobook for Ducks! the narrator does an incredible job with the narration
_The Way We Live Now_ is a stand-alone.
I've read several Thomas Pynchon novels, and I've overcome my fear for most of his books, except _Gravity's Rainbow._ I still fear to tread there.
Pynchon scares me!
I'm of the view that the longer a book, the better! Many of my own books were deliberately plotted and written as doorstopping sagas, and two are so long even by my standards I decided to publish them in four volumes. I far prefer a book I can climb into and live in for a few weeks instead of something I can breeze through in a day or a few days.
I've long been drawn to darker periods of history and dark themes in general. Part of that is because the first book I ever read, at age three, was Grimms' Fairytales, and another reason is because I tend towards a non-pathological type of dissociation as a self-protective defense mechanism. Thus, it doesn't often emotionally affect me on the surface when I read about or watch depressing subjects, even when I of course recognise these are very tragic events.
Interesting approach to reading. I think I'd feel the same way about longer reads if I had a bit more time.
Can you please put up a list of the books you are talking about .
Thanks.
I'll work on it.
I have the same problem with Stream of Conscious, but I keep trying to read it. I just purchased In Search of Lost Time and am determined to read it.
Absolutely!
I think the trick is to be able to read stream of consciousness when you can read for a good while with no interruptions or distractions.
Re: Proust. My college buddy, who majored in French & later got his PhD from Harvard, told me that his favorite writer was Proust. Maybe because my buddy is so pushy, I have never tried to read Proust although I was a lit major and have read hundreds of literary novels. The only stream of conscious novelist that I have ever liked, though, was Ford Maddox Ford.
I didn't even know FMF wrote in a stream on consciousness style.
I got about 60% through Perdido and DNFd it - I just couldn’t take any more of the sexual content and foul language. I loved the concept, and when the writing didn’t contain the 2 things above, it was so good.
I remember you DNFed Perdido which makes me wonder if it'll be for me. Gah! :)
Helpful to know! Thank you.
Just a few comments: Far From the Madding Crowd is not that bleak. Definitely a more hopeful book than most of Hardy. It’s a favorite of mine.
I wouldn’t start Trollope with The Warden. He is more congenial in his longer books. I started with Can You Forgive Her, many years ago, and got hooked. There are lots of standalone that are excellent: John Caldigate, The American Senator, The Way We Live Now, Rachel Ray…
Proust is not stream of consciousness. It is a fictional memoir, in which the narrator has retired to his bedroom where he is writing his autobiography. It has long, sometimes difficult sentences. But it is very much told from a retrospective viewpoint.
Perdido Street Station is weird, but it’s also excellent, and great fun.
Moby Dick is a story about revenge against the gods. Whaling is incidental. But if you got through 60 pages and didn’t like that, then you might be best off to skip it.
Thanks for the insight on these books!
Some of these peek my interest. Moby Dick surprised me i had to read that in high school. You a teach and have not read. I am a slow reader audible has changed my life. I read 4 or 5 physical books a year so no where near what i want but add maybe 50 with audio books. Since college
I'm so glad that audiobooks have word so well for you.
I am with you on Proust. I read Swann's Way in January and February. I got through it but it was a slog. I agree he has some beautiful writing but overall his style was not for me.
I also read A Suitable Boy during March and April. It is very readable, but I got a bit bogged down in the last half. The first half seemed kind of like an Indian soap opera. The second half has a lot of politics which I don't enjoy and, of course, I knew nothing about since it was India in the early 1950s. I knew about partition but that's about it. So be prepared for that.
The book I own that intimidates me is U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. It is apparently quite weird in style and just a few weeks ago, Steve Donoghue was rereading it, and he said he was taking his time and trying to figure out what Dos Passos was doing. I now feel like I have no hope of understanding what is going on, but I'm determined to try.
I've heard that A Suitable Boy is a bit of a soap opera. :) Dos Passos is supossed to be quite difficult.
Where's the list????
In the video.
You are a braver woman than i 🎉
Ha!
i really find the one piece in thumbnail to bait people in really funny tbh
😂
Why don't you review pop-up books?
The pop-up editions of James Joyce are much better than the originals.
I'm not sure.
Correct that The Way We Live Now is a stand-alone. The Warden was incredibly slow, imo, because he spends soooo much time detailing church politics. TWWLN reads much more like a soap opera. They are entirely different reads. He is such a hit or miss author for me.
Thank you so much!
cute kid LOL!
