What are 3 of the most complex/difficult books a person can read?

Question

We have this "know it all blowhard" at my job and he is always bragging about how much he reads and how difficult the books are that he reads. Just once I'd like to piss on his fire and have read a book that he deems to his level or above. I'll probably only read the Cliff Notes, but it just having him think I read some "big wig" book will be wonderful

Answer 1

Yeah, so many difficult books out there.

"The Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer in Middle English is a pain. Maybe even try a lesser known work by Chaucer like "Troilus and Creseyde" or "The Legend of Good Women."

Something by Kierkegaard

"The Divine Comedy" by Dante

"Paradise Lost" by Milton

Anything by Tolstoy or by Dostoevsky.

Livy's "ab urbe condita" in Latin is cool.

Julius Caesar's "de bello gallico" was pretty good as well.

"The Communist Manifesto" by Marx. It's pretty short.

the "Mahabharata" which is, I believe, the longest epic poem known to man.

"Gilgamesh" which is the oldest epic found.

"Beowulf" in Old English. Pretty much impossible unless you're fluent in Old English (yes, it's basically another language).

Plato's dialogues.

Anything like Aristotle's "Metaphysics"

Cicero's "In Catilinam" or "Against Catiline" is really good as well. It basically showcases Cicero's incredible use of rhetoric and argument as well as being an interesting situation in history.

Personally, I think if you can find a lesser known novel/poem/whatever by one of these famous authors/philosophers, that speaks volumes about how learned you are, because you haven't simply read the book that everyone else reads but have actually gone deeper into the style and thought of the author.

Good luck. Give him hell.

Answer 2

Basically anything by Immanuel Kant. Philosophy at its best, and by best I mean most confusing.

Thomas Kuhn's "Structures of the Scientific Revolution" is fundamental to modern thinking but isn't often read. People respect you if you know what a paradigm and paradigm shift is, and Kuhn was the one who created the terms.

However, if you really want to "piss on his fire" then I would recommend something foundational to modern literature but that isn't commonly read. Beowulf and the Faery Queen are two good candidates, but the Anglo-Saxon version of Judith, the Dream of Rood, Genesis B, and the Wanderer are quite good as well (all old Anglo-Saxon literature that isn't translated too often). The Prose and Poetic Eddas are key documents in mythology that color much of modern fiction. Has he read The Histories by Herodotus? If not, the book is comparatively entertaining for a history book. The Iliad and Odyssey, of course.

Answer 3

I'd go with:

Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Paradise Lost by John Milton

Made it about 8 pages into Finnegan's Wake, War and Peace took months and I only barely understood what was going on, and I only made it through all of Paradise Lost because I went on vacation and made sure that was the only story I had. Paradise Lost is the only one I've re-read and while I get it a bit better now, it's still a very tough read.

Answer 4

Ulysses by James Joyce is a tough one; the most well-read person I knew in graduate school needed annotations to get through it. Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner was a bear. And, if you want something that combines the artistic, the confounding, and the academically "hip" in one text, read My Life by Lyn Hejinian.

Another direction would be philosophical texts: Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge), Derrida (Dissemination), etc. These can be dense, daunting texts for any reader.

Good luck in your quest to shame the blowhard...

Answer 5

Certainly Joyce - either Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses (the guides to reading them are as thick as the books themselves).

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Golden Bowl by Henry James - I've tried this one 3 times and can't get through it - and I have a PhD in English.

Answer 6

I can't really pick just three - any of these should be up there on a list of hardest/most intellectual three.

* The Holy Bible - but only if you really read it in entirety.
* The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
* The Canterbury Tales - in old English
* War and Peace
* Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
* Le Morte d'Arthur
* The Holy Quran
* Descartes (anything by...)
* John Locke (anything by...)
* Wealth of Nations
* Rights of Man (Paine)
* The Constitution of the United States of America
* Pride and Prejudice
* Origin of Species
* Complete Works of Charles Dickens
* Walden
* Complete Works of Mark Twain
* Thus Spake Zarathustra
* Relativity (Einstein)
......


That should be a good start and take a bit of time. :-)

Answer 7

How about the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien,the Bible, or something else he hasn't read yet. But my best advice is to just ignore him. Let him talk about "how big and difficult" were the books he just read. It doesn't matter,he is good at reading big and difficult books. God gave you a talent too, don't let it go to waste by trying to compete with this guy who just wants to piss you off (and it looks like it's working).

Answer 8

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Answer 9

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. The unabridged version, of course. It's a great story, but hard to get through. Moby Dick by Herman Melville was a snoozer, but a classic, and The Bible. It so chocked full of contradictions and crazy stories, any one would find it complex and difficult!

Answer 10

1) James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' it can be read, but very few can understand much of it. i sure wish i could help....i hate people like that. its not what you read so much as what you do with what you know. he is probably insecure, and has to make himself seem imoprtant. what are the names of some of the books he talks about? have you actually seen, or tried to read any of them? / Tonya L. has a great suggestion. one of my brothers read dictionaries, and did book reports on them, in school.