I finally got around to reading _Clarissa_ last year and I was blown away. I was expecting it to be a dull, plodding thing that I would just have to get through. Instead, I found it captivating. It has jumped into my top ten novels of all time.

Jerusalem is one of my favourite books tbh. Read it on release and carried it around back in school. I'm 21 now and read his first novel Voice Of The Fire as it was re-released this year. Jerusalem is very deliberate in its construction and VOTF isn't really a first novel its more like a prologue to what he accomplished with Jerusalem imo. Jerusalem is less one book and is essentially a Trilogy disguised as one book. Book one is fragments of the community and the Warren family in particular, book 2 is one cohesive narrative about a kid going to the afterlife and book 3 is a crazy collection of Moore trying his most out there experimental literature. If you struggle with Jeruslem you should consider reading VOTF or buy the edition of Jerusalem which is packaged as 3 separate books. I think it's worth it in spades and its probably the most beautiful philosophy I've read, Moore gives everyone an out from death but doesn't really remove the negative aspects of reality. Personally it's The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow that I dip a toe into and then drop. I know I just need to hurl myself into those icy depths but I lack the confidence required. Most of the time I think large or difficult books aren't really difficult but just require a time commitment which is way longer than any other book. Took me a month and a half to read Jerusalem but I read another 5 books alongside it during that time. Those books were my break from Jerusalem lmao. It has a lot to say though so it's difficulty was warranted imo.

How gratifying to stumble onto a KZfaqr who shares my taste for maximalism and who has hit many of the same walls. The texts by Leopardi, Theroux (Darconville's Cat), Gibbon, Solzhenitsyn, all stymied me as well. Luckily I had to read Clarissa in graduate school and ended up writing a 20 page essay for the class that ended up at around 40 pages. I did complete Jerusalem and found it fascinating and still do. It's like one of those films whose ending somehow utterly, yet satisfyingly, overthrows everything that went before (e.g. Memento) with the result that you find yourself having flashbacks during which you keep reworking scenes to fit in with the final reveal. For my fiftieth birthday, I gave myself the completion of In Search of Lost Time, through which I had made it half-way before putting it down. When I picked it back up several years later, I realized I couldn't go forward or start again and never got past Swann in Love. I finished it 2 months before my birthday, so I threw in anotherlong-time nemesis, The Recognitions, which I'd been trying to read since I devoured Carpenter's Gothic when it first came out. The books that taunt me now are The Idiot and The Man without Qualities. One book, however, has defied me for over 40 years, Les Chansons de Maldoror. What's odd about that is that Les Chansons is one of my favorite books, and one of the more influential in terms of my approach to aesthetics. The problem is that I cannot get past the 3rd Canto and I believe it's because the book is somehow simultaneously putrid and way too rich--like a spoiled cheesecake.

Reading Joyce's Ulysses since I was 15 years old (now I am 55). Reading it still and never feel I am through with it.

I’m into audiobooks. Also reacting to your q and a. Love the q and as. Driving and hearing an audiobook works for me. Responding to q and a her bc I just listened to II and III and now I’m here.

I know only of one person who definitely finished Zettel's Traum, an old friend of mine from Germany. He had a designated table for it, persevered with Teutonic discipline and succeeded after one year, averaging about 3-4 pages a day. Simultaneously I had sank my teeth into Schmidt's last finished typoscript "Abend mit Goldrand" (Evening edged in Gold), which was a delight to read in its more humorous approach, its slightly more accessible way of using the column technique and of course its more palatable length. And something strange happened with that one: when I was nearing the end I felt a distinct melancholy coming over me having to leave this weird and beautiful landscape.. one of the few books I felt genuinely bereaved when it ended. Apart from it being a possible stepping stone to the gargantuan mountain of ZT I consider it one of Schmidt's finest works.

"The Tunnel" by William H. Gass defeated me after about 150 pages. There were so many exquisite scenes with beautiful prose, but the plot was slipping through my fingers. Each paragraph is so dense, it takes a lot of energy to follow. Definitely a case of me and not the book, as you say.

Found your channel intresting. Brother you look like liam Neeson.

just came across your channel by first watching the lispector video. great content. particularly liked using the DFW brick as a unit of measurement.

One of my most respected professors told me that Moore’s “Jerusalem” was one of his favorite books in recent memory. But no praise holds a candle to the clarity of “Boring, boring, boring.”

I love your bookshelf. Keep up the reading!

That's a nice home library in the background. I am envious of the book shelving too.

