The most difficult book you've ever read?

[Murphy]

I'll also need to add much from Aquinas.

[Lutiferre]

I'll also need to add much from Aquinas.

Aquinas is much like Kant in this regard.

Though Aquinas is even harder if you consider how concentrated his expositions are. Very often I find myself considering hard and long the single words in his sentences to understand anything at all.

[Tabiti]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra in its Danish translation (Således talte Zarathustra) was really hard until I got used to the language style. The style was very different from normal modern day Danish and seemed highly convoluted but was really just very delicate, but once I got used to it, understanding started getting smoother, the images were conveyed more succesfully, and it was wonderful to read.

It's not the translation, indeed the old style. I'm sure even Germans have problems understanding the original Nietzsche in the beginning.

[Cato]

Anything by David Hume too.

[Svanhild]

Analysis isn't that bad actually once you catch the meaning of "function", "graphic", "derivative", "integral" and "differential". Math teachers usually suck, not the subject.

I'm sorry to say that abilities differ. After years of stress, anger and tutoring I can say that I don't have the ability to excel in maths. My fortes are languages and arts. Truth be told, I catch the meaning of "function", "graphic"... but I never understood what to do next. f(x), f´(x), f(y-x).....go to hell!

[Lutiferre]

Anglo-saxon analytical philosophy and it's endless tirades of worthless blabbering and blabbering into unknown levels of abstraction, especially the "transcendental" (Kantian) variety, is the deepest depth of verbal hell I have ever delved down into, in the world of philosophy.

[Piparskeggr]

Calculus was my bane in college...

Fiction, though I love the stories, I always have a hard time wading through the works of James Fenimore Cooper.

[Murphy]

Augustine can be quite hard sometimes. He's a much easier read than Aquinas etc., of course. But at times his works can just.. drag.

[Eldritch]

I forgot Volter Kilpi's massive Alastalon salissa ("In the Hall of Alastalo"), a 900-page novel about an uneventful afternoon in a small Finnish village in the 1860's.

Some English expert in Finnish literature spent years trying to translate it into English, but eventually had to admit defeat. Or did he die of boredom? I forget.

[Lutiferre]

It's not the translation, indeed the old style. I'm sure even Germans have problems understanding the original Nietzsche in the beginning.

Yes, I am aware.

But I think the stylistic effort from Nietzsches side was the right form for his thought and definitely paid off. It makes for a work which feels much grander and more eternal than one written in a more profane and temporally inclined daily language would be able to.