Four Down...

The Guardian recently published an article about a list of ten books named the ten most difficult books ever written.  The compilers of the list (for the literary website the Millions) looked for "books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction".  The lucky final ten are, in no particular order:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
The Phenomenology of Spirit by GF Hegel
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardsom
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

Personally I would have had Infinite Jest, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, Go Down, Moses and anything by Dickens (not because his work is difficult but because it is so mind numbingly boring) on the list.

Looking at the list I realized that I have read four, avoided one and never heard of the other five.  So as a thought experiment (and a new and creative way of avoiding working on my dissertation) I have decided to read the six I have not yet read before the end of the year. 

I started with Nightwood.  It is wierd and the prose is pretty bizarre but it is not what I would call one of the ten most difficult books ever written.  But then maybe I just don't get it.

In the bullpen warming up, A Tale of a Tub.