8 Writers and Books I Find Extremely Difficult to Read

let's talk about difficult books and which books i've found the most difficult i'm quite well read but i still run into difficulty and there are different types of difficulty uh proust's difficulty is not the same as swift's difficulty so let's have a look at some of the books that i find challenging and how i get through that difficulty that might help you when you come to difficult books so i mentioned proust in search of lost time by marcel bruce it is a long i don't know if you'd call it a novel would you call it a novel or a sprawling strange experimental epic thing the difficulty is simply getting to grips with his languid languishing slow unrolling relative clause stuffed style it takes about a book so that first combre section is ostensibly the most boring but you need that section which is a couple hundred pages to get to grips with what proust is doing proust is replicating his consciousness but he's sort of backward-looking consciousness he's doing some very challenging um but rewarding things with time and he's aiming to expand your consciousness and he does that really really well it's beyond the remit of this video to say exactly what bruce is doing because he does a lot of things really really well but once you get on board with that style and you commit yourself and you must slow down when you read proust then you're in for a treat and then it becomes one of the easiest books in the world to read you must also treat proust as though he's a never-ending easter egg hunt he will mention uh music he'll mention paintings he'll mention other books and it is up to you to expand your consciousness by searching them down and reading them so when he mentions pascal's paul say go read pascal's ponce when he mentions the vintoy sonata go search for it and discover that it doesn't exist and the great thing about proust is he modifies modulates your thinking style and your speaking style read proofs for a couple of weeks slowly with dedication at leisure and at length and then see how you communicate with other people and watch their faces go next up like i said i mentioned jonathan swift and i want to talk about a tale of a tub you probably already know gulliver's travels um swift was a fierce satirist he was big into parody and the difficulty with swift is not the difficulty was proust the difficulty with swift is you're reading a satire from about three and a bit three four hundred years ago so about 1703 1704 he pushed out uh tale of the tub suddenly everybody could put out a pamphlet and just write their opinions on government or religion or anything they like anonymously and push it out it was very similar to social media suddenly the common person had a voice and suddenly you didn't know who to trust who was authority who was just mucking about who was crazy and so you need to know your history in order to read a tale of the top and you also need to know satire and the elements of satire we still have satire today and parody today but i think it's a little easier this is demanding perhaps it's just because we're not of the time but basically he takes an analogy and he talks about religion and there's three sons that have to follow their father's will and he dies and he says you're not meant to change your dress and your style of uh clothing and all that but they find little instances to change absolutely everything that they want um but it's steeped in and layered in metaphor and analogy and illusion but there's also tons of digressions so it purposefully gets a bit confusing and the digressions get mis-titled misappropriated but they're hilarious once you've got past that initial difficulty and it might take you five to ten cracks at it before you do um it's funny it is really funny and really insightful and i particularly like what swift says about critics and that helps me informs me um helps sculpt my philosophy and my approach to interpreting and explicating the great ideas the great books to great texts because i do not want to be a critic that swift outlines in a tale of top who else is difficult shakespeare is difficult now that might be surprising to hear because i read shakespeare endlessly people ask me how many times i've read shakespeare and i can't possibly answer that question because i'm continuously consistently reading him over and over and over again and i read him in a very unique style and when i read him it illuminates all my other reading and it gives me more reading to do um but what happens is when you start getting into the great ideas shakespeare is difficult and he's difficult because he has got a bit of archaic language though he's not as archaic as chaucer and uh he's not as archaic as those a bit before chaucer now that's real difficulty he's ostensibly he's quite easy shakespeare but when you first read him there's some words you don't know like uh wherefore are thou romeo just knowing that wherefore means why helps but when you go straight into it you think is she asking where's romeo why is she asking where's romeo little things like that but it's like a bell curve once you get over that initial difficulty and you understand the language you delude yourself into thinking that shakespeare is really easy and then once you really read the great books and you read and bring your whole life experience to bear upon the works and you mature a bit you realize shakespeare is extremely demanding he is really demanding of everything you have you can bring everything you have to shakespeare and it's still not enough you can comfortably bring as much as possible to him and he will always reward you and there are very few writers that can do that if you know any other writers that do that for you then drop them in the comments below because i would love to hear that um i don't know where to even start with suggesting shakespeare or where to even start and commenting on his difficulty other than the fact that he's massively embedded in the culture he's influenced absolutely everybody he influences how we speak and how we think on a day-to-day basis he is the catalyst for character whether you're reading his sonnets or his plays there is always a difficulty to be found and to be overcome and every question answered throws up three more questions where to start with shakespeare if you want to start apprehending him and you know overcoming his difficulty and incorporating him into your thinking i would recommend starting with one of the great plays hamlet kingly macbeth othello anthony cleopatra or you could try and read his plays chronologically we can talk about this more in depth if you like but that's that's a challenge right there that's a reading project or you can try reading the sonnets in sequence across the long term and journaling upon them and trying to find your favorites who else is difficult tolstoy is difficult we're currently reading anna karenina the anna karenina book club lecture series is kicking off and a lot of people are reading the novel together tolstoy is actually quite easy surprisingly easy once you get over the russian names and you enter into the novel the characters kind of carry you away um but his difficulty is what he demands of you and what he demands of you is that you bring your life to the work it's like shakespeare