Introducing Difficult Books, A Descriptive List

Difficult Books Notable Articles
October 29, 2009 | 4 books mentioned 69 3 min read

Related Books:

Whether scholars, creative writers, or citizen book lovers, most readers agree on a canon of certain legendarily difficult books—books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction.  This post inaugurates a new Millions series devoted to identifying and describing these most difficult books: ones we’ve read/wrangled with ourselves, ones we’ve known students to struggle with time and again, ones that, more simply, “everyone knows” are hard to read—those works whose mere titles glisten with an aura of rarefied impenetrability.

covercovercovercoverThere will, doubtless, be those readers who look scornfully on our choices (“Psh. These aren’t that hard, you’re just not smart enough to read them“). Indeed, for myself, that is probably true. And to those so brilliant that not a one of these tomes challenged or vexed them more than a People magazine, we tip our hats.  This list is for the mere mortals among us—who have found themselves reading and rereading the same paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses to no avail, who have been reduced to tears by Faulkner’s one-line chapter, “My mother is a fish,” in As I Lay Dying, who may have spitefully broken the brittle spine of her first used copy of Tristram Shandy, who use a volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a doorstop and eye it with a wary distrust when she walks past it (for it is fond of stubbing toes).

But this is also a list for those who, after breaking the spine, picked up the wounded volume, taped it back together, and finished that infuriating chapter, and another, and another… until, triumph!, it was finished at last. And, perhaps, now that we think on it again, having finished, could it be that it was worth the struggle? Could it be that in the pain of it was a tinge of pleasure, of value (not to mention pride)?

The hope is that our series will eventually be exhaustive, and because this is a series and so on-going, we welcome your suggestions. Where we can, we also offer our advice to aspiring readers of a particular difficult work. Our descriptions aim to be modest primers for those about to embark on the reading of a difficult book, as well as small, memorial essays on these (by many measures) great books. Titles will come from many eras and genres—the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the high Modernism of the early twentieth century, and finally our own time, and we include fiction, poetry, philosophy, and critical theory. Titles will be primarily those written in English, but in some cases we include translations. Future posts will cover works by Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,  Djuna Barnes, William Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, Jacques Derrida, David Foster Wallace, Joseph McElroy, Donna Harraway, William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and others.

1621: The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
1667: Paradise Lost by John Milton
1704: A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
1747-8: Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
1759-67: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
1851: Moby Dick by Herman Melville
1922-62: The Cantos by Ezra Pound
1927: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
1964: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
1969: The Dream Songs by John Berryman
1969: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
1974: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

Notable Articles Screening Room

Ten Books to Read Now That HBO’s Girls Is Back

Notable Articles Screening Room
January 10, 2013 | 4 books mentioned 18 9 min read
These are books that -- like Girls -- explore what it is like to be young and hungry -- hungry for love and hungry for sex, but most of all, hungry for recognition and hungry for adulthood. Ultimately, the girls in these books, like the girls of Girls, are hungry to become the women they will one day be.
Notable Articles Screening Room
| 4 books mentioned 18 9 min read
● ●
● ●
Essays Notable Articles

