Difficult Books

[Madeleine Maudlin]

I find the I Ching very difficult, borderline incomprehensible.

Also, I had a rough time completing Dan Brown's Lost Symbol.


On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> One of the two folks who wrote the 'most difficult' list, Garth, did a
> nice piece on Women & Men not long ago.
> I have a stored copy somewhere.
> I have a friend who knows him and I got to meet him in the most
> superficial way at a big book event once.
> Nice guy, genial at this.
> Lookout Cartridge, started within the last pentade, read so much like
> Pynchon in the beginning, to me, mentally touched reader as we know, that
> I stopped out. The anxiety
> of readership. That should be a recommendation and is although I have
> failed my own reader-response.
>
>   *From:* Phillip Grayson <phillip.grayson at gmail.com>
> *To:* John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; Keith Davis <
> kbob42 at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Thursday, August 9, 2012 12:40 AM
> *Subject:* Re: Difficult Books
>
>  On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:27 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can anyone give a Pynchonista's appraisal of Joseph McElroy? He's
> never really made it onto my radar but sounds intriguing. Worth it?
>
>
> I've read *Smuggler's Bible *and *Women and Men*.  *Smuggler's Bible *was
> good, but I don't remember it especially well a year later.  It's a lot of
> nested stories that compound on each other and add and play off themselves.
>  I remember liking it a lot, but it wasn't too earth-shattering.
>
> *Women and Men*, on the other hand, definitely does deserve to be on a
> list of difficult books.  It's superlong and very obliquely told, difficult
> to follow, but in my opinion worth it.  The topics and themes and what can
> be discerned of the plot are all really interesting.  There're astronauts
> and operas and all that good stuff, and the prose is very good, if
> difficult to parse at times (the perspective just changes unannounced and
> pretty constantly, so there's a lot of retracing your steps after being
> confused for half a page), and I actually enjoyed it a lot.  It's much more
> staid and less accessible than Pynchon, and I found it more effective and
> enjoyable to just let a lot slip by with a befuddled look on my face and
> trust that it would resolve itself later on in the story, and for the most
> part it did.
>
> It's a real experience of a book, it took me a few months to read it, and
> I prolly went through six other (shortish, funnish) books in the meantime
> just to take a break from it and feel literate again, but I found it a
> really unique and interesting book.  I'd be loathe to recommend it, just
> because it is so huge and such a slog, and I can easily imagine someone
> hating it, but for me it was worth it, and I'd bet if you could get the
> e-book and just open it every day and approach it as a short avant garde
> work without having to hold 5 pounds of it in your hands it might be easier
> to get after.
>
> I guess that''s not too helpful at all, but that's my experience with
> McElroy.
>
> phllp
>
>
>
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