Difficult Books
January 28, 2010
Difficult Books: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov 8
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Ada is “about” incest only in the way that Lolita is “about” pedophilia, or Moby-Dick is “about” fishing. Which is to say, it isn’t.
December 29, 2009
Difficult Books: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 3
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
Woolf’s writing can feel disconcerting, confusing, and frustrating; It can also seem numinous, exquisite, utterly absorbing.
November 12, 2009
Difficult Books: The Cantos, The Dream Songs, The Sonnets 6
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Sometimes a Difficult Book is more swimming pool than jigsaw puzzle. Rather than trying to solve it, we do better just to jump in.
November 2, 2009
Difficult Books: Richardson, Sterne, Melville 12
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
Clarissa’s difficulty lies almost exclusively in its length. Tristram Shandy is a post-modern classic before there was any modernism to be post- about. In Moby Dick, a mix of novelistic narration and plot, reverie and essay, quasi-scientific treatise, monologues and dialogues, technical descriptions, a miscellany of quotations.
October 29, 2009
Difficult Books: Burton, Milton, Swift 3
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
The Anatomy of Melancholy is “a rhapsody of rags.” Paradise Lost can be Yoda-ish, only more complex. With A Tale of a Tub, the reader is sucked down by the ferocious energy of the satire.
October 29, 2009
Introducing Difficult Books, A Descriptive List 31
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
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.
