Top Ten Difficult???
Top 10 difficult Literary Works--found via So Many Books.
What a curious list. What is so difficult about War and Peace--mere length? Hard to say--there isn't a sentence within it that is particularly perplexing or difficult. And a list of difficult works that lacks a single thing by Henry James? Where, for example is The Golden Bowl, a notoriously convoluted and difficult late work.
And Thomas Pynchon does make it, but The Sound and the Fury does? It frightens me a little to say this--but The Sound and the Fury is not a particularly difficult book after the first ten or so pages orient you to what's going on. It's a great book, but not a difficult one.
Perhaps the list author means to list the 10 most frequently started and never completed books. And if that were the case, then the list makes a certain amount of sense. I can, however, agree with the top choice--Finnegans Wake--a notoriously difficult book--although many would claim the same for Ulysses.
So, I don't really know what the list is all about, but I can say that I'd take three or four items off the list if we're really talk DIFFICULT and not merely frequently unfinished.
What a curious list. What is so difficult about War and Peace--mere length? Hard to say--there isn't a sentence within it that is particularly perplexing or difficult. And a list of difficult works that lacks a single thing by Henry James? Where, for example is The Golden Bowl, a notoriously convoluted and difficult late work.
And Thomas Pynchon does make it, but The Sound and the Fury does? It frightens me a little to say this--but The Sound and the Fury is not a particularly difficult book after the first ten or so pages orient you to what's going on. It's a great book, but not a difficult one.
Perhaps the list author means to list the 10 most frequently started and never completed books. And if that were the case, then the list makes a certain amount of sense. I can, however, agree with the top choice--Finnegans Wake--a notoriously difficult book--although many would claim the same for Ulysses.
So, I don't really know what the list is all about, but I can say that I'd take three or four items off the list if we're really talk DIFFICULT and not merely frequently unfinished.
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