Who's afraid of those "difficult" novelists ?

[Trollheart]

Yes, I tried The Divine Comedy too, but it's all the checking back to the appendix to see who he's talking about or slagging off - which, if you don't do this, makes the book pretty nonsensical - that put me off. You'd really need to have two copies, one open to the appendix, which you could keep referring back to. Oh, and four arms.

I also found Paradise Lost a big disappointment. I loved the first part, the big battle with Satan, but then Adam just licks Michael's metaphorical angelic ass for chapters and it becomes a total bore. Talk about a game of two halves!

Honestly, I don't want to read anything about whaling. I never realised how up-close-and-personal-savage-and-cruel it is. I mean, I knew it was cruel, but I kind of thought it was harpoon the whale and reel him in (bad enough) but when you read the lengths they go to/went to - no thanks. Not for me. Save the whales! Sixteen blue whales will get you a teaset at the local garage, maybe.

[Marie Monday]

so by difficult you mean both 'complex' and 'difficult to get through'? the divine comedy is neither imo, it's a hell of a lot of fun (well, especially the inferno. the boredom increases the higher dante gets. except there's the hilarious moment when he reaches paradise and you finally meet that Beatrice he's been simping about for the entire book and then she turns out to be a massive bitch lol. Have I talked about that before on here?)
I get the thing about a time cutoff for books, even though I don't do it. I enjoy reading something that clases with my modern ideas of a book sometimes, and findign the bits that don't clash. By the way, Cervantes in particular holds up remarkably well considering all that.

I agree on naked lunch being difficult. It asks you to go with the associative flow and pay attention at the same time, which is hard. I liked it a lot though. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are difficult too, of course. Others, sticking with the definition of 'complex': Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges (I like him but I think sometimes his stories are the worse for being stripped of the usual storytelling frills). And Proust is an odd one considering that he uses no 'abstract' writing style (and he spends a lot of time just gossiping), but he writes about very abstract things and uses complex language. Nabokov's Ada or Ardor, which is not super hard to follow once you get used to it but there are a lot of jokes and puns and references which you don't catch without looking at annotations or reading extremely closely. the sound and the fury can be added too, I suppose, even though it's not so much really difficult as initially confusing; it doesn't take a terrible effort to piece it all together and then it's a pretty straightforward book.

[Marie Monday]

Yes, I tried The Divine Comedy too, but it's all the checking back to the appendix to see who he's talking about or slagging off - which, if you don't do this, makes the book pretty nonsensical - that put me off. You'd really need to have two copies, one open to the appendix, which you could keep referring back to. Oh, and four arms.

I also found Paradise Lost a big disappointment. I loved the first part, the big battle with Satan, but then Adam just licks Michael's metaphorical angelic ass for chapters and it becomes a total bore. Talk about a game of two halves!

Honestly, I don't want to read anything about whaling. I never realised how up-close-and-personal-savage-and-cruel it is. I mean, I knew it was cruel, but I kind of thought it was harpoon the whale and reel him in (bad enough) but when you read the lengths they go to/went to - no thanks. Not for me. Save the whales! Sixteen blue whales will get you a teaset at the local garage, maybe.

the whole point about reading the divine comedy is not to worry too much about who is who lol. That just slows the story down, and it makes perfect sense without that info. Just enjoy the imaginativeness of the punishments, the weird demons, and dante's opinions on which sins are worse etc.

But yes, paradise lost isn't great. ideologically it's despicable, the verse lacks shakespeare's flair, and there's not enough fun to make up for it

[Trollheart]

The fun is in the first part. I thought, wow if it's all like this I am IN! And then Satan gets his arse kicked, moans about how he now has to completely redecorate Hell (and neither of the Property Brothers around to help him) and off we go to Eden, where things just get so sycophantic it's like being at a Trump rally. Pass.

[Lucem Ferre]

I do remember him simping, but I don't remember her being a bitch.