Haruki Murakami and the Art of the Day

Essays Notable Articles
May 24, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 12 6 min read
1. One of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in the past couple years involves three encounters with the work of Haruki Murakami.  In isolation, I would not have considered any one of them to have been revelatory but all together they comprised a unique way of getting to know an author and left me with several ideas that have affected the way I think about my day-to-day life. I was introduced to Murakami when The New Yorker published an essay called “The Running Novelist” that was an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  The piece appeared in the late spring, at the time of the year when I am traditionally most enthusiastic about running, and it was fronted by an illustration of Murakami in his marathon gear that caught my eye. The essay described how when he was thirty Murakami remade himself from a jazz club owner into a novelist.  The process did not happen all at once.  He wrote his first novel in the predawn hours after he’d finished tallying receipts and washing down the bar.  His writing sessions sometimes lasted only half an hour, at which point he’d fall asleep.  Even under those conditions Murakami was able to mine the talent that would eventually make him famous.  He submitted his manuscript, later titled Hear the Wind Sing, to a contest for aspiring novelists.  Some months later he found out he’d won. Over the next two years Murakami wrote two more novels in this same way (Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase) but eventually he realized there were limits to what he could accomplish so long as writing remained a secondary activity in his life.  When he was thirty-two Murakami sold his jazz club and with his wife moved to Narashino, a rural town fifteen miles outside of Tokyo.  There he set about reordering his life.  He began waking up around the time he’d formerly gone to bed and went to sleep when the sun set.  He gave up alcohol and meat, cut down on rice, and “decided that from then on we’d try to see only the people we wanted to see, and, as much as possible, get by without seeing those we didn’t.”  He would write in the morning, do errands in the afternoon, and read at night.  He started running every day. What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed.  I was twenty-seven at the time and still very much befuddled by the large-scale project of adult life.  Murakami’s essay was not a panacea, but it did sketch a type of path that I thought I might be capable of following.  While I may not have known exactly what I wanted from the next fifty years, with a little reflection I could parse the minor decisions in my days—what to eat, who to see, how to spend the last hour before bed.  I hoped, maybe against odds, that the answers to larger questions would resolve themselves out of the gradual buildup of small but deliberate choices. 2. My next encounter with Murakami took place a year later—in August 2009—when I finally got around to reading his memoir.  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a short book (I read it in a single night) that is framed by Murakami’s preparation for the 2005 New York Marathon and gathers together his reflections on his more than thirty years as a writer and a runner. The prose in the memoir is spare even by Murakami standards.  Not all reviewers were taken with this approach—one said of the book, “It’s not bad, but it’s sort of ordinary and doesn’t amount to much”—but I thought the straightforward writing allowed What I Talk About to feel notably honest.  Running is a simple pursuit and Murakami presents himself as an unadorned man and it made sense to me that the style of the book would reflect those facts. There is one particular piece from What I Talk About that has stayed with me in the ten months since I finished reading the book.  It is Murakami talking about the initial stages of training for a marathon: To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed--and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage. In the same way that people pace a marathon by thinking about how fast they want to run each mile, I think Murakami paces his life by thinking about what actions, in what quantity, and in what order he wants to be part of his daily routine. It’s a seductive idea once you think about it—and I’d say I’ve thought about it almost every day since reading What I Talk About.  “[G]etting the flywheel to spin at a set speed” applies to running, of course, and to writing, but also to endeavors like being nice or raising a child that are less amenable to being broken down into unit measurements.  It’s definitely not an approach for everyone.  In the same way that a lot of people find distance running to be tedious, the routine and austerity of Murakami’s days might seem to lack an essential zest.  But for anyone who has a hard time seeing how today fits with the rest of his life, I think this way of looking at things makes a lot of sense. 3. After reading Murakami’s memoir, I was eager to try his fiction—I wanted to see what types of stories grew out of the mind of the deliberate, self-aware runner I’d been introduced to in What I Talk About.  In February I went to the branch of the Philadelphia Free Library near my apartment and scanned the shelves until I found Murakami’s name.  The only book the library had in at that time was Kafka on the Shore. It does not take much imagination to figure that Kafka and What I Talk About were written by the same person.  The protagonists in the two books are both best pictured alone, on a journey to a place they have not yet identified.  Music features prominently in both stories, and while What I Talk About is hardly sensual, I thought that the way Murakami described the bounce of a coed’s ponytail as she ran past him along the Charles River foreshadowed the sexuality in Kafka.  Both books are also distinguished for the way that they engage primary emotions that other writers might consider too cliché to confront head on. Just as with What I Talk About, there is a single passage from Kafka that has stayed with since I finished the book.  It is Kafka speaking to a woman named Miss Saeki who he is in love with, and it was here that the connection between Murakami the memoirist and Murakami the novelist was most clear to me.  Kafka says: "The strength I’m looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose.  I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside.  What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it.  The strength to quietly endure things—unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings." Here I think Kafka is giving voice to the reasons why Murakami runs and tries to be so purposeful about his days.  It is easy, in the face of the hard moments that feature in any life, to come unmoored from the ways of thinking, feeling and acting we’d otherwise want for ourselves.  But there are also ways to fight back, and I think this is what Murakami—and anyone else—stands to gain from careful attention to the shape of the day.  As he put it in his New Yorker essay, “[L]ife is basically unfair.  But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.”
Essays Notable Articles
| 4 books mentioned 12 6 min read
● ●

69 comments:

  1. William Gass’s The Tunnel is just brutal, but the people I know who have finished it claim that it’s one of the best things they’ve ever read. Go figure.

