Hard books to read run the gamut. Some are just too long, like War and Peace. Others are just perplexing and no one will ever know what’s really going on in them, even that kid in your Honors College literature class who thinks he is so cool. Still others of the most difficult books ever written aren’t even really that complicated, they just happen to be as boring as listening to anyone, anywhere, at anytime, talking about traffic.
Here are some books we generally put down after one chapter.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The paperback is 544 pages! That’s a lot of blubber about a whale.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
1,296 pages? That’s a large commitment!
Ulysses by James Joyce
736 pages. I don’t think so.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
864 pages of Russian angst. Mark me down as a ‘no’.
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
1,264 pages in the book that inspired the musical we jokingly call “Everybody Dies, The Musical” – nope.
