The most difficult book you've ever read?

[Token]

Arent Kant books the hardests? i didnt know that about Hegel.

Kant's hardness is overrated IMO, he writes in a very straightforward and logical way. Hegel is pretty much impossible to understand without the help of secondary literature.

[Occiput in Starlight]

I didn't read Hegel in college even when it was required for some philosophy paper I took. I was incapable of the necessary concentration and work ethic.

I wouldn't even classify my attempt as "reading" because the experience was so unlike any other book-human experience I have ever had.

Maybe if I had any affinity for or experience with the sciences, my Hegel experience wouldn't have seemed so alien to me.

[capocannoniere]

Jorge Luis Borges' short stories. They are hard but they are very rewarding. The few ones I think I was able to understand were life-changing.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra was very hard too, but I never seriously attempted to study him. I only read The Genealogy of Morals fully, it was great but as Token said it's the one book that a layman can read with no challenges. Philosophy is complicated to me because there isn't really a straightforward path to beginners and autodidacts.

[Mortimer]

I dont know if difficult but tiresome and much to read... 4-5 Books.... Thousands of pages combined



whatsapp logo wallpaper hd

[Occiput in Starlight]

I didn't read Hegel in college even when it was required for some philosophy paper I took. I was incapable of the necessary concentration and work ethic.

I wouldn't even classify my attempt as "reading" because the experience was so unlike any other book-human experience I have ever had.

Maybe if I had any affinity for or experience with the sciences, my Hegel experience wouldn't have seemed so alien to me.

I also tried reading Schopenhauer a couple of times, but without background knowledge and reading my enterprises were futile.

Like with Hegel, I found reading Schopenhauer to exercise muscles of the mind which my usual reading materials (fiction, history, biography, poetry, light non fiction) simply don't. But maybe it's just that I haven't read enough advanced (or advanced enough) books and that's why I experienced Schop./Heg. the way I did.

I find it strange thinking about the dying of people like Hegel and Schopenhauer. There is something jarring about such intense cognition simply ceasing to be.

[Todesritter]

Anything by Kerouac. I don't know why he gets such praise, his writing is schizophrenic at best.

Loser hippie degenerates idolize a loser hippie degenerate that made it big in pseudo-artistic circles as proof that their lifestyle isn't fruitless waste. The whole postmodern Beat generation was trash.

[Kiel]

Citadelle by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[BakersfieldChimp]

Anything by Kerouac. I don't know why he gets such praise, his writing is schizophrenic at best.

https://www.beatdom.com/famous-write...-like-kerouac/


"TRUMAN CAPOTE
Kerouac claimed to have written his great novel in a three-week frenzy at his type-writer, banging away on the keys and churning out words onto a giant scroll of taped-together paper. Seven years on the road; three weeks writing the book. That’s how he said it was written. To this day, he is famed for this “spontaneous prose” style, yet it sparked the most well-known of all put-downs for On the Road, when Truman Capote, who wrote In Cold Blood, remarked, “That isn’t writing; it’s typing.”

[BakersfieldChimp]

Steiner's Cosmic Memory in recent memory, moreso because of the format than the content. I think I might have found every book I never finished easier to read if it had been on paper. I'm intentionally excepting art and film theory books, because I've more often gone through specific chapters rather than the whole thing.

Fiction-wise, Kafka's Trial and The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was more florid and harder to read than the Iliad and Kalevala. I like Goethe, but nonetheless... I found the Unfinished Tales and the Iliad as well as Kafka's short stories a pleasant read as long as they were printed on good paper, though.

Steppenwolf was an emotionally demanding read, in that it confronted me with a lot of uncomfortable habits and thought-cycles I had also assumed in my life. Ultimately, that's what made it so rewarding, though.

Where I come from, Kafka is used as "self-help" reading.

[BakersfieldChimp]

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Probably the most difficult philosophy book ever written.

My stumbling block with Hegel seems really stupid at this point. Once I realized he was more of a Christian out of convenience rather than a true believer, I quit trying to make his ideas fit into that mindset.