  2. I’m one of those people, Saul. I think that should be the front cover blurb: “Just brutal.”

  3. most frustrating and difficult book for me was Women and Men by Mcelroy, i was never able to crack the code and enter the world. Most challenging books to me are like a maze or like learning a new language, with sustained effort i can usually sort of solve it or start to understand it’s rythms and then it flows pretty well, but Women and Men just completely eluded me. Only Revolutions was a little like that for me too but i didn’t try as hard, the whole structure thing i found annoying, i don’t really want to have to put in manual labor while reading.

  4. I found My Name is Red, for all its richness, an incredibly difficult book. The most brutal book I’ve ever read, however, remains the slim Narrative of Sojourner Truth.

  6. After forcing myself to read Ulysses about a dozen years ago because of all the best-book-of-the-20th-century hype I decided slogging through a long book that you are not enjoying is stupid.
    So, after about 50 pages of Infinite Jest I decided it was the new Ulysses and unceremoniously put it down.

  7. The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. I have read the English translation, which “unfolds” the German into a confusing hypnotic and intoxicating reading. Very difficult and quite rewarding.

  8. I found _Women and Men_ though it took a year to finish it, a novel that has grown on me over time, and it changed the way I looked at how sentences can be written. McElroy’s humanity and compassion, attributes not easily spotted amongst Usian or other post-modernists, are evident in this book as he tries to show his characters living on multiple levels, just like we do in our daily lives. Forster’s “only connect” came repeatedly to mind as I read this book, and his most recent, _Actress in the House_, which is similar but easier to understand.

    Difficult? Yes. Readable and eventually comprehensible? Also yes. It requires patience and interest. McElroy’s not for everyone, perhaps, but few writers are.

  9. Nice to see Gass mentioned, though if anyone ever wanted a reason to read Burton, Woolf, Gaddis, Musil, Kant, Joyce, (and authors not on the above list), Alfau, O’Brien, Elkin, Mann… ah, the list goes on, Gass’s books of loving criticism are a good place to start.

    And the Tunnel is amazing. Wish there was someone of Gass’s abilities to speak for the Tunnel.

  10. I think Michael Brodsky is probably the most demanding novelist I’ve read, followed closely by Robbe-Grillet, Gaddis, early Beckett and Malcolm Lowry. I recommend cleansing your palate in between difficult books with Richard Yates, whose style is so limpid that it almost feels like you’re not reading.

  11. Tristram Shandy is laugh aloud funny. I picked it up a few years ago with no prior knowledge–just wanted a novel from the 18th C. It’s a real treat. At one point, Sterne gets 8 pp. out of a piping hot chestnut falling into a guy’s breeches. This is lofty stuff.

    As for difficult, I nominate JR by Wm. Gaddis. Seven hundred pages, virtually all dialog with no attributions. You have to pretend you’re sitting in a dark room with headphones on, listening to unidentified voices–but soon you recognize who’s talking. There are also, on the Web, guides that will break it all down into scenes by page. This book is a hoot. You just have to let it have its way with you.

  12. At Swim -Two -Birds was unscalable for me. I’ve climbed Ulysses, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Tristram Shandy and enjoyed them all, but O’Brien leaves me gasping.

  13. For sheer length, Richardson’s Clarissa should be a contender here. It’s supposedly the longest book ever written in English.

    And though it wasn’t difficult to read, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell should also qualify. It took me from November 2007 until June 2009 to get through the whole thing, but I took some long breaks from it.

  14. I must second the nomination for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. When I first started it, I thought I would never finish. It is now my favorite book and I have read it many times. For cunning, wit, pure wickedness, and above all, charm, few villains in English literature equal Robert Lovelace.

  15. Add to your list (or reading list): Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.Difficult, wonderfully bizarre.

  16. Though I love all of his stuff, it will do many readers a service to take a look at The Master’s last three: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and especially, The Golden Bowl. Pages would go by and I would not have known what he was saying.

  17. “Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino was just about worth the read with some wonderful jousts with language. The sum greater than the parts? Probably not.

  18. Clarissa isn’t that challenging – it’s essentially a bodice ripper dressed up as moral improvement. But it is loooong. That’s the trouble, right there.

  19. Hands down has to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Utterly, totally and completely batshit crazy and baffling from start to finish.

  20. Don’t forget Patrick White. Murky, baroque, and baffling, with flashes of brilliance that keep you reading in the hope that all will eventually become clear…which it never does.

  21. I found Fredric Jameson “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” to still be a little out of my reach a few years back. I am getting ready to try it out again… It should be a bit more accessible in light of the understanding I have gained since my last whack at it.

