Dune Only read 15 pages and then drop it Shesssh

Why? What’s so tough about it?

The Tunnel by William Gass really challenges you to wrestle with what makes an individual evil, sort of how the everyday unfairnesses of life can create a hateful ideology. It’s also at times challenging prose so it’s “tough” in that sense as well.

No One Like Him by Feinberg.

Silmarillion

Blood Meridian was very hard to read. Not because of the overwhelming amount of violence, I actually liked that.

But the language is on another level. I thought my english was pretty good but the poetic style really challenged me.

One of the greatest books I've read so far.

Grey Steel and Blue Water Navy

Supposedly a book looking at the creation of the American military-industrial complex by covering the creation of the modern military shipbuilding industry. By itself that seems like a relatively dry topic, but I really think there's interesting things to be looked at there.

Instead it just kept going into incredible detail on the specifics of various contracts, spending so much time on details that just seemed entirely irrelevant. Like, the overall process of selecting contractors for the Navy does interest me. But the book just kept going into absurdly specific levels of detail on certain contracts, contractors, and requirements. X contractor could only make steel plates of Y size, but that was too small for Z ships, so Congress put off expanding the Navy for a year, and then next year they set a deal up with contractor A who could make steel armor of B thickness in the correct size, etc.

I don't know, maybe it was just written for people who are more nerdy than I am, but regardless I found it incredibly boring.

Weirdly enough the first book I thought of was "The Royal Game" by Stefan Zweig.

But two others come to mind as well:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (though for me the movie was even darker)

Young Gerber by Friedrich Torberg (now that I think about it this is probably my definite answer, but I don't know if it would still have that effect on me because it might have just been due to the time I read it in... then again, I think it would still be devastating)

Maybe not difficult, but one I struggled with recently is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Too much spy lingo/slang, whatever you call it, I couldn't follow what was actually going on in the story. I had to DNF. I would like to read some le Carré, so maybe I'll try somewhere else to start.

What’s the young gerber about?

Ulysses by James Joyce, at least for me it kinda was a bit difficult.

Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Gave up part way through both and just read the Wikipedia entry.

Gardens of the Moon. Steven Erickson.

It has tons of sci-fi gibberish all the time. Once you catch on the book isn't that hard to follow, but the beginning is pretty rough.

I think the appendix in the back has like 100+ made up terms

It follows the student Kurt Gerber as he's approaching the final exams at his school. He's basically disoriented, depressed and well, you know... the typical stuff lots of young people deal with. It also talks about oppressive authority from the teachers and the ending is unfortunate and devastating.

It was published when Torberg was only 22 years old. He was inspired by his own experiences and the fact, that there were a lot of student suicides in the year 1929 (in Austria I'm guessing).

Umberto eco focoults pendulum. Great book, just hurt my brain

Assuming we're not counting non-fiction here....

(Otherwise the winner would be a textbook that I guarantee no one here cares about.)

I'll go with Mason & Dixon. It's a difficult read and it's also by far the best book of the 1990s, in my opinion.

Sorry I wasn’t that clear: I wasn’t taking about difficult books. I meant books that hit hard and put us in a deep depressed mood.

MAUS by Art Spiegelman, which details his father's experiences in the camps during the Holocaust.

M&D was a walk in the park compared with Gravity's Rainbow, though!

Rothschild's Violin by Anton Chekhov. It's short story but it cut me to the heart and immersed me into the great grief. Sometimes I read it again and still feel the same way. Another similar one is The dead by James Joyce.

I remember The Sound and the Fury as hard to read when I was younger, but I haven't revisited it as an adult

Stefan Zweig's writing is truly beautiful but it is also heartbreakingly sad. If you read his autobiography it explains so well why his writing is so sad. He really cared about people and his beloved Europe. Seeing it ripped to pieces by war, economic collapse and the rise of Nazism utterly destroyed him.

Some of W Somerset Maugham's work is just as hard to read. His short story The Unconquered is really hard to get through.

This is my pick as well. It's just the densest read ive ever attempted and I didn't come close to absorbing it all when I read it.

I'm looking forward to revisiting it later in life though.

Talking about books that hit you hard and make you feel depressed, look no further than The Book of Despair, by Fernando Pessoa. No other book that I know of goes even closer to that one, at least for me. It it greatly written, but I couldn't finish it, because it wasnt good for my mental health at the time.

EDIT: I've seen that they translated it into English as The Book of Disquiet.

Geek Love was like that for me. Remarkably imagined and strikingly told, but when things go south, they get hard. Whole concept is twisted of course and we know early on something bad is going to happen, but early on things are bright, they're intriguing, they're fun, they get you really locked in, and then...

