Books you didn't understand

Roxxsmom

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Intruder in the Dust by Faulkner. I had to read it my junior year in high school, and to this day, I couldn't tell you what it was about or remember a single scene from the novel. I think it was the prose. I just couldn't parse his sentences.

We read other challenging stuff in high school English, including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and tons and tons of poetry. Faulkner made me feel like an idiot, though.

Atlas Shrugged defeated me too. I just could not follow what was going on, nor was I engaged enough with the characters to even want to try. Years later, I learned that it was a sort of conservative manifesto or something, but I didn't get far enough into it to even pick that up.
 
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richcapo

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Finnegan's Wake. Bing bonf scriddly PAROOOOOOO. Chariot, chariot, chariot. Fwedang!

Come on now.
 

kkbe

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David Searcy's Last Things--I've mentioned it before. The writing was so convoluted sometimes. But I liked it. Up to a point. The story was oddly constructed and I didn't really get what happened at the end.

Strange reading experience.
 

Six Alaric

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Naked Lunch. Admittedly, I only read the first 20 pages or so, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

I finished the book and I'm none the wiser. It just seems to be a string of drug-induced fantasies and nightmares. I think that's the point, but I'm not sure what Burroughs was trying to say with it.

For similar reasons: Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker. I understood each scene, just not how they were meant to follow on from each other most of the time. All felt kind of random.
 

clintl

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Finnegan's Wake. Bing bonf scriddly PAROOOOOOO. Chariot, chariot, chariot. Fwedang!

Come on now.

LOL! I have a friend who is both a successful, award-winning writer and has a Ph.D. in literature, and he told me many years ago that Ulysses can be understood with a lot of work, but that Finnegan's Wake is completely incomprehensible.
 

meowzbark

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Catch 22.

The dialogue reminds me of someone trying to win an argument against a seven-year-old.
 

kuwisdelu

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I had a problem reading "Focault's Pendulum." It's in first person, and it's a translation, but I don't know if either of those had anything to do with me not liking it.

While I gave up on the Satanic Verses because they made no sense to me, I loved the Pendulum so much... I quite like the re-imagining of all history because of a simple conspiracy theory. I've read a German translation, so I don't know if the English one ruined the book.

I liked Pendulum when I read it as a teenager, but probably wouldn't enjoy it now. As I've gotten older, I have far less patience for that sort of stuff anymore, even though I loved it when I was suffering from chuu2byou.
 

ElsaM

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Catch 22.

The dialogue reminds me of someone trying to win an argument against a seven-year-old.

I read Catch 22 during the holidays between finishing high school and starting university. I stuck with it because I felt I should be broadening my mind and reading actual literary works, even though I had no idea what was going on and was finding the dialogue incredibly frustrating.

And then, suddenly, it just clicked and I couldn't put it down. It was possibly the most intense reading experience I've ever had.
 

brasiliareview

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How about The Splendor of Portugal by Antonio Lobo Antunes? Jumping back and forth in time - I've seen this device before and can handle it. Not exactly knowing who's talking? Same. Understanding the conversations but not the why of the conversations? Same again, but this is perhaps the start of the trouble spot.

My trouble is the overall point. This is where it loses me. I'm being vague but it's difficult to parse a novel in this way. If the characters are fully rounded, and the conflict is fully set up, but something from the macro view seems to be missing, what exactly is that flaw? Or is it an authorial flaw? Perhaps it's a cultural thing, and the missing is in me the reader.
 

Witch_turtle

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This may be unpopular, but . . . The Ocean at the End of the Lane? Not that I didn't understand the book or the story itself--I did and I enjoyed it alright--but I scratch my head every time I see someone going on about how it changed their life or touched some deep part of their soul or how it was this amazing source of comfort in a difficult time. There is so much reverence for this book that I can't help but wonder if I totally missed something. I even read it a second time, but nope, can't see what everyone else sees.:Shrug: Someone explain it to me!
 

Friendly Frog

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Sallinger's Catcher in the Rye.

It was supposed to be something we would really connect with when we had to read in it school. And I just didn't. It didn't make any sense to me and I seldom disliked a main character as much as I did with this book.

Heck, even the teacher wrote on my reading comprehension test that I didn't get the point of the story (and/or title). Well, I probably agree(d) but I would have liked to know what the bloody point of it was.

Some times since then I wondered whether I would understand more when re-reading at a later age, but at the end of the day there are too many books and too little time to waste with books you didn't even like the first time around.
 

S.J.