  22. All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something. They are fictions, sometimes_about_ the act of writing, in many cases, though not always.
    He has a newie, Barley Patch, available from Giramondo Press in Australia, that opens, “Must I write?” As my kids might say, intense.

  23. Carlyle’s a good suggestion. And how about Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren? Still working on that one…

  24. Pingback: Bites: Hemingway’s African Snows, Colson Whitehead on Your Next Novel, The Virtuousness of Swiss Prisons, and more « Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  25. If we’re chucking in works of philosophy (Kant, Hegel, et al.), surely Wittgenstein’s Tractatus goes flying in at the top? Head-in-the-microwave hard.

  26. During my late teens I devoured ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys, identifying powerfully with the author’s depiction of the protagonist’s inner world. Subsequently I choked on Cowper Powys’ magnum opus, ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ and the various other Cowper Powys doorsteps over which I attempted to clamber with increasing dispmay. I now have a modest collection of John Cowper Powys first editions, none of which I have read beyond their indigestible first few pages.

  28. Pingback: Friday Finds: November 6th | BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!
  29. Pingback: Bookmarks for 11/14/2009 — MK Anderson

  30. thank god someone else mentioned the difficulty of as i lay dying! i thought I was the only one. i’d also like to nominate the man without qualities, and for something more contemporary, 2666. I read the first four books and just couldnt bring myself to finish the fifth.

  31. Kirk, please give Infinite Jest five or six weeks of your attention – it’s a rich, rewarding book. Just keep three bookmarks inside it (one to mark your place in the text, one for the endnotes and one for words to look up). I finished it last weekend and haven’t been able to pick up anything else since. Nothing I’ve read describes entertainment or addiction so clearly and thoroughly.

  33. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one of the few books I’ve ever thrown across a room from frustration. I picked it up and continued, threw it across the room again, picked it up again … and now it’s my answer to anybody when they ask me my favorite American novel. As with so many “difficult” books, once you figure your way in, once you begin to get a foothold, then the magic starts.

  34. William Gaddis’ “JR” is indeed difficult and wonderful but even more complex, and again all dialogue with no character identification was his next one, “A Frolic of His Own,” which takes on the American’s craze for suing one another to the nth degree.
    But for sheer intensity of writing, I suggest “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young, two volumes (Dalkey Archive Press), 1300 pages of paragraphless prose poetry and essentially plot-less. It’s that aspect that allows you decades to finish it (it took me four).
    It also happens to be one of Anne Tyler’s favorite books, which she says she dips into during episodes of writer’s block. The book even had a few seconds of fame in the film version of her “The Accidental Tourist.”

  35. Looking at the list of Difficult Books covered so far, it looks like they are going in chronological order. That means Ill have to wait for my favorites: Vollmann, Gass, and DFW.

  36. Pingback: Prangende vraag « Van alle markten thuis

  37. @Otto At Swim-Two-Birds harder than Ulysses?!? You must be joking. Without the footnotes, I never would have stood a chance with Ulysses. I never even felt the need for footnotes with O’Brien (and At Swim-Two-Birds is far and away his toughest book).

  38. Pingback: Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch « Time's Flow Stemmed
  39. Pingback: Difficult Books | Progressive Geographies
  40. Pingback: Difficult Reads | DailyBookTalk

  41. ‘apologies for getting all epistemological, but “hard” is really (really) subjective in this context…..

  42. I read Ulysses at age 15, and I don’t regret it.
    Now I’m 16, and on to Gravity’s Rainbow.

  43. The Cat in the Hat really blew my preconceptions away.
    What is it with that tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie.

  44. I have a few white whales that I will dominate. Did I miss it in the comments? Did no one mention Proust? I’ve read Swann’s Way, but I feel uncomfortable making that statement. I just don’t feel like I paid enough attention. Oh also, Auerbach’s Mimesis. Maybe one day, I’ll figure that one out.

  45. Sorry I just realize my previous first sentence made no sense. (I call the books that truly challenge me white whales…usually in my best grizzly old sea captain voice.)

  47. Have read 2/12: Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost. I have to say that, for me, both are superseded in difficulty by Bronte’s ‘Villette’. It’s long, jumps in and out of French during speeches, and has a very devious narrator — the reader has a task to work ahead of her.

  48. If “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski is not on this list when its done, it cant be taken seriously…

  49. Ashamed to say I’ve read not a single one on that list…BUT (I saved a lot on my car insurance) I DID make it through The Royal Family by William Vollman. I’ll choose waterboarding next time.

