Challenging Reads

I am reading Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and I am thoroughly enjoying it. But I read a 700 page novel in 2 1/2 days a week before and I am finding that I can only read 10-20 pages at a time in Don't Panic. I suspect I am running up against two things. 1) The novel is one I'd read before, more than once. 2) Don't Panic is non-fiction.

What if anything have you found makes for a challenging read? How does the challenge present itself to you? (For me I find I can't read for as long or at full speed as compared to other books.)

(Edited to add touchstone.)

I'm currently finding A Dweller on Two Planets to be slow going. The late 19th-century prose is further bogged down by Atlantean terminology, and the plot is fairly plodding. But it's not "challenging" in the way that Terra Ignota supplies a myriad of characters, factions, and motives, or the way Wolfe's Solar Cycle gives understated cues about technology and aliens.

It’s an interesting question. I am reading The Order War right now and it is an enjoyable read but not a compelling read. More like spending time with good friends. In contrast, this summer I read the last three books of The Expanse and flew through all three in a couple of weeks. Those were very compelling reads where I didn’t realize that I had read for a couple of hours without taking a break. Last month I read Epiphany of the Long Sun and the last 1/4 to 1/3 was compelling that read quickly but there was a middle portion where a contingent of the characters are wandering through subterranean catacombs that just seemed to go on and on. That was slow reading.

So what made the difference for me with The Expanse? I really cared about what happened to the characters as written and the action built up well and was riveting when the denouement arrived.

I am not being very articulate! Like I said… good question.

I also think it's an interesting question. But I think the first step in answering it would be to determine what is meant by challenging.

To me, challenging can break down along a couple of different lines.
1. A book can have challenging writing. This would be most similar to readability scores or the level of language and words being used in the book. To me this can take me out of the story very quickly if I'm having to slow down a lot just to understand what is being said.
2. A book can have a challenging plot. Essentially, this would be the complexity of the story. This might also include some of the writing issues that sometimes come along like having too many characters, unresolved plotlines, or deus ex machina situations.
3. We could also define challenging by looking at it's antonym. In this case, my assumption is that the opposite of challenging would be a fun read. Other than what's been mentioned before, a fun read to me would be something that I am interested in the topics or provides a sense of wonder (stealing from Brandon Sanderson). This is somewhat a catch-all category because I think there is more involved than just the first two things above.

Looking at some of my recent reads that I thought were challenging, Gene Wolfe's Solar cycle (as mentioned by >2 paradoxosalpha:) was horribly challenging on both #1 and #2. For me, I also found that after 1.5 books I just wasn't interested in finishing the story. I know it is complex and many people may find that a good thing, but at the time I just wasn't willing to figure it out. As an alternative, the Kingkiller Chronicles also has a very complex plot similar to the solar cycle, but the writing is so much easier that I don't mind the plot complexity.

Babel was also a challenging read for me mainly because of how it was written. Being written like a scholarly work with citations and asides throughout the text just meant that I wasn't getting pulled into the story at all. There wasn't anything particularly bad about it, but I found myself struggling to get through it. The plot was mostly normal though.

>3 Neil_Luvs_Books: I love the Saga of Recluce series, but I've had some friends tell me they can't get through the stories because they are too slow. I think this falls mainly under #3 above where I like a well thought out story even if it is slower but I know many people just want action packed stories.

Those are my ramblings on the topic.....

I love China Miéville's work and have read all of his fiction and some of his non-fiction, but I found Embassytown quite challenging. I had to concentrate on the language and linguistic structuring, and pay close attention to how the protagonist worked out what to say. It was a bit of a struggle, but worthwhile.

>5 Luke.w: In this case, my assumption is that the opposite of challenging would be a fun read.

And I'm much the opposite. While I can enjoy books that offer little challenge to me as a reader--say, an ordinary murder mystery or a conventional sword and sorcery adventure--I don't find them so memorable or satisfying. I savor a challenge, and I think they come in many forms, some of which have been identified already:

1) Erudite and exotic language
2) Complexity of plot and proliferation of character (e.g. Gravity's Rainbow)
3) Strangeness of setting (e.g. A Voyage to Arcturus)
4) Moral and/or emotional remove (e.g. Naked Lunch)
5) Sheer quantity of text (e.g. A Dance to the Music of Time)

I think Wolfe's Solar Cycle and Palmer's Terra Ignota tick all of these boxes, and I loved them both.

7>

Mentioning Wolfe (and adding Priest) another factor can be the reliability of the narrator or narrators. An extremely unreliable narrator tends to make the reader work a bit harder.

