I don’t know what to call it. John Muir is awesome. So poetic, interested in all the things I’m interested in, inspires me to get out there and go hiking (as if I needed more motivation?) – yet, his work is… I don’t know what to call it… “heavy”… the opposite of light reading. I’m just slogging through it. I don’t know if I really like it, but it’s definitely beautifully quotable. It’s leaving me with so many mixed feelings.
Camussssssssssssssssssssss
Greg Bear is the densest sci fi I have ever read. His books are great, but I feel like I need to warm up my brain or something before I read them.
It’s called dense prose and some ppl like it a lot
Neal Stephenson. Loved both The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon but those f*ckers were DENSE
I plan to read Snow Crash sometime in the near future but I kind of need to mentally prepare
snowcrash is your reward for getting through cryptonomicon.
I just reread Peter Watts’s Blindsight for the second time and Echopraxia for the first time. I “got” Blindsight so much more the second time around, but both times it was tough. Echopraxia probably needs a reread at some point, but maybe a few years down the road. So many science, biology, and trans humanist ideas are in those books that you almost need a degree in philosophy to understand it.
Not really. If I find it too hard to get through the books then I automatically don’t care much for them as writers.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I feel like he has such a way to convey feelings everyone has but can’t normally describe with words but when you try and repeat what he said, it’s impossible to explain 😅 I’ve read 3 volumes out of 6 but i don’t think I understood it very well so I plan to reread it from the start before i continue on. Though i really can recognize that what i’m reading is so profound, it’s difficult (for me at least) to get into it. It definitely takes a lot longer and more rereading of paragraphs to understand than other easier works
Kind of felt like that during On the Road. DNF.
Malazan books. I read the first three and burned out. Amazing Storia but they see told in such an arcane way that it’s like pushing through thick undergrowth to read a page
For me, I found that because of the wildly inconsistent quality of books it made it difficult to want to continue. You never knew if you were going to get epic world building, low stakes shenanigans, brutal battles, or characters ripped from legends.
On top of that, the second book was so good that the next several just couldn’t match the excitement and tension generated from it.
This is good to know - Malazan is on my list because it’s so well-loved by fantasy fans. But I want something that is going to suck me in and let me experience the story without effort. My brain is too fried by work these days for me to strain it when I’m trying to unwind with a good book.
If you can find a pdf of a page or preview of the book that’ll give you an idea.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
James Joyce tips his hat and gives up the throne.
Lol yeah Carl Jung’s Red Book lol
jung on synchronicity is a tough one also.
Don’t hate me… But Tolkien, Lord of the Rings. It’s very flowery with descriptions and nice little poems that I just cannot get into. I guess it doesn’t help that I picture all the characters and locations from the movies, so reading extended descriptions of things I’ve seen feels superfluous.
And the poems, while nice, are distracting from the really interesting stuff and I tend to just gloss over those too.
Then there’s The Silmarilion…
He’s a great author, and quite the poet, but I fell in love with the movies he inspired more than the source books. I think I’ve only read LOTR once or twice so maybe I just need to give it another go…
I like the idea of tolken, but I think he’s actually a shitty writer. He should have left over 50% of his work in the editing room floor. So many extra details that just take away from the reading experience. I feel like he actually wanted to write a dnd module for his world rather than a novel. It reads like an encyclopedia.
I have the same relationship with Tolkien. I love the stories but the descriptions and language lose me. I have considered listening to the books - sometimes I can get through dense writing more easily that way.
Dune. The world is so cool but man. It felt so clinical.
The audio was better for me because of this.
Allan Moore’s Jerusalem. I love most of his work and was very excited to read Jerusalem as it was his first published novel. However some characters speak in such thick and varied accents (which Moore writes out phonetically) that understanding dialogue beyond context was impossible for me.
I threw up my hands and bought the audiobook version and it was fantastic. But I couldn’t read it to save my life.
It’s not his first published novel. His first was “Voice of the fire”
Thank you for the correction. Another book to add to the must read list.