  51. i am surprise that the bible is not number one , very difficult to read and everybody have a different interpretation

    it have all murder ,mystery, science fiction , mass murder ,jealousy ,erotic poems ,magic.

    plus not many have read it covert to covert , one problem though no jokes !

  52. I’ve read (and felt I understood) quite a few difficult philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Baudrillard and even Lacan, but nothing could get me through Being and Nothingness, by Sartre.

  53. Pingback: Ten Most Difficult Books « Gyrovague's Raves
  54. Pingback: ‘Moeilijke’ boeken – Hoeveel heb jij er gelezen? | Scriptgirl.nl
  55. Pingback: White Whales – The Books That Drive Us | www.booksandlibations.com

  56. Great project, sweet feeling of investment paying off when you have suffered through some entry on the list.

    If the flood gates are opened to french philosophy, well, there are many… but Lacan and his Écrits should definitly be considered. Derrida just need a friendly explanation, but Lacan never intended something as mundane as being understood. Even Zizek admits it: unreadable.

  57. Pingback: Flavorwire » Are These the 10 Most Difficult Books?
  58. Pingback: Sapete quali sono i 10 libri più difficili da leggere? | agora-vox.co.cc
  59. Pingback: Haftadan Kalanlar // 6-12 Ağustos 2012 | koltukname

  60. I second two books: Darconville’s Cat-moreover, you
    reach the point of increasing returns.

    And Oswald Spengler’s Decline-the 2 volume unabridged set with fold-out
    charts will make for instant discombobulation.

    Also Laura Warholic by Theroux.

  61. Pingback: AnnAlysis Sunday Times: Lee Child Reads, Some Great New Releases and a Quote From a Book I Can’t Put Down

  62. I loved “Moby Dick” when I read it in the 1980s, but that was because I had the now out-of-print Harold Beaver edition from Penguin with its 300 pages of notes telling you what you need to know.
    I have loved the first 3 pages of “Ulysses” each and every time I have read them.
    Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”, ugh.
    Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” is actually supposed to be funny, rather than impenetrable. Melville was inspired by Carlyle but lightened up the prose.
    Wright’s “Arabic Grammar” (Dover reprint) is easily the best Arabic grammar I know, but the author assumes the reader already reads Arabic, as well as German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic, so people who had trouble with Spanish …

  64. Pingback: Just can’t finish… – Lead.Learn.Live.

  66. I’d nominate Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Shea. The former due to its postmodern and semi-experimental semiotics; the latter due to its length. The people I’ve met who have abandoned these works far outweigh those who have completed them.

    Cloud Atlas, however, is a higher achievement. Amazing work.

  67. Pingback: Literary Links | Emily Eckart
  69. Pingback: Tackling Tough Books | Time's Flow Stemmed

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Essays Notable Articles

Is Big Back?

