Buzz
If you've ever noticed a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses on a friend's shelf, it's likely that they haven't read it all the way through, or at least haven't completed it. No judgment here—many people have tried and failed to conquer the famously 'unreadable' novel, and that's perfectly fine.
Some books are simply difficult. Whether told through unreliable narrators, filled with a multitude of characters and subplots, delving into concepts that don't translate well into text, or even inventing their own vocabulary, these books are challenging in various ways. Some over-explain, others expect you to possess vast knowledge before even opening the first page. Some are just unnecessarily long. Here are ten books that, for various reasons, are incredibly tough to get through.
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
“[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”—Macbeth (Act V.5, 26-28)
Let’s begin with the obvious. William Faulkner’s most renowned novel is already unconventional, featuring four different narrators guiding us through a plotless story. What makes this book even more difficult to follow is that it opens from the point of view of Benjy, a character with significant mental challenges, who has only a vague grasp of what’s happening. He jumps between his memories without giving us any indication of when the shift occurs. If the characters themselves don’t understand what’s going on, how can the readers expect to?
9. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story of isolation and obsession is almost mind-bending in its vastness. Spanning multiple generations of the same family as they build the village of Macondo, the challenge of this book is that nearly all the male characters share the same name. While The Sound and the Fury may be confusing, at least its characters have distinct names.
If that’s not disorienting enough, the characters seem bound to repeat a nearly identical cycle, trapped in a loop of prosperity and ruin, condemned to make the same mistakes over and over until their town is eventually destroyed by a cyclone.
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
No action. No plot. Almost no dialogue. A family travels to the Isle of Skye, intending to visit the lighthouse, but bad weather prevents them, and they decide not to go. That’s the extent of it. The rest of the story is filled with introspection and philosophical musings. We float in and out of characters’ minds, sometimes mid-sentence, and like The Sound and the Fury, it’s often unclear when the perspective shifts.
7. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco’s novel centers on three publishers researching secret societies, only to end up inventing one of their own, becoming so absorbed in their ‘Plan’ that they almost forget it was all their own creation.
The challenge of this book lies in the sheer volume of history, philosophy, mythology, and science it contains, forcing readers to constantly refer to other sources to keep up with the plot. It has been interpreted as a satire of everything from postmodernism to historical revisionism. Ultimately, it's a book about books, which is fitting considering how many you'll need on hand to fully understand it.
6. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Some books don’t seem overwhelming because of their intricate structure or format. Rather, they are simply long. A perfect example is *Les Miserables*, affectionately known as 'The Brick'. This monumental novel tells the epic tale of Jean Valjean, an ex-convict in pre-revolutionary France who decides to tear up his parole slip and escape under a new identity.
If only it were that straightforward. Author Victor Hugo frequently digresses throughout the book, offering the entire backstory of a bishop who only appears once, and delving into a thorough exploration of the Parisian sewer systems. With over 600,000 words, brevity is not exactly Hugo's strong suit. Maybe it’s better to watch the movie instead.
5. *Miss Macintosh, My Darling* by Marguerite Young
Though not quite as confounding as *The Sound and the Fury* or *To the Lighthouse*, Marguerite Young’s *Miss Macintosh, My Darling* is one of the longest books ever written. To put things into perspective, its word count exceeds that of *Les Miserables*, as well as *Atlas Shrugged* and *War and Peace*.
Marguerite Young’s novel, which centers on a woman searching for her childhood nanny, took her eighteen years to complete. She even confessed that had she known how long it would take, she might not have started it. In fact, one man gave copies of the book to all his friends, offering to pay for their kids’ college tuition if they managed to finish reading it.
4. The Mahabharata
If Miss Macintosh felt like a tough read, brace yourself for the Mahabharata. This monumental Sanskrit epic is more than twice the length of Miss Macintosh and nearly triple the size of Les Mis, stretching across a staggering 1.8 million words. It's part sacred scripture, part epic drama about an ancient Indian war, encompassing over 100,000 couplets that cover a wide range of subplots, offering an all-encompassing history of Hinduism in ancient India. The journey doesn’t even end with death—characters are followed through their reincarnations. If this feels overwhelming, you're in good company. This poem is the very definition of epic. A five-hour movie version of the tale is available here, condensed from the original nine-hour stage production. However, if you're sensitive to “cultural appropriation,” you might want to skip the video.
3. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Known for other perplexing masterpieces like Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Irish modernist James Joyce truly surpassed himself with Finnegans Wake. It's an immense work with an intricate, cyclical structure, experimental prose in a constructed language, and a plot that can barely be called coherent—if it can be called a plot at all. Finnegans Wake is the epitome of an unreadable novel.
If 100 Years of Solitude wasn’t disorienting enough with its cyclical nature, Finnegans Wake takes that to the next level by starting midway through a sentence and ending with its beginning. The result is a never-ending loop that makes the book feel infinitely longer (and stranger) than Les Miserables, Miss Macintosh, and Mahabharata combined.
2. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
If you're intrigued by tales of brutal violence, why not experience them in an entirely invented language? A Clockwork Orange may not be a lengthy novel—under 200 pages—but it’s written in Nadsat, a slang created by author Anthony Burgess to prevent the futuristic setting from feeling outdated. What's more, Burgess initially refrained from including a glossary in the first editions, so readers were left to decipher this entirely fabricated language themselves.
Even after you’ve decoded some of Nadsat's vocabulary, A Clockwork Orange remains a challenge. The invented language doesn’t mitigate the raw depictions of violence, torture, and sexual assault. While the film version has a darker conclusion, the novel’s disturbing nature permeates from beginning to end.
1. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
It's not just the vast scope or the quirky stream-of-consciousness style that makes Slaughterhouse-Five tough to digest. What truly makes this book difficult is the daunting scale of its subject matter. In Slaughterhouse-Five (The Children’s Crusade), Kurt Vonnegut strives to portray the unthinkable, recounting the carpet-bombing of Dresden and other wartime atrocities through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a man whose trauma causes him to experience every moment of his life in a disjointed, non-linear fashion.
The book's chilling nihilism makes it even more unsettling. Murder, genocide, and war are depicted with such emotional detachment and coldness that it turns into an utterly harrowing experience. To add to the bizarre nature of the story, the protagonist is abducted and placed in a human zoo by aliens with one hand and toilet plungers for arms, who also don’t believe in the concept of time. (Don’t ask).