>8 andyl: extremely unreliable narrator

Oh yes, definitely. I think it's interesting that this conversation is in "Science Fiction Fans," because I find that sf is prone to supply either extreme of challenging and easy/accessible. Easy sf generally has a third-person omniscient reliable narrator. The minute you add first-person narration to sf, you start to encounter difficulties because of the speculative elements that are either opaque to or taken for granted by the narrator. Add some moral culpability (i.e. motive for dishonesty) to your narrator, and then you're off the charts for what ordinary readers can manage.

>3 Neil_Luvs_Books: >5 Luke.w: I have never found any of the Saga of Recluce novels a challenge, although other books by L. e. Modesitt, Jr. have been challenging for me like The Corean Chronicles and I had to DNF The Octagonal Raven, although I intend to give it another shot later this year.

>7 paradoxosalpha: I think everyone's view on what is challenging depends on what they are looking for from reading. In my case, I read a lot of research and legalese in my job, so I read as an escape from that. Reading a book where I have to take notes just to keep up sounds too much like work to me. I would rather relax while I read. Now, this doesn't mean I always choose the most simplistic book, but taken as a whole I would rather have an interesting fun read instead of something that will just give me a headache.

>11 Luke.w: Legalese? Hah! I laugh at legalese, and rewrite it in English.

>7 paradoxosalpha: I need to read the Terra Ignota series. Too many people have said it is worth reading and placed it in the same category as The Solar Cycle which I have been enjoying despite finding it a challenge. An enjoyable challenge!

To me what makes a challenging read is if it is the opposite of a great book - if it is not immersive and not memorable. The other factor is if I dislike the subject matter or characters. No matter the subject, that makes it a chore to get through. For example, I am very, very slowly reading East of Eden by Steinbeck. I extremely dislike the characters and the concept, but I have to admit it is memorable and well written. I just don't want to know what happens.

>13 Neil_Luvs_Books: I think that's a really good point. Just because a book is a challenge, does not necessarily mean I don't like it!

Dream of the Red Chamber by Xueqin Cao and Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin are probably the most challenging stories I have ever read. Particularly Melmoth. Melmoth is a wonderful and dense story that can be hard on the eyes but reaches in and shreds the senses.

Riddley Walker is challenging for the post-apocalyptic creole it's written in, but translated into English it's a reasonably straightforward tale. Dahlgren was, plotwise, a bit of a mindscrew across the board, at least for my money.

>17 spaceowl: Dhalgren
Good pick! High on my list of books deserving a second read.

I read the whole of Delany's Return to Neveryon recently, and it was challenging in ways that sword and sorcery (its intended genre) hardly ever is.

>17 spaceowl: and >18 paradoxosalpha: Yes! Dhalgren was another enjoyable challenge. I’ve read it once a few decades ago while an undergrad. It is due for a reread.

for me, if I describe a book as 'challenging' it only means that it is the opposite of an easy read. That can mean several different things:
- I need to go slow and put extra thought into it. Example: most nonfiction.
- it is densely descriptive, or has intricate world building. Examples: Obsidian and Blood by Aliette de Bodard, Semiosis by Sue Burke, the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson.
- it is deep and I have to put it down periodically and ponder the points made. Ex: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Imajica by Clive Barker, The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd.
- it is painful or sad and I have to take it in smallish doses. Ex: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg, We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.
- it is an older book that didn't age well but I want to understand the sensibilities of the time in which it was written. Ex: Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

some challenging reads were more rewarding than others, but usually if I describe it as challenging that means it was worth the time and I did finish it.

I just re-read the 1st set of "Thomas Covenant Chronicles." I dearly love the books. The worldbuilding is extraordinary, the storyline is unusual, and the writing is outstanding.

HOWEVER:

The protagonist is a despicable individual. He does some horrible/shocking/hideous stuff in the first 50 pages. I get it, that's the point Donaldson was trying to make with the character, but it's still a challenge to get past it.

In addition to that, the protagonist is also a whining coward. Again, that's intentional and central to the theme of the books but listening to him whine and moan for a thousand pages is CHALLENGING!

At some point, you sort of wish somebody would just stab him.

Having said all that, the books are great. Give them a try if you haven't read them already.
Just be aware, it's a challenging read. You're going to follow a lead protagonist who's a despicable human being.

Cheers

>21 Authjgab: "I see you've got Lord Foul's Bane."
"No, no, just a hangover."

>21 Authjgab:, I've fond memories of the first six, though I've never been brave enough to revisit and stir the ashes. The last four .... oof. Let's forget he wrote those.