Essays Notable Articles
September 8, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 23 7 min read
Is Google making us stupid? Is reading in America a dying pursuit? Will novel srviv in age of twtr? String together enough of these think-piece propositions, and you begin to notice a pattern. Ostensibly open-ended, their very existence presumes an answer in the affirmative: yes, Google is making us stupid...at least, too stupid to entertain the possibility that this is other than a yes/no question. If the presumption is correct, we might reasonably expect to see it reflected in the evolving form of the literary novel. Just last month, in a cover story on Jonathan Franzen, Time's Lev Grossman postulated that "the trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization: the closeup, the miniature, the microcosm." And in practice, a young writer presenting her manuscript  to editors quickly surmises that the working definition for a novel is no longer Randall Jarrell's "a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it," but "a prose narrative of 235 to 325 pages that we can bring out as a paperback original." Joshua Cohen, the 29-year-old author of several books, recently told The New York Observer that, of the eight publishers who passed on his novel Witz (800 pp), "One of them told me they would publish it if it was 200 pages.... One said 10 years ago they would have done it, back when people read novels." But if, as Grossman suggests, the "literary megafauna of the 1990s" no longer roam the earth, how to explain Time's interest in Freedom (576 pp)? Moreover, how to explain the thicket of big novels that surround it on the shelves of America's bookstores - not only Witz, but also A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book (675 pages), and Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (599 pp), and Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death (725 pp), and Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn (592 pp), and Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting (1136 pp), and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (560 pp), and Javier Marías' Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (1255 pp) and Adam Levin's The Instructions (1030 pp)? Surveying those shelves, one begins to suspect that the spread of micro-designations like "literary megafauna" (or less charitably, "phallic meganovels"), rather than the plenitude or scarcity of the species in question, is the true marker of our changing culture. Not so long ago, the phrase "long novel" was no less redundant than "short novel." The serial publication practices of the 19th Century nudged the Victorian novelist toward amplitude. Multiply 16 (the number of pages in a signature) by two (the number of signatures in an installment) by 20 (the number of installments favored by Dickens and his publishers), and you get 640 serial pages - the length, give or take, of Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House. Not to mention Vanity Fair and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda... Soon, Trollope would be conceptualizing his novels explicitly as two- or three-volume affairs. My Oxford World Classics edition of Barchester Towers retains its two-volume pagination; it runs from 1 to 271, and then from 1 to 280. Toward the end of the second volume, the author begins to make asides about having to reach a certain page count. In the age of offset printing, the long novel is more heterodox. Not much unites Moody and Marías and Mantel, other than the fact that they are currently stacked half-read on my nightstand. (There's nothing like the birth of a child to foreground the sheer length of a book in one's mind.) To yoke these writers together is thus to risk several kinds of reductionism. Most importantly (and speaking of Trollope): one doesn't want to conflate geometric greatness with the aesthetic kind. Some of the best novels I've read recently are shorter than American presses tend to publish. (In the Spanish-speaking world, in particular, the short novel seems to have thrived in a way it hasn't Stateside. A parallel essay may be warranted). Still, the current profusion of long novels would seem to complicate the picture of the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span. Publishers' willingness to take a chance on a long book circa 2010 may be directly connected to chances taken in the past. The fierce bidding, in 2007, for Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (992 pp), a demanding work in translation, surely owes something to the rapt reception of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (600 pp) and subsequent widespread anticipation for 2666 (912 pp). McSweeney's may be hoping The Instructions repeats the success of Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital (615 pp). And David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1104 pp) continues to have a remarkable second life on the backlist, which is still the publisher's bread and butter. Biographical books and articles by David Lipsky and D.T. Max, as well as copious online discussion, sustain interest in the book. A clerk at a local bookstore told me last week that, for the last two months, it's been flying off the shelves. Indeed, après Jest, doubters may catch a whiff of decadence, or at least self-consciousness, around the efforts of Cohen, Levin, and other candidates for wunderkindency. To be even more crassly economic, in the slog of the Great Recession, the long novel offers readers a compelling value proposition. One may revile all the works of William T. Vollmann, and admire those of the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin, but even at 55 bucks, Imperial (1344 pp) offers a wildly higher hours-to-dollars ratio (it's roughly one-to-one) than The Beauty Salon (72 pp). (Well, Imperial isn't actually a novel, but it feels weird to discuss long books and exclude Vollmann's megaliths.) To put it another way: Ann Beattie's Walks With Men (102 pp) will cost you about as much as a trip to the local multiplex, and last about as long. And let's not forget that publishers can charge more for a long book than a short one. This helps explain why the Harry Potter novels kept getting longer and longer... On the other hand, barring a guarantee of Potter-like sales, publishers hate big books, as Cohen learned the hard way. They're expensive to print, to ship, and to warehouse. And, to compound the problem, reviewers hate long novels. How much easier to say of Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists (288 pp) than of, say, Joseph McElroy's Women and Men (1191 pp), "It's so good I had to read it twice." For a deeper explanation of the long novel's enduring health, we have to look toward something harder to quantify: the construction of the reader. The more we're told we're becoming readers of blogs, of texts, of tweets, of files the more committing to a big book feels like an act of resistance. To pick up a novel in excess of 600 pages is to tell oneself, "I am going to spend twenty-four to forty-eight hours of my life with a book, rather than the newspaper, the internet, or the smartphone. I am going to feel it in my muscles" (Some will object here that lugging Infinite Jest on the subway is more a way of saying, "Look at me!" But surely matters of style, and of gender, are at play here; no one levels the same charge at readers of Marguerite Young.) The desire to escape the hive-mind of cyberspace - to be, once more, a solitary reader - may also be at play in the rise of "the Kindle-proof book": the book so tailored to the codex form that it can't yet be reproduced electronically. Think of The Original of Laura, or of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, or of New Directions' editions of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, or Anne Carson's Nox (actually more of a scroll), or Robert Walser's Microscripts. At the very least, the current boom, or miniboom, in big books should tell us that novelists still believe in this kind of reader.  In the end, this may be enough to ensure her survival; just as the audience shapes the writer's habits, the writer, by the demands she chooses to make on her imaginary readers, calls her audience into being. One  of the underappreciated things about Franzen is that he writes as if the novel still (as Benjamin Kunkel puts it) "dominate[s] the landscape like a mountain range." And lo and behold, there he is on the cover of Time! One doesn't want to draw a veil over the various corporate machinations that made that possible. At the end of the day, though, a large number of readers are, like their 19th Century antecedents, currently reading and thinking about and talking about a work of fiction whose physical dimensions signal a corresponding largeness of intellect and spirit. Surely, we can agree that that's a good thing. For amid all the debatable, slippery stuff about our evolving consciousness, the relationship between the novel and a certain quality of attention appears to be inescapable. Whether in long or otherwise demanding books, or in long or otherwise demanding sentences, or in prodigious subtleties of perspective, writers of the 21st century continue to seek out an audience possessed of that attention. And, in defiance (so far) of predictions to the contrary, readers keep rising up to meet them.
Essays Notable Articles
| 4 books mentioned 23 7 min read
● ● ●
Notable Articles Reviews

