Because it’s not one of these, I can think of a couple off the top of my head that are more difficult, for instance Récoltes et Semailles by Grothendieck, or the Voynich Manuscript, or the Meccan Revelations by Ibn Arabi. Also this is hard as frick: http://noesis.crifst.ro/wp-content/uploads/revista/2002/2002_2_01.pdf
Opera and Drama by Richard Wagner.
>Richard Wagner
He's basic.
You haven't read him.
It's Finnegans Wake, by a country mile. All those other things you mentioned are just mathematical or metaphysical treatises, and not really that hard to understand.
Bullshit. Finnegans Wake is fine.
Okay, and the Wake is a book of puns. Children love those.
From Middle English ponnen, ponen, punen, from Old English punian, pūnian (“to pound, beat, bray, bruise, crush, grind”), from Proto-Germanic *punōną (“to break to pieces, pulverize”). See pound. As a kind of word play, from the notion of "beating" the words into place.
No PIE root homie?
pudenda
>and not really that hard to understand.
Epic
Relatively, yes. Many more people will be able to understand those than FW.
Just some tedious 5000 page self publish on amazon
The Voynich Manuscript
There’s a chinese translation of finnegans wake if you want something really difficult
Have you seen it? Seems like a near impossibility to me
My new philosophical novel "Ada jest of infinite search of lost rainbow of gravity andthe spirit of the critique of pure Oedipus of the man without magic qualities"
pic related is the actual most difficult book. finnegans wake is full of fun and jokes, this piece of shit is 1000 pages of sheer plodding misery
Excuse me sweaty but FW has caused me untold misery
This. Actually unreadable and you could only ever pretend to like it.
Keep shilling Grothendieck without explaining any of what you've read or know.
Call of the Crocodile
finnegans wake is more difficult than the ones u mention
As someone who has actually read Finnegans Wake, it's definitely that one. Most of the novel is impossible to understand without either delving into a lot of secondary material or having read every book/learned all of the languages Joyce did (including Sumerian), and even then you'd come up short. Most other novels you might list are only difficult because of dense and very abstract ideas, but the wake is difficult because of many layers of references/allusions and combinations of multiple languages for just one word.
If you're counting papers then the top spot would probably be taken by something like the proof of Fermat's last theorem by Andrew Wiles, where only a few people in the world have the required knowledge and intelligence to understand it.
Also interesting is Mochizuki's claimed proof for the abc conjecture. 500 pages of dense, formal, and highly concise math. There were conferences back in 2018 or whenever it was first put out, to try to understand it, but little progress was made. Eventually, Fields medalist Peter Scholze made a serious effort to understand it, and identified what he considers an error, but Mochizuki emphatically denies it. As far as the mathematical community is considered, the conjecture has not been proved.
https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%20Teichmuller%20Theory%20I.pdf
https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%20Teichmuller%20Theory%20II.pdf
https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%20Teichmuller%20Theory%20III.pdf
https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal%20Teichmuller%20Theory%20IV.pdf
This sort of thing makes me question mathematicism at it’s most realized extent.
>Fermat's last theorem by Andrew Wiles
It's crazy how far the middle class in england has strayed from any discernable signs of high university cultures, it's a real underground now. I have much respect for math autist kings, I knew a kid from school who was like that, bullied all the time, it's a shame but it seems strangely beautiful, like a new personal language, in that sense I'm sure there's many allusions to the Wake.
The Voynich manuscript (assuming it has real semantic content). After centuries of attempts it has never been deciphered, literally no one in the past 500 years has been able to read it. The undisputed final boss of literature.
Aren't some Turks like 30% done tling it? It's just a botany book.
They claimed that 3 years ago, the same year some professor claimed it was in Latin. It's in the same place as Linear A where people periodically start with a conclusion, produce a gibberish "translation", and declare the thing solved, except the manuscript is so long they don't even get to the second step.
I don't think something written in a language nobody knows, to be intentionally near indecipherable, counts as a difficult book
methinks jung's magnum opus - aion
why not black books
Black books are definitely harder, but mostly as it's just too deeply personal
Infinite Jest
Bonaventure
Tantraloka.
Actually this text is astonishingly clear-cut
Buddhist sutras are harder to understand but again, it is high-minded and cosmic and ultimately understandable.
It really takes a couple of years of obsession before you start to actually grasp the outlines how incredibly, mindblowingly, neutron-star dense Finnegans Wake is.
>It really takes a couple of years of obsession
sure if youre a moron
Have you read Finnegans Wake? Pick out one single word and attempt to explain it in its context. I'm quite sure you can't.
i read fw, several annotations for it, and keep up w new findings for it from time to time. i have about 200 pages of notes for it. idk everything about it but i know it pretty decently for a nonspecialist. u dont have to try to test me
but i was a physics major and fw is downstream from that level of cerebration. believe when i say fw isnt really intimidating and hardly requires years to understand, except for the readers who lived before comprehensive secondary for it was made
FW is legible and clear and, on the surface, a chatty novel. You were able to subvocalise the words as you read them. Yet I am quite sure that you cannot explain the meaning of a single one of those words to me or even adequately refer to any thing that James Joyce was writing about, no matter your notes and annotations. You might as well have kept up with new findings for the Voynich manuscript.
ok moron
For you, it's the Enneads
Avatamsaka Sutra
isn't the actual most difficult book, any book of faith for a sceptic?
I mean, hand the book of Islam or something to a redneck and they would probably not understand it out of spite. Since the book's success more or less depends on converting you.
In a similar way, a difficult book might also be something like The Old Man and the Sea, where the message of the book seems metaphorically bottomless.
Critique of Dialectical Reason by Sartre. Seriously, It's fricking 1300 pages of pseudo-existential marxism, filled with completely superfluous and odd neologisms, conceptions, arguments and trains of thought. And this is coming from someone who had read Being and Nothingness, and actually quite enjoys Sartre (despite him being hated on here).
good thread concept, I like the potential of the Voynich manuscript, but Finnegans still uses english words so it's a book and not just a 'what if this was a book'
Can I get secondary recs for FW?
I'm an ESL and I suspect a bit moronic too.
www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/