>23 Cecrow: Agreed, the last 4 were very difficult to get through. I made it because it became my vision quest!

Somehow I missed this thread last fall. As others suggested, a challenging read that I want to, end up, finishing is one that has major good qualities that make up for the challenge. If it's just awful-type challenging, it's a non-finisher.
One of the worse ones for me is the Gormenghast books (starting with Titus Groan. They're brilliant, original, and engrossing. I keep meaning to reread them again (I *think* I read them twice, years ago) but never do it. Somehow the sheer, rich heaviness of them puts me off the reread. I will, though, eventually.

>21 Authjgab: I agree, the Covenant books are great fantasy, extremely well written, if maybe just a little over written at times, but still great. Covenant is a really tough protagonist to put up with.

The Covenant decology is one of my favourite reads. Though I agree that the second trilogy is a bit more challenging to read than the first and the final four even more so. But I still greatly enjoyed them. I’m sure I will read all 10 one more time. Those last four books are dense. But I thought still worth it. I liked how it was all tied up in the final pages.

I liked the second trilogy better than the first, but he lost me at book 7. This was a long time ago, and I am a very different reader today. Even then, his use of benign Sanskrit metaphysical terms to name malefic entities gave me pause.

>25 rshart3: I find the same challenge in reading the Gormenghast books. They're brilliant, but very dense. They require a commitment.

I think Peake is a significant lacuna in my reading history.

>21 Authjgab: and others ...

This discussion of the Covenant books gives me pause. I read the first trilogy for certain as a teenager, possibly the second. I recall very little but do resonate with the comments about Thomas being a difficult character, and while I didn't appreciate it much at the time I believe it was my introduction to the concept of an anti-hero. I've not felt compelled to re-read, generally holding an impression they weren't very good novels and yet my reading experience was formative, and I was always left with the impression the novels were less juvenile than others I was reading at the time. (And I remind myself: somehow you decided to read 3 books if not 6, so how bad could the books have been?)

I wonder if re-reading would prove to be more satisfying than I've anticipated up to now.

>31 elenchus: You might have to do as I did with Doc Smith: re-read one on the basis of seeing just how bad it could be. I found interesting things with a 40-year plus re-read, but some of my fears were confirmed. And in any case, I could lay that particular demon to rest.

>32 RobertDay:

I think that's where I'm headed. Recently I made just that decision with Terry Brooks's Sword of Shannara, prompted primarily by my son reading it on his own. I read the Shannara series at much the same time as I did the Chronicles, and had a similarly lukewarm sentiment for those novels: that is, I know I enjoyed them at the time, but have doubts that I would today. The difference so far (I'm about a third of the way through Sword) is that the book itself isn't the primary motivator, it's having a shared literary experience with my son. The book itself has demonstrated so far that I'm safe in not reading further in the series, unless something radically changes in the final two-thirds. So yes, exorcising that particular demon.

The question is how soon I'll be motivated to pick up Covenant. Very likely it will come down to some external factor such as a copy falling into my lap, or my son deciding that's another series he'd like to explore.

>30 paradoxosalpha:

I adore Ghormenghast, and have re-read it once. But it's been decades and though I've since purchased hardbound volumes to easily avail myself of another go, I've not yet done so. For me the experience is overwhelmingly emotional and transporting: undoubtedly there are themes and insights to be had, but for me the impact was of living in a mindspace decidedly distinctive and encompassing, defined both by characters and setting, and by Peake's marvelously idiosyncratic language.

Unlike with my intention to revisit Dune or my recent re-reads of William Gibson's novels, my expectation isn't that I'll pick up better or refreshed understandings when revisiting Peake. It will be to take another literary excursion that I've not yet found in any other books, except glancingly in some Weird works.

But I do think you will enjoy Ghormenghast and who knows, you might get something altogether different than I did. Look forward to reading your review, eventually.

>34 elenchus: This discussion is helping push Gormenghast closer to the top of my TBR pile. I purchased the e-books a couple of years ago but have yet to dive in.

>32 RobertDay: Lay the demon to rest... What an apt adage! I still have the first six Thomas Covenant mass market paperbacks on my shelf from when I read them back in the 1980's. I suppose I should try opening Lord Foul's Bane one of these days to revisit the demon.

I picked up a hard copy of about 100 pages the publisher made Stephen R. Donaldson remove from, I believe book 2, Illearth War. In the preface, he tells us why he had to pull it. It is from the Bloodguards perspective, which the publisher points out, proves that "The Land" exists. So they made him yank it.
I thought that was interesting.
Don't ask me where I found it, because I can't remember.

