In Like a Lion: The Toughest Books

As the saying goes, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Last week was very difficult for reasons I'm not quite sure about, so the topic of difficult books came to mind for this week. Have you read a hard book lately? Come along with me for an exploration of some hard books I've read, hard books I want to read, and how I plan to tackle these books. (And, in the spirit of Valentine's Day which is a few weeks past, bear in mind that a reading habit, regardless of the book difficulty, has been shown to make one more attractive!)

What Does "Tough" Mean?

Several possibilities come to mind when I think about what a "tough" book is and how to define it. By contrast, books that are "easy" look like this: simpler vocabulary and sentence structure (for the reader's grade level), clear and interesting illustrations, extensive use of headings and different font sizes or white space to indicate organizational structure, and familiar subject matter, even if the genre is fiction or fantasy. For me, an "easy" nonfiction book might be M is for Mama, for example.

Given the contrast, I can more easily define some characteristics of a "tough" book. Bear in mind that "tough" is not the same as "boring." An example of a book my husband found boring is Kant--he uses it to put himself to sleep sometimes, when his brain won't turn off. Kant is (in)famous for his convoluted writing style, regardless of what you think of his philosophical content. But getting back to plain old tough books, here are some clues:

• The content may be unfamiliar to you. My first forays into philosophical reading made this abundantly clear. There is a good reason that I am not a philosopher!
• The language may be complex. Again, many philosophy books fall into this category for me, though some authors are less clear to me than others (e.g., Anthony Thiselton, or devotional material that academic N.T. Wright has tried his hand at). One way around this that I have found is to read the text aloud, whether to myself or to Child, who interrupts with babbles after every few paragraphs to conveniently give my voice a rest.
• The visual layout may be distinctly un-aesthetic. I do not like small print (9-10 point or smaller) or narrow margins or very long continuous paragraphs, which is the primary reason I have, to Husband's amused chagrin, been skipping the page-long footnotes in Martin Hengel's The Cross of the Son of God. 
• The content may be emotionally or morally difficult. This may slow down or demotivate the reader from continuing, to get the book finished in a timely fashion. I'll speak more to this point in the next section to illustrate.

What Are the Toughest Books?

In my previous post, I talked a lot about the different genres available, in fiction and nonfiction. Here, I'll list the books generally considered "tough" only in terms of the two (or three) broad categories.

Fiction picks considered "difficult" (mostly because they are long, and the language is complex or archaic), include a lot of novels.

• Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville. I remember reading an abridged version of this as a child. The full-length tome is just under 500 pages, and slow-paced enough that most people spread out the reading to weeks or months.
• Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo. I read this a few years ago and, similar to my experience with Jane Austen, didn't wholly appreciate the literature quality the first time around. It's over 1,000 pages in translation, so set aside even more time to read this book.
• Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce. I haven't read this one; it is approximately 600 pages and written in parallel to Homer's Odyssey. Based on the summary, I might add it to my TBR at some point.
• Finnegans Wake (1928-1939) also by James Joyce. The argument of this 600+-page novel is that history repeats itself in cycles. That may be a topic for another post.
• Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace. I know nothing about this 1,000-page work that is apparently impossible to summarize, other than that it deals with postmodernity. I am unable to make a recommendation one way or another on this book.
• War and Peace (1865-1969) by Leo Tolstoy. Having read Anna Karenina but not this Russian novel (1,100+ pages), I would recommend it if you're interested in a philosophical, fictional take on 1800s Russian society.
• The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The undercurrent of this novel is a search for God in just under 1,000 pages. I haven't read it, so unable to recommend one way or the other at this time.

In the "poetry" category, one fun find I came across was The Chaos. Why is this considered hard? Its author tried to use every single spelling irregularity in the English language, resulting in around 800 examples. If you are in the stage of teaching a small child to read using phonics, this poem may not be a good idea at that exact time . . .

"Hard" nonfiction picks were trickier to find. Nonfiction is generally considered harder because it doesn't necessarily grip the imagination (according to the internet, at least). Still, I was able to come up with a list. Note that these vary tremendously in length and subject matter.

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) by Edward Gibbon. The six volumes of this historical work total almost 4,000 pages.
• Anything by Jacques Derrida (d. 2004). This French philosopher was a voluminous voice promoting deconstruction of binary ways of thought. From what I can tell (since I have not read his work), his writing style is the main obstacle for many readers.
• A Brief History of Time (1998) by Stephen Hawking (d. 2018). This admittedly secular work assumes the historicity of the Big Bang, which was developed by a Belgian priest-astronomer, Georges Lemaître, in (Christian) response to the previous (naturalistic/pagan) steady-state theory of the universe.
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. I recently re-read this and found it much easier, but then again, I read a lot of harder books between the first and second times! The main barrier in this book is its complex thought.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1999) by Douglas Hofstadter. Kurt Gödel (d. 1978), specifically his incompleteness theorems/hypotheses, is a favorite mathematician of Husband. However, the book itself assumes a naturalistic position, i.e., that consciousness can possibly develop from non-consciousness. I have major problems with that.
• Oxford English Dictionary. I don't think I need to tell you why this book is considered hard! 😂

What Are My Toughest Books?