I do remember him writing about all the poets in purgatory telling him how great he is.

I just have a hard time with the old writing style it was in, rather than it being boring. I remember being completely confused by what was happening most of the time.

[Trollheart]

If that's directed at me @Lucem Ferre I'm not sure what you mean about "her being a bitch". All I know is that after the Big Battle, Adam spends literally chapters telling Michael how cool he is, how he wishes he was like him, how he wants to be an angel when he grows up etc. It just gets stomach-churningly sycophantic, and frankly, it's so thick you'd spend days just trying to trowel it off and still get nowhere. Such a comedown!

[Lucem Ferre]

If that's directed at me @Lucem Ferre I'm not sure what you mean about "her being a bitch". All I know is that after the Big Battle, Adam spends literally chapters telling Michael how cool he is, how he wishes he was like him, how he wants to be an angel when he grows up etc. It just gets stomach-churningly sycophantic, and frankly, it's so thick you'd spend days just trying to trowel it off and still get nowhere. Such a comedown!

No, it was directed at Mary about Dante's Inferno.

[Lisnaholic]

I was intrigued by the variety of responses to The Divine Comedy:-

"...given me trouble...completely confused..."
"...quite enjoy..." (but for the illustrations!)
"..all the checking back to the appendix..."
"...it's a hell of a lot of fun..."

So, I decided to give The Divine Comedy a go myself, (if reading 4 out of the 100 cantos counts as "giving it a go".) My personal take:-

At its core, reading for pleasure is all about effort and reward: how much work you have to do and how much pleasure you get out of it. I found The DC to be right on the borderline, but just tilting into the negative: quite a lot of effort and not really sufficient reward. I adopted Marie's approach, skipping almost all the notes, etc. and I had to adjust my usual reading style: I had to read faster than I wanted to catch the ideas that often spanned across two or three stanzas, then I had to go back if I wanted to relish the imagery, etc. Even then, I struggled a bit  to follow the story, or who was saying what. Still, I made it across the First Circle of Hell, aka Limbo, and to the gates of the Second - far enough to discover that Dante was promoting that rather discredited notion: using the fear of Hell to bully people into being loyal churchgoers. Well, it was 1321, so perhaps we should give him a pass on that point.
 
I enjoyed most of the "old-timey" language, although, out of habit I kept misreading the archaic, "Lo!" as "lol", which actually perked up Dante's text a little! Though of course it's only part-Dante: I was surprised to realise that the 1949 translation I was reading was by Dorothy L. Sayers. Quite a departure from her crime novels, but she did a good job in terms of vocab and rhyming, I thought. Some images were good enough for me to go back and check them out again, for eg:-

"This dreary huddle has no hope of death,
Yet its blind life trails on so low and crass
That every other fate it envieth."

Anyone who has been stuck at work on a wet Thursday afternoon in February can surely relate to that! So there are some gems, and I might read on, but I'm not planning to read it through to the end, mainly because I only have this slender extract:-

 

 

[Lucem Ferre]

It's that old style of writing.

I'll probably try it again eventually.

[Lisnaholic]

Tolstoy has been mentioned a couple of times, and he certainly has a huge reputation. I remember an assessment I once read about him: that he was a very "complete" novelist,  who lived a full life and could write about any aspect of human experience. I haven't read enough of his stuff to know if that's true; I more-or-less enjoyed Anna Karenina, sometimes thinking, "Wow, this is really good", but at the same time being rather relieved when I'd finally finished it and could go on to something lighter.

I haven't tried War and Peace, but I can sympathise with your comment, Guybrush:

Tolstoy was easier, but War and Peace was just introducing more and more characters without outlining much of a plot. Why should I continue? Though someone did bring a bear on a drunken binge which seems fun and very Russian.