Modern Life is Rubbish: Tao Lin’s Taipei

Notable Articles Reviews
June 5, 2013 | 4 books mentioned 97 10 min read
There is a small, deadly class of book that makes you never want to set pen to paper again. Tao Lin's novel is a grave case of this kind, where you are faced with the consequences of writing down all the things you do or think. What if they sound like this? Colorless, witless, humorless. Picking out individual passages cannot express their cumulative monotonous assault on the senses.
Notable Articles Reviews
| 4 books mentioned 97 10 min read
● ● ●
Lists Notable Articles

Most Anticipated: 2009 May Be a Great Year for Books

Lists Notable Articles
January 6, 2009 | 4 books mentioned 12 7 min read
The publishing industry (and every other industry) may be going down the tubes, but readers won't be wanting for good new books this year, I suspect. Readers will get their hands on new Pynchon, Atwood, Lethem, and Zadie Smith - those names alone would make for a banner year, but there's much more. Below you'll find, in chronological order, the titles we're most looking forward to this year. (Garth penned a few of these little previews, where noted. And special thanks to members of The Millions Facebook group who let us know what they are looking forward to. Not everyone's suggestions made our list but we appreciated hearing about all of them.)In February, T.C. Boyle returns again to his unique brand of historical fiction with The Women. The four women in question all loved famous architect (and eccentric) Frank Lloyd Wright. Given the time period and subject matter, this one may resemble Boyle's earlier novel The Road to Wellville. PW says "It's a lush, dense and hyperliterate book - in words, vintage Boyle."Yiyun Li wowed quite a few readers with a pair of standout stories in the New Yorker last year, and all her fans now have her debut novel The Vagrants to look forward to. PW gave this one a starred review and called it "magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim." Quite a combo. All signs point to Li being a writer to watch in 2009 and beyond.Out of My Skin by John Haskell: I like John Haskell's writing a lot, and I like books about L.A., and so I think I'll like John Haskell writing a novel about L.A. (Garth)Home Schooling by Carol Windley: This book of short stories set in the Pacific Northwest is certain to garner comparisons to that other Canadian, Alice Munro. (Garth)March brings Jonathan Littell's very long-awaited novel The Kindly Ones. American readers have waited for an English translation since 2006, when the book was originally published in French. The German reviews for this Prix Goncourt winner were decidedly mixed, but I'm still intrigued to read this novel about an S.S. Officer. Literature, pulp, or kitsch? We'll know soon enough. (Garth)Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, offers up The Long Fall, the first in a new series, the Leonid McGill mysteries. The new book is notable in the change of venue from Los Angeles, Mosley's heretofore preferred fictional setting, to New York City. PW says Mosley "stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series."In Castle by J. Robert Lennon, "A man buys a large plot of wooded land in upstate New York, only to find that someone has built a castle in the middle of it--and the castle is inhabited." Intriguing, no? (That description is from Lennon's website.) In related news, Lennon's collection of stories Pieces for the Left Hand will be published also in March. It'll be the book's first U.S. edition.Mary Gaitskill's 2005 novel Veronica was a National Book Award finalist. Now she's back with Don't Cry. The title story in this collection appeared in the New Yorker last year.I've already devoured Wells Tower's debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Tower's eclectic style is on full display here. Some of these stories are masterful iterations in the New Yorker style, while others experiment with voice and style. The collection closes with the title story, his most well known, an ingenious tale of vikings gone plundering. Normally a debut collection wouldn't merit much buzz, but readers have had their eye on Tower for years because of his impressive long-form journalism in Harper's and elsewhere. (Tower also appeared in our Year in Reading this year.)Zoe Heller had a huge hit with What Was She Thinking in 2003. Her follow-up effort, The Believers arrives in March. PW gives it a starred review and says it "puts to pointed use her acute observations of human nature in her third novel, a satire of 1960s idealism soured in the early 21st century." The book came out in the UK last year, so you can learn plenty more about this one if you are so inclined. Here's the Guardian's review for starters.April brings Colson Whitehead's novel Sag Harbor, which jumped a few notches on many readers' wish lists following the publication of an excerpt (registration required) in the New Yorker's Winter Fiction issue. Based on that