The hardest book you have had the (dis)pleasure of reading?

<p>Wuthering Heights- I really like tragic romances but NOTHING happened. They angst then die. I only really liked the end when they finally got together. Plus the first Catherine really annoyed me.
To Kill a Mockingbird- I guess I'm a little biased about this one, but I got to really hating it. I read it for pleasure and enjoyed it...until the next four years I had to read it for class. I got to the point where I could practically quote it, and began to despise it.</p>

<p>Like many others on this thread, I've had the displeasure of reading The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne doesn't know how to keep the reader interested, or maybe it's just my short attention span.</p>

<p>THE SCARLET LETTER and BEOWULF are both fairly easy to read, but difficult to get through in that they are flat out horrible!</p>

<p>One of the slower, tougher books I've read for school turned out to be amazing...GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Dickens.</p>

<p>Anything Ray Bradbury gets confusing w/ all the crazy metaphors he uses.</p>

<p>
[QUOTE]
CANTERBURY TALES IS PAINFULLY BORING.

[/QUOTE]
</p>

<p>I respectfully disagree. I'm assuming you've read the whole thing, including Sir Melibee and the Parson's Tale (the boring ones among those I haven't read), but the Wife of Bath's Tale easily makes up for those.</p>

<p>Ya The Scarlet Letter was terrible. I didn't understand any of it. I had to read Wikipedia to understand what happened.</p>

<p>The hardest book I read was prolly The Poisonwood Bible. It was interesting, but pretty long.</p>

<p>I LOVED the Canterbury Tales.</p>

<p>Reads very quickly, too.</p>

<p>The Sound and the Fury: it's pretty much weird and...ugh and ew. It was very difficult to understand. The first chapter is in POV of an retarded person. Everything was out of order..!!</p>

<p>Yes, the Canterbury Tales was pretty cool. Our teacher made us memorized the prologue :)</p>

<p>She made you memorize the prologue? Wow, that's difficult. Did you have to recite it? Middle English pronunciation is quite hard.</p>

<p>The Scarlett Letter. the perfect example of too much information. but thats just me.</p>

<p>ever heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel? it was pretty much suicide.</p>

<p>Wow I'm surprised people found the Scarlet Letter so hard. I actually liked that book... but my hardest book would probably be American Reformers 1815-1860</p>

<p>"ever heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel? it was pretty much suicide."</p>

<p>it really is a great book, though.</p>

<p>Basically any Victorian age British novel over five hundred pages.</p>

<p>My Antonia; the book still makes me wince. Not really hard to read, but I couldn't pull any meaning from it for the life of me, and yeah, my essay reflected that lol.</p>

<p>Oh, and on the whole, I'd advise against reading any book/s that deal with Bohemian immigrants during the early 20th century.</p>

<p>HOD is one of those books that is torture to read, but after you've read it, you're like, damn, that was one of the best books I've ever read.</p>

<p>No, I still hate Heart of Darkness 4 months later...</p>

<p>I had to read "La Cantatrice Chauve" (The Bald Soprano) for my French class. Not only was it in my second language, but it was an absurdist play and nothing made sense in context. As a person who derives meaning from context more than looking up stuff in dictionaries, I was frustrated the entire way through.</p>

<p>Also, "Jude the Obscure," by Thomas Hardy, was so soul-crushingly depressing that nothing really compares.</p>

<p>Wuthering Heights, although that was a while ago, so maybe now it wouldn't be so bad.</p>

<p>T.S. Eliot scares me. I've only read one thing by him (Murder in the Cathedral), and that was supposedly one of his easier works. Still really good, though.</p>

<p>
[quote]
I respectfully disagree. I'm assuming you've read the whole thing, including Sir Melibee and the Parson's Tale (the boring ones among those I haven't read), but the Wife of Bath's Tale easily makes up for those.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Getting into the Tales is a bit boring (the introduction of all the characters), but the stories themselves were entertaining, I thought.</p>

<p>In Search of Lost Time, also</p>