That sounds like my experience with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I didn't realise that in order to find out about the brothers, Dostoevsky would first walk me through a sprawling geneology of Russian families and try to baffle me with all those options of Russian names. Here's a quote from someone facing a similar struggle with Doctor Zhivago:
 

A common criticism of Russian books is that the names are confusing and I am beginning to understand what the problem is. Yuri, Yura, Yurochka, Yuri Andreyevich and Zhivago are all the same person - and every character, large or small, has the same bewildering multiplicity of names.

At some point during the recitation of the Karamazov family tree, I realized that Dostoevsky was in deep with this attitude:-

the inclusion of a patronymic (father's name) adds another layer to a person's full name, making it appear like they have multiple names; this practice reflects the cultural emphasis on family and respect within Russian society

At heart I prefer to judge people as I find them, instead of working out how illustrious their families are first, and that's why I binned The Brothers Karamazov before the book really got started, disappointed that Dostoevsky did not have a more modern, equal-opportunity attitude.

[Marie Monday]

The comparison to Dostoevsky is not really accurate though, they're very different writers (Dostoevsky seems to be many people's idea of a russian novelist, even though he's fairly atypical). The start of the brothers Karamazov is clunky and shamelessly expository, Tolstoy isn't nearly as bad. War and peace does start slow, though. Anna Karenina less so, it has my favourite opening paragraph.
None of the russian writers of that time are difficult though.

[Trollheart]

It's not on the same literary scale, I know, but I found Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, the first in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever very hard going, so much so that I was ready to give it up until something interesting happened and then I was happy I stuck with it. I tend to describe Donaldson as being "a writer who describes every blade of grass", and it's appropriate I feel. But it just shows that sometimes novels can be slow to get going, but often reward persistence. I tried this with Moby Dick, before anyone asks, but it just defeated me. So flat and boring and ho-hum.

[Lisnaholic]

^ "...a writer who describes very blade of grass" is a good phrase, Trollheart, and illustrates a dilemma for a novelist, about how much to put in and how much to leave out.
I don't read many fantasy books, so I can't comment on Lord Foul's Bane, but I did read the five exhausting volumes of Game of Thrones, and would say that George RR Martin is also guilty of putting in too much: not so much too many details (although he does go on to excess in describing meals eaten, and coats of arms). With G Martin I thought there was just too much storyline: the intrigues and rivalries go on and on, way past the point where my interest ran out. He was the Duracell bunny, leaving me behind - though I did, in fact, struggle on and finish the books.

The comparison to Dostoevsky is not really accurate though, they're very different writers (Dostoevsky seems to be many people's idea of a russian novelist, even though he's fairly atypical). The start of the brothers Karamazov is clunky and shamelessly expository, Tolstoy isn't nearly as bad. War and peace does start slow, though. Anna Karenina less so, it has my favourite opening paragraph.
None of the russian writers of that time are difficult though.

^ Yes, I only put them together to mention the issue of Russian names.  Perhaps Dostoyevsky springs to people's minds as a Russian novelist because he serves up a good measure of gloom, both material and intellectual - and isn't that what we in the West expect from Russia ? Also, of course, he was persecuted by the Czars, so he's like a proto-Solzhenitsyn figure too.

None of the russian writers of that time are difficult though.

^ Well, everyone has a different perception of "difficult", Marie. It sounds like you can breeze through books that I often find to be a bit of a slog.

[Trollheart]

A phrase comes to mind, not sure where I heard it: a classic is something everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.

[Marie Monday]

everything about that phrase is depressing

You make a good point about Dostoevsky, Lisna. I also think it's because he's weirdly the most accessible of the Russian writers: on the one hand because the constant drama means that, for better or worse, at least his books are comparatively fast-paced compared to the likes of Tolstoy; on the other hand, his clunky way of writing means that the underlying themes are comparatively on-the-nose. I certainly don't breeze through Dostoevsky, by the way, or quite a few other writers mentioned in this thread. It's just that all my discipline in life seems to be concentrated in the ability to finish books.