For whatever reason, I haven't been that interested in novels for the last decade or so. A few books that have been boring (not hard) I have recently chosen not to finish. So, the hardest books I have read recently have been nonfiction.

The first recent hard book for me has been N. T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus (not Dominic Crossan's series of the same name), a short-ish work that aims between the scholarly and the devotional level. In Wright's devotional work, since he is first and foremost a scholar with an 80-plus book biography (focused on the New Testament wherein he is the world's foremost scholar), I just didn't like the writing style. However, in actual scholarly work, the book was difficult for me on an emotional level instead.

I was raised in a Lutheran-charismatic-pietist environment (my journey into Anglicanism is something I've alluded to in some recent posts). As such, assumptions I grew up with included (1) a face-value reading of Scripture (with a concordance or study notes if available) is authoritative enough for daily devotions and decisions; and (2) although Jesus has two natures, fully human and fully divine, the human nature is mainly important for His birth and death, but not much in between. Assumption #2 wasn't helped by the lack of teaching in the Lutheran Confessions on the human nature of Christ.

So, by the time I got to chapters 2 and 3 of The Challenge of Jesus, I was struggling. Wright focuses the book on the historical context that shaped how people viewed Jesus and how Jesus viewed Himself. Philippians 2:5-11 is a central passage that speaks to how the two natures interact(ed). My struggle stemmed from my lifelong thinking of Jesus as though His divine nature were continually overpowering His human nature, so that human actions were attributed to the divine nature. Having not thought through what this meant and how this would truly fit in the historical context of first-century, second-temple Judaism, it felt like heresy to think about Jesus' human nature as acting, well, human (albeit sinless and without original sin). However, on reading further for more context and development of Wright's argument, I realized that a greater awareness of Jesus' human nature in all its fulness will increase the comfort one experiences from meditating on Him. (Here's an hour-long video from Lutheran theologian/pastor/professor Jordan Cooper on how to talk about the two natures non-heretically.)

The second recent hard book for me has been less intellectually and more emotionally difficult. Technically, it's a series, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. As Husband has emphasized, Lewis was familiar on a scholarly level with the classics, particularly Plato and Aristotle. What I hadn't known as a child, though, is that the trilogy is not geared toward a child or young-adult audience. Parts are legitimately scary. My parents had the books next to Lewis' other works, so sometime during childhood I read Perelandra (#2). That was a mistake.

As Husband and I were working through the trilogy on Audible, the visceral memory of my first reading came back. I couldn't remember exactly what part of Perelandra had scared me until we actually listened to it, after which I was fine. Now that we're over halfway through That Hideous Strength (#3), there are more political or suspenseful parts that I make sure to listen to well before bedtime, but it's a lot easier this time around.

What hard books do I plan to read in the near future? Plato's Dialogues (hard because of length of individual dialogues because . . . Child does not take kindly to me reading more than a few paragraphs at a time, during times when I can read instead of work) and a review of Wheelock's Latin because it is waking up long-dormant neuronal circuits. This second book has gone way down in priority, as evidenced by my being stuck in chapter 1 and not having touched it in several weeks.

(Is it a good or a bad thing that I don't have other hard books on my TBR?)

How Will I Tackle These Hard Books?

I'm taking inspiration from The Art of Manliness, which I've linked before.

• Budget time - especially weekend AM and weekday PM time
• Set a goal reasonably time-bound - tell Husband for accountability
• Include some reading aloud to Child in fractious times - helps me concentrate a little better. (He seems to enjoy my reading of Martin Hengel's The Cross of the Son of God during our walks as I sit on a bench.)
• Use my black notebook to take notes. I've had this plain lined notebook for many years; it finally morphed into a reading journal sometime during grad school.
• Build momentum with short books (my most recent was Gavin Ortlund's Finding the Right Hills to Die On which I read in a day on Sunday)
• Keep the rest of life as simple as possible
• Put the phone down . . . which means getting my 5-7,000 steps early in the day so I don't feel a "PT" need to carry it around.
• Feed my brain - complex carbs, fats, etc.

What are your go-to strategies for hard books? What hard books have you read or do you plan to read recently? Share in the comments below!