>36 Authjgab:, it appears as one of his stories in Daughter of Regals. The explanation I understood for cutting was that it was a long story told from the bloodguard's perspective rather than Covenant's, unlike the rest of the series. But the guard is relating it to Thomas and some of the others, he doesn't become the novel's narrator. I suppose it could be said that supports the Land's existence, but ... if I tell you the story that the pink elephant standing behind me just told me, that doesn't make the elephant or his story any more true.

Yeah, the epistemological anxiety was what I liked best about those books.

>36 Authjgab: It is called Gilden-Fire. I picked up a stand alone hardcover copy years ago. I quite enjoyed it. You can find a PDF of it at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/gildenfire0000dona

It's not fiction but I will throw it out there anyway. The most challenging read for me EVER! in all the decades and decades of reading has got to be, "The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon. I'm a huge Asimov fan. I can't remember where I read it, but somewhere he said that he got the idea for the "Foundation" books from reading this. So I thought, why not. I'll give it a go. My friends thought I was insane. It was a mind-boggling experience, but I did it! The bottom of my tombstone will say something like "He was a nice person. He finished reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but it almost killed him."
All joking aside, it's an insanely detailed view into the Roman Empire. Give it a whirl when you've got nothing else to do for several weeks.

>40 Authjgab:

You read Gibbon in a few weeks?? Wow. My biggest single reading project was probably Casanova's memoirs. It took me over a year. I was reading a lot of other things concurrently, of course.

>41 paradoxosalpha: like maybe 47 weeks?!!! Seriously I can't remember how long exactly. I did it in small chunks so my head wouldn't explode.

>40 Authjgab: Absolutely another challenging one to re-read, but I will eventually. It's wonderful, certainly for the scope of it, but even more for that unique 18th century style: stately sentences rolling along, like waves hitting the shore. I have that 3-vol set with columns on the spines: the first volume the column is complete, the second it's starting to crumble, and the third is just a stump.

War and Peace probably doesn't fit into science fiction, but it took me 10 months to read because I got bogged down in the "war" description parts. The last pages describe astronomy and calculus, so I guess it is "science" and "fiction."

Okay, I'll go out on a limb and offer up Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The internet has labelled it several types of fiction (speculative, literary, or how about "New sincerity metamodernism literary fiction or post-postmodernism encyclopedic novel" as things that come up when googled), including science fiction. I'm not offering it up as a great sci fi novel - I still, 4 years later can't decide if I liked it or was just scarred by it. I read it with a virtual group during Covid, meeting every two weeks to discuss bits at a time (took us 6-7 months at that pace). The endnotes will kill you if the story doesn't.

>43 rshart3: It's possible that he set a world record for longest "run on" sentence. There were times, when reading it, I had to go back and look at what I just read because something seemed odd. And sure enough, it was a single sentence that was half a page long.

I've been reading Steinbeck's East of Eden off and on for two years now. It is well written, I just dislike the characters and concept so much, I just don't enjoy that part of the reading experience.

>46 Authjgab: Ha! Very true. And in my case, you're onto something: I also love Henry James & W. Faulkner. None of them exactly light reading.

I had a horrible time getting through Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. Maybe if I was more interested in that field of study ... No more Darwin for me!

>47 Karlstar: I'm among those who consider East of Eden to be Steinbeck's most accomplished novel, but I'm always interested in seeing how others react. There's no right or wrong answer, as it's a matter of taste. I'll add that I only read it after reading pretty much everything else he had written, which perhaps adds context.

Here's another challenging read for consideration. The Illuminatus Trilogy. I tried to read it twice and failed both times.

>51 Authjgab: Read that years ago. In fact, I probably haven't opened it in more than forty years. I think of it as a very Seventies trilogy; perhaps my head was in a different place then.

>51 Authjgab: I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was on sabbatical in Costa Rica in 2005. I hated it. Which surprised me because I very much enjoyed Robert Shea’s Shike duology Time of Dragons and The Last Zinja. But Illuminatus I found to be just smartalecky, if that is a word. I only finished it because it was the only novel in English available to me at the time. I remember throwing my copy across the room when I finished it, I was so annoyed with the ending.

>51 Authjgab:, >52 RobertDay:, >53 Neil_Luvs_Books:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy was the right book at the right time for me in high school during the 1980s. When I returned to it just a few years later, it had not aged well. On the other hand, I still feel comfortable recommending both Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati and Shea's All Things Are Lights to people who like the sort of reading I do now.