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.
I’m pretty proud of reading “An Introduction to Buddhism” by Peter Harvey this summer. It’s only 550 pages, but it’s a lot to absorb. I’ve been reading religious texts recently (just for general knowledge, no religious motivation) - I started with the Tao Te Ching and the Quran - and when I got to the Lotus Sutra, I realized I understood absolutely none of it, so I got the Harvey book first. I did read the Lotus Sutra afterwards, and could finally make some sense of it. But yeah, the Harvey one was a high intensity read. Lots of note-taking, lots of flipping back and reviewing and memorizing and contextualizing.