in that sense tolstoy comes out of the earth himself he is nature he is life itself and he demands that you keep the characters in your mind in your heart in your soul forever and once you read anna if you read it properly you will never let those characters go they will be a continuous touchstone you will constantly evolve your thinking in regards to them but also the themes that preoccupy them now that's a challenge that sounds like a challenge to me and that's why we're doing the lecture series that's why we're taking this book slowly over eight to ten weeks that's why there are lectures that run to several hours on one part of the novel alone that's why there's peripheral secondary reading that's why we're reading plato's symposium that's why we're reading baudelaire that's why we're reading well we're reading a lot tolstoy is difficult so we need to read him together so that's that's a primary difficulty when it comes to great writers tolstoy shakespeare austin they're not necessarily difficult on the surface it's just the fact that they demand you to live them that's the mark of a great book can you live it can those characters live rent-free in your mind now it's not just fiction imaginative literature that moves me that i find difficult it is practical applicable life philosophy i'm not talking plato i love plato but i consider him an imaginative fictional writer like freud i don't think there has direct philosophical applicability just like i don't think freud is particularly comforting or even has any sort of utility in regards to understanding psychology who does though well marcus aurelius does the stoics do like seneca and my number one my favorite aristotle i particularly recommend aristotle's nicomachean ethics we did a couple of podcasts on the ethics we went through the different vices and the different virtues and aristotle was one of those who you need to really again slow down that's the mark of a difficult book do you need to slow down another mark of the difficult book is does it have to be quiet when you're reading him do you have to be sat upright do you have to have a pen in one hand and p and a pad of paper and make notes does it take you three four five minutes to read one page these are things that aristotle demands of you and then he demands that you change your life for the better you don't have to you don't have to listen to him but once you know what he says has to say about ethics or poetics which is useful if you're a writer or an artist of any kind you can't ignore it you can't ignore it and that's the mark of a difficult work it says hey you know how to be better i've told you how to be better why aren't you being better that's what aristotle does now let's go back to fiction and i recommend a few more difficult uh writers a lot of people probably expected me to say james joyce ulysses finnegan's wake or ts eliot they both have similar but different difficulties joyce is just difficult um because he can't even read what he's saying try reading fillings wake you need a guide to understand in both of those books though ulysses is easier than you think especially if you read it aloud or get a good audio version of someone reading it aloud it's beautiful music and poetry um and it can be really quite emotionally effective and what joyce did for the novel is he basically broke it uh after joyce you can't really do anything new with the novel and since then all of these experimental or avant-garde novels the ones that read that win booker prizes they basically just do a pale glimmer a shadow of what joyce did back in the day with ulysses and finnegan's wake that's why i don't like them and they don't have a beating heart underneath them but yeah joyce is harder he has a lot of mythological and classical illusions so you need to be well read you need to read ovid and you know homer and all that stuff t.s eliot is also steeped in illusion though he tells you who his illusions are but don't be fooled because t.s eliot is misdirecting you i don't particularly like t.s eliot i think he is the cause of a lot of nasty um academic criticism and i just don't like him personally and i've found over the years that i'm naturally drawn to people who are just nice people jane austen a fellow pisces montaigne a fellow pisces shakespeare who i believe was a pisces so people will say he wasn't born under the pisces star sign i can tell if someone's a pisces i can tell someone's empathetic i can tell someone to tell if someone's a nice person i don't think tolstoy was particularly nice i think hugo was an i think dickens was nice um and this i needed the person to at least be nice and not an anti-semitic in order to be reading their work especially when i don't consider their work anything special that might sound controversial a lot of people like elliot please explain to me what's so great about the wasteland i can kind of see it but it wouldn't be on the top of my reading list especially when his tradition of criticism and academic um academic theory has been so devastating to so many good writers the reason we don't read some of my favorite writers today is because of a strain of criticism that comes from elliot so let's talk about who's good gorgeous jorge luis now there's two styles of short story checkoff anton chekhov or jorge louis borges now chekhov is slice of life um he went on to influence basically everybody if you read hemingway although ostensibly on the surface hemingway has nothing in common stylistically with chekhov regardless of what translation you use he was influenced by chekhov most people were chekhov said don't tell me that the moon is shining uh show me the glint of light on a broken shard of glass on the ground something like that um chekhov is truthfulness um embodied truthfulness and it's a pleasure to read chekhov and the internal life of his characters is really rich on the other end you've got borges who is deep difficult speculative hypothetical fiction anybody who writes speculative fiction grand ideas not necessarily about character plot story emotional affection but more like a thesis statement in story form anybody who does that is likely influence whether they admit it or not by borges borges is hard his short stories are not very long there are only a couple of pages but you'll probably need to spend longer with them than you would a story by chekhov and that's why borges is difficult and those are just some of the writers that i find difficult for various reasons i love difficult writers i believe in a difficult pleasure i believe in what harold bloom called the reader's sublime and you need to read something difficult and climb a hard literary mounting in order to be rewarded anyway let me know what your favorite difficult writers are who do you struggle with who's a challenge pop them in the comments below and also if you've enjoyed this video please hit the like button and subscribe thank you very much and happy reading

Channel: Benjamin McEvoy

Views: 1,739

Rating: 4.9207921 out of 5

Keywords: proust, a la recherché du temps perdu, in search of lost time review, a remembrance of things past, how to read Joyce's ulysses, finnegans wake, swift tale of a tub, tolstoy, anna karenina book review

Id: JXkGiaAeV9w

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021