“Know my name” by chanel miller was quite tough to get through, as you might imagine. There were multiple points where I needed to take a break just to rest emotionally

Honestly light from uncommon stars as I was reading it early in my transition.

Finnegan's Wake was by far the most difficult.
Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow a distant second/third.

Norwegian Wood fucked me up for awhile.

I once read an article about how “The Velveteen Rabbit”, a beloved children’s book hits people left behind from suicide extremely hard. If you’ve ever been close to sufferers of depression it can be extremely difficult as well.

Being and Nothingness probably because I was reading it during my daily commute to/from work.

No need to apologise. You were perfectly clear. A few replies are from people who read your OP in too much haste, and that's hardly your fault.

Game of thrones. It's just politics with 1000 characters you have a really hard time keeping up with. I'm almost done with the series and I had to put it down.

Oh where the red fern grows EASILY

One fish two fish red fish blue fish, such big words

Centennial

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward just slapped you in the face over and over with highly emotional and upsetting things. And yet it’s absolutely beautiful writing and an amazing read (as are her other books that also get difficult, but this was the hardest for me).

I read a book about rocks and other solids. It was hard.

Probably The Discomfort Of Evening, for kind of a silly reason: I’m really squeamish about bodily fluids of all kinds, and this book really likes bodily fluids and also things that look, feel or taste like bodily fluids

Nothing so far. I have PTSD from violent happenings in my childhood so I don't react the way normal people do. I tend to like when the difficult is done well. Makes it feel like I'm less alone.

If it's difficult just to be difficult it turns me off. Stop caring and stop reading.

My parents had The Gulag Archipelago, by Alzexander Solzhenitsyn, on the shelf. At sixteen I pulled it down and read it through, both volumes, cover to cover.

My parents were worried that it would send me into a depressive spiral. This was probably a valid concern, but for some reason it didn't. Instead, I felt saddened, but also in a strange way uplifted. Like I'd borne witness to something that more people should know about and remember.

So nowadays I feel like everyone should read at least one book in their life, that calls them to bear witness to man's capacity for inhumanity.

For the reason you meant: Freakonomics. It really opens your mind to a few things that people still debate over. For the reason you don’t mean: cant hurt me by david goggins. I have never read such hilariously awful shit in all my life. It’s weirdly frequently suggested and it baffles me.

It's vocabulary(I am a non-english speaker)

Lolita. Every five pages it made me so angry because the POV character is such a horrible manipulator that I had to put it down and do breathing exercises. But it's such a masterful example of an unreliable narrator and the prose is so beautiful that I couldn't help but finish it.

It's probably the best book I've ever read and will never read again due to the animal rage it elicits within me.

um...lolita...

Just reading the summary bummed me out...

Kite Runner, Homegoing (some chapters), Secret Daughter, and Long Bright River were some of the hardest reads for me!

i've read many emotional and violent or tragic books but on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong sticks out, probably bc such a bleak story was written so beautifully.

also i think abt the part about veal at least once a week so

Too late, bro

Yeah I’m having a hard time emotionally with American Psycho. Not surprised though. I flew through more than 100 pages Monday night and then yesterday got to the part about the homeless guy and I only read about 25 pages all day yesterday and I haven’t picked it up at all yet today.
1984 is on my list of books to read soon.

Atlas shrugged, it's just rambling at certain points to me.

It's a great book but we all read it as kids, and damn the end of that book is sad

Michael Kohlhaas, original German version, written at the 19th century with fake 16th century German on purpose

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma. I read this book four years ago and don’t remember my exact feelings on it, but I did love it. It was definitely a “forbidden” topic that I thought the author portrayed very well. It might be due for a re-read to see if my feelings about it are the same.

I love Sylvia Plath and I love the Bell Jar, but reading it always puts me in a really weird place. It's all just way too uncomfortably relatable for me.

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The Power of the Dog series by Don Winslow. It was a tough read for me because it felt more like nonfiction than fiction, and the violence in it was extraordinary. I didn’t finish the third book.

1. The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was arrested because he criticised Stalin. it was just hard reading in what awful conditions people were living in these camps.
2. War and Peace - Tolstoy. I think it doesn’t need any explanation 😂 story is pretty dense, four books, sometimes it’s just boring
   Andrei Bolkonsky is crush and love, but after Tolstoy kills him , I just stopped reading

Really depends on what you mean by “toughest”.

For me, it would be The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I was doing a buddy read with a coworker and it was incredibly boring. I could only read it in 70 page chunks before I’d doze off.

Brothers Karamazov

The Glass Bead Game