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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-18-2014, 06:12 AM
Although it is more of a study than a book, hardest one was The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer. Not confusing, just way way way too god damn elaborate.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-18-2014, 07:59 AM
The Tale of Genji is told not at all in chronological order, based on antiquated imperial court Japanese from a thousand years ago, and alludes to people whose names we aren't allowed to know.
But it is beautiful. Simply reading it can take you away from all the bullshit of technology and modern society.
Consider the image that this chapter title emotes: the floating bridge of dreams.
Simple and concise, but like a well-written haiku, full of possibilities well beyond its physical scope on paper. One can get lost in such a world.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-18-2014, 09:38 AM
Had to read Dickens in high school - Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities. Tough slogs. Maybe I should revisit them.
Tried to get through Gravity's Rainbow three times, just bogged down in the bullshit riffing. I always stopped at the banana part.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-18-2014, 09:44 PM
I got to chapter 18 in Catcher in the Rye. Incredibly painful read. I found it amusing at first, then the drudgery of the character started to grate on me and I had to put it down.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-19-2014, 01:07 PM
Quote: (04-18-2014 12:04 AM)poutsara Wrote:
Quote: (09-10-2013 04:59 PM)Giovonny Wrote:
The Bible or anything about The Theory of Relativity.
I've read the bible maybe once in total. New Testament about 3 times. The Gospels, each one, about 5 times in total. I see it as a collection of separate books in a single compendium, which I guess is what it is. Almost a Rorschach blot. I think the authors are getting at something they don't understand but really want to. I feel the same way.
I've read textbooks on relativity. The special relativity stuff I get, I think. The general relativity I don't get. Not sure if many people can really understand this stuff though. What I learned is, I will never understand what's really going on.
The main take home for me, for all of this, was that I'm just going to have to be ok with incomplete understanding.
Yes, the bible and particularly the new testament is full of wishy washy pseudo philosophical mumbo jumbo.
As for other difficult subjects, I remember reading stuff like Decartes and Kant in high school classes and back then it was pretty damn hard to make sense of some of it.
Needless over complication is intellectual failure and Descartes, as I recall it, uses it to "prove" god's existence.
Same with pretty much everything written by socialists, feminists or frankfurt school people. It is pure nonsense in pseudo academic writing. It fools some people though.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-20-2014, 08:21 AM
Ulysses by Joyce is supposed to be damn near impossible.
A year from now you'll wish you started today
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-20-2014, 09:12 AM
From the article above:
Quote:Quote:
Gilbert Ryle, a true stylist among philosophers, said: “It’s much easier to catch a philosopher out… if he is not talking in technical terms, and the most important thing about a philosopher’s arguments is that it should be as easy as possible for other people, and especially for himself, to catch him out if he can be caught out.”
I am related to Gilbert Ryle - interesting fact. lol
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-20-2014, 03:48 PM
I've read all three of the big books of economics by Ludwig von Mises: Socialism, Human Action, and Theory of Money and Credit.
The last two are tough reads.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-20-2014, 04:09 PM
Currently reading The Trivirum and it's no easy thing to do.
"Melmoth the Wanderer" took me years to finish.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-23-2014, 06:39 PM
Basically anything I studied in high level philosophy classes.
- Phenomenology Of Spirit
- Being And Time.
- A Thousand Plateaus.
Although, with philosophy it's often hard to tell the difference between difficulty due to inherently difficult subject matter, and difficulty due to obscurantism and (for lack of a better word) "bullshit." Deleuze for instance was probably mostly bullshit.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
04-23-2014, 08:55 PM
Good luck to any of you if you ever attempt to read a clockwork orange.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
06-02-2014, 12:34 AM
The derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations. Prose is cake compared to that shit.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
06-02-2014, 01:01 AM
Quote: (04-20-2014 08:21 AM)ElJefe Wrote:
Ulysses by Joyce is supposed to be damn near impossible.
It is. I've read some crazy shit, and Ulysses is the hardest book I've ever read.
If you're not fucking her, someone else is.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
06-02-2014, 06:43 AM
I heard 'Finnegan's Wake' is even worse.
Joyce was such a retard.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
06-02-2014, 09:57 AM
So much of German philosophy is incoherent, useless nonsense. Seems like these guys count it a badge of honor to be incomprehensible.
Same with anything by Kant.
Maybe language has something to do with it, but I doubt it. Sometimes translations can ruin a decent piece of work.
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What is the hardest book you've ever read?
06-02-2014, 10:49 AM
My take is that Kant was very smart and also a very bad writer.
Because Kant was a legitimate genius - he made difficult writing fashionable. And a lot of lesser philosophers have buried their lack of talent underneath a deliberately difficult and wordy writing style.
Take 2Wycked to give one example!
:-)