Difficult Books

[jochen stremmel]

Isn't it Garth who said it changed HIS life? Anyway, I think a life
that can be changed by reading Heidegger isn't much worth living.
(Perhaps in English it isn't just as unreadable.) And David, I
wouldn't touch the Phenomelogy of the Spirit again in my life. What's
very much worth reading, in my eyes, is the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right by one Karl Marx. These are ten pages or so that
changed my life.

J

2012/8/9 Madeleine Maudlin <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com>:
> Emily over at Publisher's Weekly, she recaps her ten favorite most
> difficult, and she says at the end of her Being and Time blurb that it
> changed her life.
>
> That's frikkin awesome!  How is, how did, what, is there, hold a moment, can
> I, existential phenomenology has a winner, and what I would like to do, does
> anybody know this Emily lady, Mr. Kohut do you know her, can I get her email
> from you?
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:36 AM, Madeleine Maudlin
> <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>