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To all those saying Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, please don't let them put you off Dubliners or even Portrait of the Artist. But especially the former.

To those saying Salman Rushdie, I totally agree. Satanic Verses defeated me too. That said, the opening passages of Midnight's Children (and passages throughout) are some of my favourites ever.

Books I didn't understand. I was going to say 'too many to count' but actually can't think of many beyond what's been said. Maybe To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf...
 

meowzbark

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I read Catch 22 during the holidays between finishing high school and starting university. I stuck with it because I felt I should be broadening my mind and reading actual literary works, even though I had no idea what was going on and was finding the dialogue incredibly frustrating.

And then, suddenly, it just clicked and I couldn't put it down. It was possibly the most intense reading experience I've ever had.

I have Catch 22 on my bookshelf. I'm going to try it again in a few months...maybe. I didn't get very far on my first attempt. Then again, I got farther in Catch 22 than I did in 50 Shades of Grey.

Someone please tell me why my friends said 50 Shades of Grey was the most intense book they've ever read. I wanted to burn it. Instead, I gave my unfinished copy to the library.
 

Perks

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I need to give The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao another try. I could not make heads nor tails of it.
 

GingerGunlock

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I've tried to read The Satanic Verses twice, once while in college and very impressionable, and once out of college (and still probably impressionable, though far more thorny), and my interest in it broke down at about the same time both read-throughs. I just don't care enough, and then I lose the tenuous narrative thread once we're like, three times removed from the initial scenes.

Naked Lunch is the only book I've literally thrown across the room, which sounds far less impressive when I tell you "across the room" was where the owner of the book was, and so I was sort of vehemently returning it.

This may be unpopular, but . . . The Ocean at the End of the Lane? Not that I didn't understand the book or the story itself--I did and I enjoyed it alright--but I scratch my head every time I see someone going on about how it changed their life or touched some deep part of their soul or how it was this amazing source of comfort in a difficult time. There is so much reverence for this book that I can't help but wonder if I totally missed something. I even read it a second time, but nope, can't see what everyone else sees.:Shrug: Someone explain it to me!

It kind of feels like a betrayal to say this (I love American Gods and Sandman, specifically), but that's also how I felt about The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Though I more or less enjoyed the story, it didn't speak to me with any level of profundity.

I have Catch 22 on my bookshelf. I'm going to try it again in a few months...maybe. I didn't get very far on my first attempt. Then again, I got farther in Catch 22 than I did in 50 Shades of Grey.

Someone please tell me why my friends said 50 Shades of Grey was the most intense book they've ever read. I wanted to burn it. Instead, I gave my unfinished copy to the library.

When I got my hair cut back in July, the hairdresser said 50 Shades of Grey was the first book she'd read since high school, and she was almost 30. I have no freaking idea why people are so into this book. I work at a library, and my coworker and I, at the height of the trilogy's popularity, would open a copy at random when it came through our hands and read a sentence out loud. Because that's the kind of people we were. But the relationships in it make no sense to me and/or are alarming at best.

I haven't had any problems with most of the books in this thread.

I'm starting to think I'm weird.


I've never had any problem with Atlas Shrugged, but I read it like a science fiction novel.
 

Mr Flibble

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Quantum Thief

I loved the first chapter, but seems like it promised me a different book to the one I actually read (same with the blurb - I was promised a flamboyant hero dammit and I got jargon! Also a hero that used to be flamboyant...)

I have no damn idea what happened. Q-dots iirc (???) RL Epic mounts (Facepalm and ???) a butt load of new SF terms that are not explained so we're left to guess (afairc)

There was a thing. Apparently. And then...?? Well and then lots of words that meant nothing sprinkled through the text. Something about not showing people your privacy settings??? With a mystery? And someone was related to someone else and then..it ended?

I mean maybe it's me. But...???
 

Amadan

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To those saying Salman Rushdie, I totally agree. Satanic Verses defeated me too. That said, the opening passages of Midnight's Children (and passages throughout) are some of my favourites ever.

I really liked Midnight's Children. But The Satanic Verses, while I understood it well enough, bored me. The only reason that book is Rushdie's most famous is the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Quantum Thief

I loved the first chapter, but seems like it promised me a different book to the one I actually read (same with the blurb - I was promised a flamboyant hero dammit and I got jargon! Also a hero that used to be flamboyant...)

I'm with you. I wanted to like that book, but Hannu Rajaniemi is like Alastair Reynolds on meth.
 

akiwiguy

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The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass. One of those books that seemed, for me, to require more reading about the book than actual reading of the book to figure what it was about.