A Brief History of Time is not a challenging book at all. Hawkins masterfully presents difficult topics in an accessible way. If people are not finishing the book it's on them and their level of interest, and not the difficulty of the book.
A little empathy might be in order. This book is infamous for never getting finished even among scientists. Clearly you suited its style if there was even one. Maybe you were just in a very motivated state when you read it. Doesn’t really mean much when the preponderance of evidence isn’t in that direction.
I read it when I was ten or eleven, after reading Cosmos. I'm sure some of it flew over my head, but it wasn't a hard read even then. In the sense that it was quite approachable, written in an accessible tone, and didn't assume any previous knowledge. I was a sharp and nerdy kid, but far from a genius.
For me Gödel, Escher, Bach is a better example of a great book I kept bouncing off of for various reasons even though I read it much later in life. Gravity's Rainbow in fiction.
Some of my favorite books are ones that I started three or four times before pushing through and loving them by the end.
Amusingly, _Catch-22_ is the only book to make both this list (which focuses more on prestigious or famous books rather than books anyone tries to read) and also my list of most-dropped books compiled from GoodReads statistics: https://gwern.net/goodreads
I find that strange because I liked _Catch-22_ and found it easy to read! (And easier than _Genji_, _Solitude_, or _Brief History_.)
Boy am I glad to see American Gods on that list. I started reading it on someone else's recommendation, whom I obviously should not have trusted. I gave up halfway, convinced that Neil Gaiman is a pen name of Garth Marenghi.
To anyone who gave up American Gods: you're right, they're wrong.
I really enjoyed American Gods but it took me a long time to finish. I assumed it was because my attention span was getting worse but I hadn't considered that it was just a tough book to read. The books I've read since have been non fiction which are also slow reads for me which supported my, hopefully incorrect, hypothesis.
I really didn't enjoy Catch-22 because it felt like a short story dragged out to 200 plus pages, just repeating the same observation about war again and again each chapter.
I was forced to read Catch-22 for a college course (“The American Novel”) so maybe that helped, but I loved it. I remember walking through the hallways of my alma mater with the book in my face and suddenly succumbing to fits of laughter.
It’s obviously not meant to be an exhaustive list of such books, which would be impossible. And any such list on the internet is just an opening for an argument.
What? War and Peace is relatively long but not particularly challenging to read, at least for the time period it was made for and compared to the other books listed.
But then again, I really loved the philosophical ramblings on history and leadership and how much Napoleon sucked. Honestly feel it should be required reading for anyone in a leadership position. But then again, if you just want to read the story, the parts can be easily skipped.
Granted you need to have some baseline knowledge of Russian culture and with some philosophical concepts like materialism to really grok it, I guess. I think hard to read can be very subjective anyway depending heavily on what books one have read before and general background.
I didn't hate reading Ulysses, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. I suspect my experience wasn't that different from yours. There were parts that made sense, and even some parts where I could follow along with the humor, but there were many passages where I had no idea what the hell was going on.
In retrospect, I should have read a Cliffs Notes version before attempting the novel. I'd recommend anyone interested in reading Ulysses to go in knowing the story and what the chapters are about ahead of time. It's not going to spoil anything.
Finnegan's Wake, I gave up after 20 pages. That thing makes Ulysses seem like a YA novel by comparison.
Ulysses abounds in humor, and of all sorts, from the lowest bawdy humor to the most arcane in-group nerd humor. It’s a pity that you were unable to enjoy at least those passages in the novel.
“Gravity’s Rainbow” should be here. It’s constantly rated as one of the best American novels but it’s the most difficult read I’ve ever had. You thought Naked Lunch was crazy? This book will melt your brain trying to follow characters, themes, and the prose itself before you even get 100 pages in.
Agree it should be there. One reason I think so many people drop it is that fairly early on there is a surreal multi-page section with no punctuation. That stopped me twice, but if you get past that it calms down.
I got a few pages in before deciding I'd pick it up again some other time. There are apparently websites that will explain page by page what is happening, and I don't have that time right now.
“Hard to read,“ of course is a function of how attuned to the book you are at that stage of your life. Also, anything forced upon you will be a hateful read. That’s why people hate a lot of good books with compelling plots, eg OHYoS mentioned in the article.
OTOH, of course, some books do expect you to toil through, generally due to their scope or aspiration or both. In fiction, Ulysses mentioned here, and In Search of Lost Time would be examples that are very different but people have found challenging. For nonfiction, The Road to Reality and Gödel, Escher, Bach would be some examples.
Plenty of books on that list give you fair warning before embarking, but LotR lures you in with "You liked The Hobbit, right? Fancy some more of that?"
Not sure what the methodology is here, but I think it’s some combo of popularity and likelihood the book is finished, which implies length, dry-ness, as well as “difficulty.” The thing I learned from it is the Hawking Index. Link copied here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index
Catch-22 was hard for me simply because it was too dark to handle at the point in life when I tried to read it, although it is quite funny in places. It isn't 'hard to read' though.
I couldn't put 100 Years of Solitude down once I picked it up, and I don't understand why it's on the list as opposed to Gravity's Rainbow or something along those lines.
I don't understand how "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or "Catch-22" are on here. Maybe you just have to be at the right place in your life, but I just plowed through those in college.
I've never gotten around to reading "A Brief History of Time", but I still hold out delusions that I'll get through "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose some day.
I feel like 100 Years gets a little repetitive in the middle-end. I skipped (shock! horror!) a good 80 pages or so. Everyone’s got the same names as ghosts of their ancestors walking around and I kept having to flip to the family tree in beginning to keep up.
This being said, it provides a wonderful perspective on how the stories that define us come from a magical yet misty history.
And hey, maybe the prose is like Faulkner or McCarthy in the native language and you can gallop your way through those sections, I dunno.
Anna Karenina is one I keep trying but still haven't managed to get through as well. I know it's good, I even enjoy it at parts, but I basically keep thinking about how I'd be having a much nicer time reading Bulgakov instead or something.
Well, I'd say it's self-selecting given the topics and nature of the site. There's a massive supermajority of engineers of all stripes.
And it's not 'exclusive'. It's not like getting an account here is hard. But staying requires understanding of the topics discussed at length. So it's a self-selecting exclusivity at best.
Rick and Morty? That's the terrible flash animation that ended up getting a full animation? It was puerile when it started. I assume it's no better. (I have better things to do with my time.)
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Rick's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Morty truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Rick's existential catchphrase "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them.
And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Morty tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel, kid.
Give this is a "copypasta" from reddit, maintains that I'm indeed right. This vomit of a show is akin to "Married with Children", "Family Guy", Jerry Springer, and other shows that cater to low-brow alcoholic idiotic "funny" shows..
That's fair, but I think there's a LOT of equally culturally relevant books like eg Gravity's Rainbow, War and Peace, Infinite Jest, with many more characters and a lot more complex plot.
I've read this one three times over the years. What can I say? Sometimes, a book just grabs you and won't let go. It was the first novel that truly rewarded my effort.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
"His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts were soaked through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing him."
"Jim, [Marlon Brando] moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care."
"The key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry."
"Yes, I'm paranoid -- but am I paranoid enough?"
‘Hey Hallie? I think I’m being followed.’
‘Some men are born to lead, O.’
This is essentially a content-mill listicle. The complaints about why some books were chosen, miss the point that this article isn’t actually meant to be serious and informative. It just needs to put something, anything up to draw advertising revenue.
I feel like content-mill stuff has been making it to HN’s front page more in the last year or so than before. Perhaps the system for moving things from New to the front page needs to be tweaked?
