it doesn’t have to be your favorite book or anything. It can be any book that you find yourself thinking of with a sense of pride for having read it.
Personally, I am really proud of myself for not DNFing A Little Life and pushing forward. I read a very good chunk of that book with tears running down my face–mind you, I was reading it on my phone during lectures for the entirety of my first semester last year–and I was always on the verge of putting it down just because of the horrible content. Also, it was pretty long; too long, actually. So when I was done, I was simultaneously Heartbroken, broken (just like in general), and relieved. It was truly a feat.
An honorable mention is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, because I swear to God I did not understand a single thing about it even 10 chapters in. Charles Dickens is too much.
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War and Peace. It was a few years ago but I’m still patting myself on the back for it.
Anything longer than 600 pages. 11/22/63 comes to mind. Took me a couple months to read.
11/22/63 was long? I feel like I read that book in a week and I’m usually a slow reader. I must have dove deep into that one.
To me it was long. To each their own. It’s def a good Stephen King book but was not my favorite of his so I didn’t really breeze through it.
Gravity’s Rainbow, despite understanding maybe like 10% of the book. What a ride.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Rather than being just a book, it is a life coaching guide that helps you to γνῶθι σ(ε)αυτόν (“know thyself”).
Blood Meridian as a non-native speaker
I read Brave New World years after I was out of school–not my favorite book, but not as bad as I’d thought it might be.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It was recommended by my mentor teacher while I was student teaching in history classes. Difficult read due to the depressing subject matter but SO important for understanding how important the food and drug administration is
I’ll have to say: Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope – because I read it aloud to my wife while she knitted an afghan. We did the same with The Mayor of Casterbridge but that’s a shorter book.
I’ve had A Little Life on my bookshelf for years intending to read it, but have put it off because of its length and how sad everyone says it is. After all that you mentioned, would you still recommend it to someone?
Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. He describes a carving on a door for an entire chapter in Name of the Rose, or what felt like it. I really enjoy his writing, but they make terrible beach reads!
The petit prince A thousand splendid suns Gently falls the Bakula
Infinite Jest. I feel like David Foster Wallace wrote this book with the goal of including as many obscure vocabularies as possible. I eventually got hooked about 60% through, but this was a struggle. Literally forced myself to read it as a challenge.
It was a long and tedious and overly complex book. But it was well-written. And to think, I put myself through it all because of “This is Water”.
Foucault’s Pendulum, twice. It’s what Da Vinci Code wishes it could be when it grows up.
The Iliad, bc it can be challenging and we had to dissect it and learn history too.
Physical Organic Chemistry