>hard to read = good
why is /lit/ like this?

Cause it's usually the case.

>>24522163 (OP)
Pseuds

>>24522163 (OP)
because filtering feels good

>>24522163 (OP)
>hard to read
>the great gatsby
>catcher in the rye
>hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy


Now, answering OP's question, usually the greatest works of art are complex. In this case, complexity in language makes these books hard to read.

>>24522163 (OP)
None of these are harder to read than an average philosophy text. What the fuck is wrong with you lol

Because good books are usually old

>>24522163 (OP)
Most hard books these retards recommend are extremely good, aside from Finnegans Wake which is just Joyce jerking himself off

>>24522274
They feel like a chore to read.

>hard to read
>no faulkner
>all easy to read books
OP is a faggot.

>>24522277
Read more. Moby Dick is a joy for me and I'm always disappointed when it's over.

>>24522163 (OP)
>Hard to read
>Moby Dick
Yes. I think modern sycophants are posturing for literary cred.
>Gatsby
>HH
>Mockingbird
>Huck Finn
You can't read if you think these are hard.
>Don Quixote
>War and Peace
>Rye
Can't speak to these.

>>24522163 (OP)
Moby Dick is the only hard one among them, are you really so app-brained that a long book is suddenly "hard"?

>>24522279
>>24522312
>>24522328
pic unrelated

>>24522329
Then name some books that you think lit does
>hard to read = good

>>24522163 (OP)
I'm ESL and I can attest none of those are hard you must be retarded

>>24522339
ulysses, the odyssey,The Iliad, Lolita

>>24522163 (OP)
I disagree. I'm reading a book on why we enjoy tragedy and for some reason I'm reading about darwinism and farts.

>>24522163 (OP)
i would not say these are too hard outside of moby dick. that one is indeed tricky but i am ESL so i think i get a pass. i think you must be suffering from some kind of CTE type injury if you struggle with gatsby, finn and mockingbird, though.

>>24522163 (OP)
>Book is hard to read
>Hard book makes you ponder the words and their meanings
>Hard book forces you into a viewpoint, culture, and time outside of your own familiarity
>Therefore it's more fun and involving to the reader
>Fun = Good
Simple as.

>>24522348
I'm curious what about Moby Dick is harder for you, is it the deliberately archaic style, or the vocabulary? I was intimidated by as a teenager but years later I just fucking love it. The prose is so pretentious and full of flavor.

>>24522355
archaic style, varied diction and the dense usage of 19th century whaling and nautical language and terminology that makes it a little bit difficult for me. its a wonderful read now though as an adult and as my grasp of the english language is better now than my teenage years. i do agree that the prose, while being very pretentious, is quite enjoyable to read. it just flies and drifts around so liberally that you cant help but be smitten by it
t. scandi

>>24522163 (OP)
Are those books supposed to be examples of simple to read fiction that are also good? Because if you have trouble following the Great Gatsby you might actually be retarded.

>>24522163 (OP)
>implying any of these books are hard to read

>>24522343
The Iliad isn't hard to read it's just incredibly dull

>>24522163 (OP)
most hard books aren't actually hard to read. I think difficult often gets conflated with complexity when they're different things. Finnegans Wake is difficult because it needs to be decoded and it's difficult to follow. Something like Infinite Jest isn't that difficult to follow but has a lot of complex theoretical stuff going on that makes it worth engaging but the prose style is pretty accessible you just have to be able to follow the thread of a sentence a little more.

>>24522343
>the odyssey,The Iliad, Lolita
lmao

>>24522415
No it’s not

>>24522598
It's insanely repetitive and borders on Table-of-Nations-esque at times

>>24522163 (OP)
The only hard to read books in this image are Moby-Dick and War & Peace.

>>24522163 (OP)
>hard to read
It's jus words on paper
Readin aint hard but understandin may be, but then you jus need to use yo brain a lil bit.

>>24522355
Unique words/total words count can be a quick and dirty way of estimating book difficulty. It doesn't account for everything, something deliberately obtuse can be difficult (see The Sound And The Fury, Benjy chapter) but it does give you SOME insight.

>>24522697

>>24522343
Homer??? Probably true if you're an anglo, fifty translations and only readable one is Pope. Truly a pitiful existance.
Learn Polish or Ukrainian, our translations of the Greeks are really good.

>>24523018
>ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.
I don't buy it.

>>24523296
I'll admit I haven't read Jeżewska's Iliad yet, but what good translations of the Odyssey are there? I'm on book 16 of Chodkowski's Odyssey and I enjoyed it less than Fitzgerald's.
>inb4 Parandowski
I refuse to read prose translations.

>>24523362
I read read parts of Dmochowski's 1800 Iliad, seems fine. Surprisingly easy to read for a ukrainian that hasn't ever spoken a word in polish
polona.pl /item-view/1dc46930-dec0-4b7d-a5a2-723744a654e0
But there are a dozen of polish translations to choose from, surely they can't all be worse than the 200 year old one.

>>24523459
Dmochowski just seems to me like a worse Pope. I hate it when translations add rhymes for no reason; Pope could pull this off through sheer skill, but really it's Pope's Iliad, not Homer's Iliad.
In general, I seem to prefer English translations of Homer. Dante is where the Anglos just can't keep up.

>>24522343
The only one here that is hard to read is Ulysses. Put the phone down and take a language arts class again

>>24522163 (OP)
Zoomers usually have a inane attraction to pain

>>24522341
I think there is a phenomenon where as an ESL, you don't appreciate the relative difficulty in the same way as a native speaker, in part perhaps because you don't perceive the relative easiness of easier books in the same way as a native speaker.

>>24523296
If I'm going through the trouble of learning Polish or Ukranian just for the sake of being able to read (allegedly) superior translations of Homer, I'm just going to learn Homeric Greek. But I wonder why you specify Ukranian in particular? Just because that's what you're familiar with, or because Ukranian in particular has some real knockout translations compared with the Russian offerings? Could a Russian speaker who hasn't spent any special effort learning Ukranian pick up a Ukranian version pretty easily?

>>24523683
Russian is also fine, I just didn't mention it. They have a few versions of Iliad: the old 1829 one, a newer rework that makes it less archaic, and some other one.
Russians seem to have great trouble understanding Ukrainian lexicon. Can't imagine it being a pleasant read. They should probably choose the reworked version.
But ukr and rus translations are very similar, there's much less difference in sentence structure and in choice of words than 2 random English versions would have.

>>24523296
>>24523683
A Ukrainian here. Never heard about our exceptional translation, but I had tried to listen to some Russian translation (I think Homer's works should be listened to as it was intended in the 9th century BCE) and its purple pseudo-archaic prose really annoyed me, so I DNFed. Now I'm going to listen to Wilson's translation of "The Illiad" and Fagles's translation of "The Odyssey" (NARRATED BY GANDALF HIMSELF, I'M VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT).

>>24522598
Bitcyhys son of Likigsis battled horphys son of dinglis while Vagilisys son of Anusphe watched

>>24522163 (OP)
I actually thought about your question and tried coming up with books that aren't stylistically too difficult for the average pleb to read and which I still enjoy. Borges and 1001 Nights are Okay I guess. They're all I could think of.

>>24523018
Suttree has 20,000 distinct words and a word count of 176,000. That would put it between Ulysses and Moby dick i guess

>>24522163 (OP)
He rapes his sister, Phoebe.

You literally can't read English, if you can't read HHGTTG. That's like the first "real book" you should be reading when you're ten years old.
Catcher in the Rye at 15.