Tough Reads

Hi, I'm sure this has probably appeared as a thread before, but my question is this:

Are you trudging through a long or difficult book, determined to get to the end, no matter what it takes?

I've been reading a prose translation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso for a long time. I can't even remember when I started it. It's not that it's difficult to read, but it has 46 cantos, and in my edition, 573 pages of very small text. I'm on canto 21 at the moment, and I am enjoying the knights in shining armour and damsels in distress, but it is a slow process.

So, to those of you in the literary mire, keep calm and carry on!

Linds.

I know that particular book. It's a killer. The Penguin Edition? Yes the font is tortuous.

Ha, hopefully LGKerr is through it now. I believe the prose translation is by Waldman in Oxford's World's Classics line. I read and enjoyed it but there were definitely some doldrums. The battle that takes place where the Saracens attack Charlemagne and the city of Paris was fairly amazing in terms of large scale and small scale narration. Amadis of Gaul stuff is even worse. A lot of Cervantes' more sense when you've read these works but they are pretty slow and fairly unrewarding.

For some reason Zola's La Terre took me the better part of this year. My wife and I did welcome our first child in June and our house always requires something from me time and energy-wise. It was good; not quite Germinal. Fairly dark and disturbing toward the end, at least the action. The tone is always about the same in Zola.

I think I made a rule about 15 years ago about finishing. The only two I put down (and they were very close to the end, maybe 200 hundred pages) were Tale of Genji and Life of Johnson.

I'm picking back up Charles Dickens Bleak House. Over 1000 pages, I attempted to read it once when I was very young but never got through it all and the book confused me something fierce back then. Heck, it confuses me still but I will read on till the end. Has anyone else read or attempted to read this book? If so is it worth it before I even start again?

Dickens is a guy I keep wanting to get into, but can't seem to find the time. I've acquired three or four of his books over the years and have yet to crack one.

Shame on me.

Russian literature is another literary branch I've been aching to explore--been accumulating a number of fat, depressing tomes along those lines for the past couple decades. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Lermontov.

One of these days...

The few times I have tried Russian novels I have been defeated by the names. It is very disconcerting a few hundred pages in to discover that Alexander, Sascha, Sergeiovich, and a few other characters are actually all the same person.

Aw I love Russian classics. The diminutives & patronymics have honestly never given me much trouble, aside of the occasional confusion about how the heck does Aleksandr turn into Shura or whatnot, lol.

I also quite enjoyed the two Dickens I've read so far, though Pickwick did have a slow start.

>5 CliffBurns: I've never had any problems with Russian literature (in translation), having tackled War and Peace and Crime and Punishment before going on to more recent Russian stuff like Bulgakov's The White Guard. And I have enjoyed Victor Hugo as well. But I found Dickens hugely irritating: to me, he read like a pulp writer padding out his word-count. At his best, he's wonderful - the storming of the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities is a gripping piece of work - but elsewhere I found my fingers itching for a blue pencil.

It's funny with Hugo. There's been similar moments I'd rather be reading anything else but what's in front of me but on the whole--and I'm not sure it's the finishing he's good at--they're satisfying works. I recommend The Man Who Laughs and Toilers of the Sea and Ninety-Three (to a lesser extent) as well as Les Miserables.

> I haven't read Bleak House but I have read David Copperfield and Domeby and Son and Pickwick (and Our Mutual Friend as well as a few others). David Copperfield and Domeby and Son both had some tortuous sections at the end. David Copperfield did have great things that redeemed the whole and is a bit iconic so it was worthwhile. Pickwick was fairly spectacular once it was a few hundred pages in.

'Bleak House' is famous for being a tough read. But it's also considered the greatest Brit novel of its era; maybe of all time. I can't advise you whether to stick with it or not; because at no point does it ever get easy. I enjoy it and value it; but its not my #1 favourite from the author. It is #3 though, which is still pretty high.

The atmosphere; the theme; the variety of incidents and events; the staggering array of characters and their habits make it extraordinary. But there's no laugh-out-loud humor as there is in some of his others; and of course nothing (for me) can quite top 'A Tale of Two Cities'. 'Tale' is a much more restrained, modern-sounding Dickens, mostly free of the voluminous running-on-at-the-mouth, paid-by-the-word style so common with him.

Slavic literature yes; its often very difficult; but try some short novels by Dosteovsky. That's a good place to start. His themes are still very modern. Chekhovs' plays are easy reads; as are the short stories of Pushkin or Gorky. Or you could go with something extremely simple such as Krylov.

>9 DanMat:, I'd second Toilers of the Sea, I just recently read The Old Man and the Sea and that had me thinking of it again. I've read Ninety-Three but my mind's a blank, it left no impression. Les Mis of course is great.

I'm tackling Dickens in publication order, only reached to the end of Martin Chuzzlewit so far and it sounds like the best is still ahead of me. Pickwick hasn't been topped by anything else yet.

Haven't read Chekov's plays but his short fiction is great. Crime and Punishment doesn't have too terrible a morass of character names, I thought.

Chekov's plays are great too. Not much opportunity to get mired down.

Try The Man Who Laughs at some point. The slog in that one is this seemingly inexorable scene in the very beginning that's much too long. The rest is magic. Heavy and dark at the end like Toilers. I don't think there is a modern translation so I read one of the opensource/POD ones from amazon which seemed fine.

> 4 > 5

Dickens? Bitchin' about serialized Dickens? No, I've bulled through that stuff. Now as for the Magic Mountain or, even Infinite Jest, they were challenges.

And, yes, Chekov is short, concise and wonderful.

aw Mann!!!!

>12 DanMat:, had my Hugo phase in university and haven't been back, but I'll consider it.

>13 Sandydog1:, I keep thinking about trying Infinite Jest ... and then not thinking about it again for a while. The Magic Mountain would probably be attempted first.

I should revisit The Brothers Karamazov someday, read that one in high school and didn't grasp it. Must also give Catch-22 another go, couldn't do it in my twenties. I'll never try Dhalgren again.

More recently I needed much hand-holding with James Joyce, but he's totally worth it. Haven't found Henry James nearly so bad as reputation suggests, but on the other hand I've only read his reputedly easy stuff so far. The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl are still ahead of me.

This is the translation of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT I'm picking up:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0143107631/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_19?ie=UTF8&p...