The Road to Reality is a beast! Amazing that he starts by defining fractions and arithmetic and then goes all the way through modern physics in a single book. A truly monumental achievement. (And the bibliography alone is unbelievable.) Certainly a lifelong task to read let alone deeply understand that one.

"The Road To Reality" is hilarious. It's meant to be a "common mans" exposition of physics yet you'd need *at least* a post-doc level of mathematics to make any progress. I guess Roger just thinks everybody knows complex analysis.

Just found your channel today, this is your 2nd vid I'm watching. I feel like I've stumbled onto a booktube secret society. I am going to look into the Baroque book.

When I was teaching English in Italy many moons ago, we had a Penguin Classic abridged version of Decline and Fall, which was still about 1,000 pages, but I loved it. Maybe give that a try first.

Great video, thank you. Love this channel. Gravity's Rainbow was the book I finally had to put down. Ironically, it wasn't the style that eventually defeated me (I loved the couple of other Pynchons I have read) but some of the subject matter. I still hope to come back to it one day but Pynchon is a particularly talented provocateur haha

I’m another casualty of Infinite Jest. I get lost about two hundred pages into it.

Lots of fabulous books, some I've never heard of which is always stellar. Kudos to you on reading some of Bottom's Dream. When I learned about it a few months ago, I thought of purchasing it & gave it serious thought. That book intimidates me to no end & I know my place with that pecking order! 🥰 I'll happily chill here with Joyce for a few more decades. May need a few more lifetimes to get my reading level up there with Schmitt. ... though the temptation to explore it is quite real. Please don't fret about pronunciation I think any mispronunciation of this great writer is largely cancelled out by simply talking about the unabridged version. There's folks who don't know it's a 3 volume book which could be a disservice to it. Nothing against abridgements or even 'Cliff Notes' editions. I'd accept a Cliff Notes for Sidney's Old Arcadia if it ever comes down to it & my reading time is truly running short. But I think because of what struggles/passion for truth these authors went through to create these books, the very least we could do is muster up enough self discipline to sit in our cozy room with the edition that has a few extra pages. Don't fret about the stresses for you to get through it 'cause when the time's right to read it, I'm sure you'll get the most from it. If you like, try starting with his earlier works before embarking on Gulag. He packs a punch in everything he writes. Right now Borges is giving me a hearty challenge. After 10 pages, I'm dumbfounded for a few days & can't read anything else. Fabulous video, I'm happy to have found your channel a couple of days ago. I hope your week is pretty awesome. 🤓

I'm glad to see that you include both humanities and physics and scientific examples. Too often the assumption made by a lot of people is that the humanities are a lot easier than the sciences, but really if you're looking at its hardest pieces of literature, that are on defining historical events like the Roman Empire's fall, to truly understand it takes quite a brain that is beyond most of what the ordinary human mind has capacity enough to comprehend outside of a linear, simplified reduction of the event to an encapsulation by some very basic sentence or two, which is something people also do when simplifying difficult, or non-intuitive physical and spatial theories about mathematics or atomic particles, to make it easier for intuition to grasp - finding the links uniting all the factors in an epic historical events requires an understanding of all the contingencies in the world greater than what an individual mind can hold all at once in its grasp. By the way your book shelf is more shelved and stocked with works of literature than the contents of my small town library in the middle of desert in Australia.

Love this. And in your question and answer series you talked about not doing away w writers bc of their past problems. That’s good, bc people w that oppressive McCarthyistic pov can’t read history whatsoever based on the differences in cultures over time.

I managed to read Gulag Archipeligo, but it was hard. Sometimes I could whizz through 50 pages but at other times could barely read 1. As you said a really difficult topic. It sickened me off of reading in general, I didn't read anything at all for 6 months after finishing it.

Hunger's Bride I picked up when it first came out and I really enjoyed that one. I wish they would make an audio version of it as it would also be fun to listen to it.

I had trouble with Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” but then found a different translation (by Michael Hofmann) and it was much better.

A book that defeated me recently was 'The Shape of Things to Come' by HG Wells, where he writes about an imagined future as if it's an historical book. The writing was so dry (which makes sense, conceptually) that I thought "I know where this is going, and I just can't do it", and stopped pretty early on. I hope to be in the mood for it one day. The list of books that I'm too scared to even approach on the other hand............

Leopardi is my favorite. I’m on page 300 or so... I take so many notes in the margins that my hands start to ache!