Tess isn't necessarily overwhelmingly sad. It's just somewhat frustrating from a modern feminist point of view as far as what Tess has to go through because of societal rules and expectations of the time. I mean, it's not a happy book, but I've read much sadder books.
Oh! Interesting. It just got bumped up in my estimation. ☺️
@@Shellyishactually, something extremely bad does happen (pretty early in the book)
I have no idea why I forgot about essentially one of the most major plot points.
Boy howdy, I'm going to look dumb once you see what I failed to consider.
Great video, you're truly insane (jk!)
Thanks 😅
If you are insane I would recommend this book.
" This is for the real adepts in madness, who have gone beyond all psychiatry, psychoanalysis, who are not helpable. This third book is again the work of a German, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Just listen to its title: TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. We will just call it TRACTATUS. It is one of the most difficult books in existence. Even a man like G.E.Moore, a great English philosopher, and
Bertrand Russell, another great philosopher - not only English but a philosopher of the whole world - both agreed that this man Wittgenstein was far superior to them both.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was really a lovable man. I don't hate him, but I don't dislike him. I like him and I love him, but not his book. His book is only gymnastics. Only once in a while after pages and pages you may come across a sentence which is luminous. For example: That which cannot be spoken should not be spoken; one should be silent about it. Now this is a beautiful statement. Even saints, mystics, poets, can learn much from this sentence. That which cannot be spoken must not be spoken of.
Wittgenstein writes in a mathematical way, small sentences, not even paragraphs - sutras. But for the very advanced insane man this book can be of immense help. It can hit him exactly in his soul, not only in the head. Just like a nail it can penetrate into his very being. That may wake him from his nightmare.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a lovable man. He was offered one of the most cherished chairs of philosophy at Oxford. He declined. That's what I love in him. He went to become a farmer and fisherman. This is lovable in the man. This is more existential than Jean-Paul Sartre, although Wittgenstein never talked of existentialism. Existentialism, by the way, cannot be talked about; you have to live it, there is no other way.
This book was written when Wittgenstein was studying under G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell.
Two great philosophers of Britain, and a German... it was enough to create TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS. Translated it means Wittgenstein, Moore and Russell. I, on my part, would rather have seen Wittgenstein sitting at the feet of Gurdjieff than studying with Moore and Russell. That was the right place for him, but he missed. Perhaps next time, I mean next life... for him, not for me. For me this is enough, this is the last. But for him, at least once he needs to be in the company of a man like Gurdjieff or Chuang Tzu, Bodhidharma - but not Moore, Russell, not Whitehead. He was associating with these people, the wrong people. A right man in the company of wrong people, that's what destroyed him.
My experience is, in the right company even a wrong person becomes right, and vice-versa: in a wrong company, even a right person becomes wrong. But this only applies to unenlightened men, right or wrong, both. An enlightened person cannot be influenced. He can associate with anyone - Jesus with Magdalena, a prostitute; Buddha with a murderer, a murderer who had killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people. He had taken a vow to kill one thousand people, and he was going to kill Buddha too; that's how he came into contact with Buddha.
The murderer's name is not known. The name people gave to him was Angulimala, which means 'the man who wears a garland of fingers'. That was his way. He would kill a man, cut off his fingers and put them on his garland, just to keep count of the number of people he had killed. Only ten fingers were missing to make up the thousand; in other words only one man more.... Then Buddha appeared. He was just moving on that road from one village to another. Angulimala shouted, "Stop!"
Buddha said, "Great. That's what I have been telling people: Stop! But, my friend, who listens?"
Angulimala looked amazed: Is this man insane? And Buddha continued walking towards Angulimala. Angulimala again shouted, "Stop! It seems you don't know that I am a murderer,
and I have taken a vow to kill one thousand people. Even my own mother has stopped seeing me, because only one person is missing.... I will kill you... but you look so beautiful that if you stop and turn back I may not kill you."
Buddha said, "Forget about it. I have never turned back in my life, and as far as stopping is concerned, I stopped forty years ago; since then there is nobody left to move. And as far as killing me is concerned, you can do it anyway. Everything born is going to die."
Angulimala saw the man, fell at his feet, and was transformed. Angulimala could not change Buddha, Buddha changed Angulimala. Magdalena the prostitute could not change Jesus, but Jesus changed the woman.
So what I said is only applicable to so-called ordinary humanity, it is not applicable to those who are awakened. Wittgenstein can become awakened; he could have become awakened even in this life.
Alas, he associated with wrong company. But his book can be of great help to those who are really third-degree insane. If they can make any sense out of it, they will come back to sanity."
Thank you!