excerpt (and the publisher's catalog copy), we are in store for a coming of age story about Benji, a relatively well-off African-American kid growing up in New York (and summering on Long Island) in the 1980s.Colm Toibin has a new novel coming in May called Brooklyn. This one looks to be a novel of immigration. From the catalog copy: "In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go."I've been following Clancy Martin's How to Sell as it's appeared in excerpts in NOON and McSweeney's. The writing is terrific, funny, and disturbing: ripe for a Coen Brothers adaptation. (Garth)Summer reading season gets going in June with Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which his publisher is calling "his most ambitious work to date." This one sounds like it will look in on the lives of several disparate characters in New York city in the mid-1970s. Audio of McCann reading from the book is available at CUNY Radio.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won tons of praise for Half of a Yellow Sun. Now she's back with a collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, likely including "The Headstrong Historian," which appeared in the New Yorker last year.Monica Ali is back with her third novel, In the Kitchen. This one is based in London and apparently involves a murder at a hotel.July: William T. Vollmann is known for his superhuman writing output, but his forthcoming book Imperial is a monster, even for him. Weighing in at 1,296 pages and carrying a list price of $55, this work of non-fiction is "an epic study," in the words of the publisher, of Imperial County, California. Ed offers quite a bit more discussion of the book. Don't miss the comments, where it's said that Vollmann has called the book "his Moby-Dick."August: When the deliberate and reclusive Thomas Pynchon puts out a new book it's a publishing event, and with Pynchon set to deliver a new book just three years after his last one, well, that's like Christmas in July, er, August. This one is called Inherent Vice and its cover is already causing much speculation (and some consternation) among the Pynchon fans. Expect rumors about the book to be rife through the first part of the year. Pynchon's publisher Penguin, meanwhile, has called it "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog."The Amateur American by Joel Saunders Elmore: I have to mention this novel by my old friend Joel, sections of which I read in manuscript. Surreal yet propulsive, it has one of the sharpest opening lines I've ever read... assuming he kept the opening line. (Garth)September: Scarcely a year goes by without Philip Roth sending a new novel our way. Little is known about his forthcoming novel except the title The Humbling. Amazon UK's listing for the book puts it at just 112 pages which seems like just an afternoon's work for the prolific Roth. As Garth notes, his last two outings have been underwhelming but with Roth there's always a chance of greatness.Kazuo Ishiguro's collection of stories also comes out in the U.S. in September (though it will be out in much of the rest of the English-speaking world in May). The catalog copy calls Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall "a sublime story cycle" that "explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time."Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood will have a new novel out in September called The Year of the Flood. There's not much info on this except that it is being described as "a journey to the end of the world."E.L. Doctorow has an as yet untitled novel on tap for September.As does Jonathan Lethem. According to Comic Book Resources, Lethem said his untitled novel is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it's strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles Finney and Hitchcock's Vertigo and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it's long and strange." I like the sound of that.A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore's first new novel in over a decade will arrive in September. The Bookseller sums up some of the excitement.October: You probably already know that Dave Eggers is working with Spike Jonze on a film version of Where the Wild Things Are, but did you know that Eggers is doing a novelization of the childrens classic too? It's apparently called The Wild Things and will show up in October.Arriving at some point in late 2009 is Zadie Smith's Fail Better. With her critical writing in The New York Review, Zadie Smith has quietly been making a bid to become the 21st Century Virginia Woolf. When she writes from her own experience as a novelist, she's sublime; when projecting her own anxieties onto others, she's less so. It will be interesting to see which Zadie Smith appears in this book of essays on books and writing. (Garth)We encourage you to share your own most anticipated books in the comments or on your own blogs. Happy Reading in 2009!
Lists Notable Articles
| 4 books mentioned 12 7 min read
● ●