The Gulag Archipelago is truly depressing. I’ve read only a 100 pages but it was very difficult. Should pick it up either soon or next year. Tried to read Infinite Jest but I stopped midway a couple years ago, also read Gravity’s Rainbow after that and remembered enjoying this more than Infinite Jest.

This one’s not as large as many others here, but I’ve never been able to get through A Tale of Two Cities. I want to, and I’ve read some other Dickens stuff, but this one has beaten me twice so far.

Two that keep defeating me are _The Origins of Order,_ by Stuart Kauffman and Ernst Casirer’s _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms._ The Kauffman book is a fascinating discussion of complexity and self-organizating systems (his discussion of how life likely emerged from auto-catalytic sets of chemicals is fascinating). There’s another excellent book (which I have read) called _Evolution in Four Dimensions,_ by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb that supplements Kauffman’s book. The latter is about how there’s much more to evolution than just random - “random” - variation and natural selection. Evolution actually operates through four different kinds of inheritance systems that build on one another and interact in interesting ways: the genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic systems. There are fascinating discussions in the book about the kinds of (by our standards) simple cultures that animals develop, but which are nevertheless recognizable as cultures (mother rabbits can pass a taste for certain foods down to her offspring through her milk, rats can teach each other efficient techniques for stripping pine cones, etc.). Even genetic inheritance is more complicated than most people think because a gene’s effects on you will depend not only on what the gene itself is _but what other genes it’s located next to, and in what order._ Kauffman’s book focuses exhaustively on self-organization, but together they make a much much interesting and polychromatic picture of evolution. The upshot of his book, though, is that, given the nature of organic chemistry, the emergence of life was probably just about inevitable. Evolution and biology are much more lawlike and less random than they appear. Kauffman also wrote another book called _At Home in the Universe,_ which I have read, and which is basically a shorter version of _Origins of Order._ And as for the Casirer book, well, I have read the first volume, but whenever I push further, other books always call me away.

Bruh, don't worry, I got it much worse: it's those books about Captain Underpants that keep defeating me! 😢

I quite liked Jerusalem as I like anything by Alan Moore. Just re-read Middlemarch and Ulysses again and I am currently re-reading Gravity's Rainbow. The only 2 books that have defeated me are Infinite Jest which I have tried to read once and Joyce's Finnegan's Wake which I have tried to read twice but each time I have failed to complete mainly because its like reading a foreign language that you don't understand.

Great video, Chris! Clarissa is a slog. I spent nearly six months on it during college. It's a book I will probably only read once. Bottom's Dream continues to intimidate me from my shelf. I read Finnegans Wake a year or so back and kept hearing BD referred to as a much longer version of the Wake. Not sure I'm ready to commit to that sort of intellectual endeavor just yet.

Moore’s Jerusalem is one of my favourite books. Each to his own. Moore’s description of a kids playground: ‘…and the autistic cubist’s notion of a concrete horse that grazed eternally nearby…’

The Recognitions. The beginning is so great. But then Gaddis and I just lose each other. Some of the dialogue suddenly begins to feel so trite (which I know is on purpose) so I skim it a bit hoping for that next big striking character moment, only to find out that I should have payed more attention when an event happens and I am unable to understand it.

The last book that defeated me was 'Women and Men' a novel by Joseph McElroy. I ordered the novel by W. Paul Anderson from Amazon. I also like big books.

My defeaters: Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides & Thomas Pynchon.Pausing Raymond E. Brown's Death of the Messiah: Very deep & detailed, also Proust. Loved the Gulag, The Oak and the Calf & many of his others.

Robert Fagles was asked in an interview what literary work he’d recommend most to “his” readers and he said without a moments thought- The Civil War trilogy by Shelby Foote- after reading a bit about the work and from my respect for Fagles- I embarked on what has now been a 5 year long intention to read this tomb of a historical text.

It took me over ten years to read both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights (not the same ten years, but there was an overlap). I've been unable to finish The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy by Janet Coleman. Twice I checked it out through Interlibrary Loan, and had to return it before finishing it. Then, I bought my own copy, and now there is no incentive to start reading it. I'd like to read Gibbon in tandem with the Roman writers. I'll read one of the Romans first, then read the passage fom Gibbon covering the same period.

Reading Jerusalem: Boring Fantastic Interesting Rereading Jerusalem: OMG Yes Fabulous WOW

Anyone know if there are plans for a second printing of _Bottom's Dream?_ I'm happy to pay the $70 list rate for a copy, but the secondary market prices just keep climbing.

I don't generally think I'm defeated by any books, though an argument could be made for a few. For most books I've partially read, I'd say I've been distracted from some--the ones I will surely return to and finish eventually--and I've become disinterested in others--the ones I will *not*. I guess I'm in distracted mode from Ulysses. I will get back to that one, for sure. I'm in the process of reading the Recognitions, I loved the first, say, 400 pages, I'm a bit bogged down in a middle section that isn't holding me in quite so firm a grip and I'm moving to a new home, new job, etc., so I'm at risk of distraction here, but I'm pretty sure I'll carry on with that one. I'm conflicted regarding Jefferson Davis's The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Do I really have to go back and read the last third after a hiatus of years? I was influenced to read it by, of all unexpected sources, W.E.B. Dubois, just to see what the lost-causers had to say for themselves. But I kind of felt that I got it without having to finish it. As for Clarissa, I am a zealous advocate. Do it! As for all of these books, they probably each benefit from being the only thing you read until you're finished. Clarissa possessed my full attention, as did the Chinese classic Water Margin. Several times in one's life, I think it's great to just live with a book for a good long while. Which reminds me... I guess I have to get back to Orlando Furioso one of these days, eh?

I'm currently through FW. I don't have the willpower of finishing this book. Wish me luck.

Over the years, I put down Finnegan's Wake (too dull, didn't enjoy Ulysses much and don't enjoy word play that much); Infinite Jest (not interesting enough to spend so much time on); and Swann's Way (may try to find my old copy to give it another shot). One that I found hard to finish, but may actually re-read some day, is The Magic Mountain.

I have Zibaldone, and those parts where it's highly technical about language totally defeats me, i just want to read his pessimism!

I think, for me, it’s the subject of physics and not the books, but I have also read and read and reread In A Nutshell and A Brief History of Time. In addition to these, I have enjoyed multiple viewings of various specialists who make an effort to explain all this to the regular people of earth on television shows. Once, on perhaps the fifth watch, my brain understood space-time. Only for a moment, but it was glorious.

Definitely want to take a crack at Zibaldone at some point....

one never will finish Finnegan's wake, even if you've read every word and used a reader's guide. The Wake is eternal.

Personally, I have a lot of books that defeated me, most of them are classics. I started to think that is something the fact that I choice to buy them and just love the art between titles. ,,Introduction in psihanalize" by Sigmund Freud was at beggining acceptable, but after 300-400 pages become so complexe and deep that make me crazy. It's surely a book that will change something at you in sense of introspection and reflexion. You will ask yourself after. "What was the motivation beyound a action?", "Why try to reject something and accepte another thing?" But just the ask will not send you the rezolvation, so it's kind a painfull when you fell that personally I don't know something... just more and more question that make you weak and disturbing you from the meaning of life... To live.

I’ve only recently came across this channel. Very enjoyable. Though would respectfully disagree with Jerusalem being boring. It’s just incredible all that can be told in the amount of time that a child chokes on a piece of candy. The section where he “describes” a fourth dimension is for me as elucidating and clever as Abbott’s Flatland... perhaps more so... certainly funnier.

Have you made it through Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West?

Hello, pretty funny, that you mentioned a german book by arno schmidt on your list. I can confirm to you, that even here in germany noone has read this book ;) I've got a copy of it in my shleve staring at me. Maybe one day i'll pick it up. But you're surely not the only one who struggles with it.

You mention at 7:10 that you could only get through it if you read nothing else - do you typically read multiple books at once? What's the thought process on when to pick up another one while you have one or multiple currently in the rotation?

Humger's Brides, a beautifully written book, a story within a story which I also have not completely read.

"Zettels Traum" ? Maybe start at the beginning auf Arno Schmidt, not at the end ;) I read the "Die Gelehrtenrepublik" and that das experimental in form but very readable. That book is sayed to be his last "normal" Book, after that it is sayed to get very experimental ...

Penrose was maybe the latest book I did not finish, I made it well through it then I realized I am not gaining that much by reading it. He has the most weird way of explaining relatively simple concepts with very elaborate and convoluted references. If you don't know what he means before he says it, little chance you understand afterwards :) "Gulag Archipelago" is a great book, it reads very well, only problem is its length; "Jerusalem" is a nice book, but hard to call it a novel really, it is a collection of various texts related to Northampton revolving around some characters

They do say that excessive eloquence can be exhausting. Maybe that applies to some of these books, in your experience?

Where to get a copy of the Mad Patagonian?

I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow, got through the first section, about 180 pages, and discovered I couldn't make sense of the book at a sentence by sentence level. It felt like I had lost the ability to read. It was so weird. I actually did like what I read of it, and love Lot 49, so I want to go back to it someday.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo defeated me . I read Notre Dame Dr Paris first to get a feel for his narrative style but failed every time. May fare better with Audio.

I've read the road to reality twice in English and twice in italian and i loved it. For me as italian, it is quite impossible to think reading leopardi in English. He is absolutely incomprehensible without knowing the contest in which he lived. It's quite difficult to understand even for us italian people. I've read the zibaldone when i was 18 years old after having studied chuncks of it during 3 years of junior high school and 5 years of high school. Let me think some similar in English that for me will be impossible to read...finnegans wake. Moore is too boring. I think i ll try to read it again. I ve never read solzenitsin. I ve read "kolyma tales" by salamov instead. Quite interesting reading. "The declin and fall of roman empire" is a pain in the ass for me also. I didn't know the other books you cited even if "einstein's beets" seems quite interesting for me. My defeating books are: the man without qualities by Musil, don quixote, the mill on the po by Bacchelli, finnegans wake and anniversaries by uwe johnson(1668 pages)

Have y'read Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter?

Gibbons' Fall is worth listening to chunks at a time on Audio, it is around 126ish hours of audio by Charlton Griffin. So maybe that would be a good option for you if you have not already tried it.

I can get through a couple paragraphs of (Daniel Matt's translation of) the Zohar. After a couple paragraphs, the life-process requires days, months, years to integrate whatever happened in the light transfusion. Not sure if I'd refer to that as "defeat". Its definitely an orgasmic satisfaction to be contacted by literature at that level. But it blows circuits and immediately reorganizes whatever the view was as retained by the conventional-self. That thing gets sacrificed and is clearly-outmoded, and many people would classify that a defeat.

I know I’m two years late but there’s an abridged single volume collection for The Gulag Archipelago. You can find it on Amazon and it’s well worth the time. It’s much shorter and easier to digest. Hope this helps!

"Like eating Thanksgiving every day" : I'm dead :'D

The Baroque Cycle is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Cryptonomicon was also excellent. All of his earlier work is worth the effort. I can’t say why but anything including and after Anathem I find utterly unreadable. I had the same feeling with Thomas McGuane. The Bushwacked Piano was pure lunatic genius. He wrote a few more that were nearly as good as the BP. Then he moved to Montana and started writing about cowboys in doomed relationships. I actually researched his bibliography to determine if perhaps there were two authors by the same name. Alas he wrote a few wonderful little books and then lost his edge. I love your channel. You have caused an explosion in my “to read” list and inspired me to build a set of white bookshelves

It's almost embarrassing to admit because of how tiny it is, but I've started Kant's 'Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals' twice now, and given up within the first 10 pages

Ah. . . What about James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake", his "Ulysses", and Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood"? I didn't survive any of these.

For the really well-written texts, I imagine it takes just as long to "truly" read, without guidance, something that took may years to write. And that still does not suppose we will understand what we have read, as language is a tricky thing and not even the greatest thinkers can fully capture what they mean to say in words, no matter how experimental. Always an approximation.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do for a living?

Hey can you please review Master and Margarita?

Some of these big books take me a few years to complete, so they don't all 'defeat me' per se, but as much as I love WTV, I can't ever find a good pace when reading Argall. I just can't finish it. And other than V and The Crying Lot of 49, those Pynchon books just kill me every time. I agree with something that Alexander Theroux said in an interview about Pynchon. To paraphrase, it was something along the lines of his biggest fault is that his chapters are too long and he doesn't give any breaks to the reader.

Is it really feasible to read a book like in Bottom's Dream in translation?

Hey Chris, how are you doing? Have you since completed any of these books? If yes, what are your thoughts about it?

I'm surprised that you didn't list Finnigan's Wake ( I'm sure that you've heard that ad nauseum). I've read 5 pages of FW and couldn't go on. I dated a girl that had an older brother that suffered from Schizophrenia and I always knew when he wasn't taking his medication. In conversation, one might assume that this guy is a genius because he would discuss quantum theory and then switch as to why McDonald's really doesn't want to fix their soft ice cream machines. As I started reading FW I started thinking this guy is classic Schizophrenic. He's absolutely out of his tree. But at the same time I think that I'm just not working hard enough. I even purchased Joseph Campbell's (who I deeply respect as a scholar) Skeleton key to FW and I still couldn't further than 10 pages. I also found a wiki that explains every single sentence. And as I'm trying to make heads or tails of this thing, I simply put it down and start to reread Gravity's Rainbow and smile.

Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon... It has not defeated me, I love Pynchon but that one I have not even started! I look at it, I want to read it and I give up... For now. :P It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine

I love Alan Moore's comics/graphic novels. Pity this novel isn't worth reading. I feared it would be boring. I might try his other attempt at the novel.

I‘d love to get my hands on a German edition of Bottom‘s Dream but they are all so incredibly expensive

My kryptonite is Gödel Escher Bach…own 2 copies too 😆😂

Catcher in the Rye...To Kill a Mockingbird, to name 2

You read so many Big books. Do you ever use an ereader?

I'm Spanish speaking by birth and have never finished the Quijote. I tried as it's compulsory reading in high school, but only by way of excerpts. My attempt at reading "A la recherche du temps perdu" went awry, since it proved to be very boring and verbose, what's the issue with that stupid madaleine already, give me a break?! As for English, I own a copy but haven't finished Finnegans Wake, while I struggled and did finish Catch-22. Maybe not such a complex read for a native but as an advanced student of the English language, it was quite a challenge, particularly from the rich, oftentimes archaic vocabulary employed standpoint!

William Gaddis has defeated me twice. I tried to read The Recognitions and JR, but did not get very far in either one.

"Don't gnaw your lip like that, Wilma!" Thanks, that alone has finally convinced me to begin pursuing Bottom's Dream. Meantime, Zibaldone...I just a month ago shelved it after it spent a year on a low table by my desk. To compare that to another giant Italian work, Gramsci's prison diaries can be dipped into randomly. Z requires a steady, probably daily dose. After the intro, I made it two days, maybe three, returned after a few weeks and felt I had to start over. I've not given up, just waiting for retirement. I spend a lot of time in Italy, and I need to read it so I'll be able to slyly ask everyone I know if they read it (with a follow up snare question for those who say, of course).

Neal Stephenson's Anathem! I was very impressed by his novels from the 90s but once I got to this one I felt like he'd lost me

Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young. Around 750 pages. I read it, my eyes saw each word, still not sure about the plot.

I don't think I'm as Smart as the Author of these Videos, but one book that has defeated me is William James' "Varieties of Religous Experiences. I know many people in this Spiritual Path I am involved in who have tried reading the book, but it also "defeated" them. It is not an easy read. It is a book that was written in the beginning of the 20th Century and had a lot of 19th Century Language and Ideas. I know only a few people who were able to sucessfully read it. I may try reading it again.

I have been continuously throwing myself at kant’s critique of pure reason for the last two years and I don’t think I picked up a single thing beyond what was said in the preface and the introduction. E

Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. I don't know why but I just can't get into it.

Think the only book that keeps defeating me is Elfrieda Jelinek's "The Piano Teacher". There is just too much self-abasement in that for me. It reminded me of a scene in Polanski's film "Repulsion" which I've sat down to watch on several occasions, but never been able to get past the same point each time.

I'm looking for a collection of historical books on the ottoman empire

I got The Road to Reality just to see what all the fuss was about. The amazon reviews go something like 'I have two PhD's from Princeton in QFT yet this book baffles me' ... its not for the faint of heart.

If you were like me, you'd never get a book done, l'm thinking. I have been known to look at the back blurb, then the page count. If it's over 500 pgs and sounds boring from the blurb, it's getting resold.

I like Thomas Mann writings(The Magic Mountain being in my top 5 favourite books) so I tried to read Joseph and his brothers a 1500 page book during the second half of Genesis, I got 1000 pages in and just lost interest. So many of the themes about the ancient middle east went right over my head, I simply just don't get the appeal of that book. Also other than Paradise Lost I have trouble appreciating epic poetry like The Divine Comedy, Don Juan and Greco-Roman epic poems, I really rather read a novel than most narrative poetry.

I admit it: Naked Lunch. I have tried it again and had to stop. And yet I've read Burgess' "A Shorter Finnegans Wake" and "Ulysses".

Saw this title and had a feeling Clarissa would be here. Have that one on my list.

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson leaves me stranded time and time again. This is due to the strange phrasing throughout, as well as a plethora of barely explained neologisms.

Great commentary and review at least this time I got something out of your video. My attempt was not defeated!

Finnegan's Wake laughing in the background :)

Could someone pleeeeese list these books with author and title.correctly spelled. The description does not include the list, and the transcript is about as accurate as an online translator The first book especially, I can't make out the cover, and when I enter anything Zippo into Google I get ten thousand matches about lighters.