Forget Easy Reads – These Are Literary Mountains to Climb!

Forget about easy reads – that’s so last year! We’ve cozied up with our favorite novels that have loose storylines and a carefree, almost lazy writing style. They kept us occupied and made us laugh and filled our days with small injections of time away from the real world. Now is the time for the actual challenging reading material – it’s time for an adventure with literary mountains, and we are going to introduce you to the most challenging reads you could get your hands on. Accept the challenge!

Nightwood – Djuna Barnes

Barnes is an author who makes use of the gothic prose writing style to engage readers in her novel, Nightwood. The method is rather tortuous and even confusing if you aren’t familiar with such type of writing. You will be quickly lost in this collection of ideas, descriptions, and monologues if you haven’t read a prose style novel.

If you’re familiar with the kind of book we’re talking about and if you’re game, then this novel is about an individual who indulges in cross-dressing and wanders around Paris, indulging in alcohol and nighties makeup and wigs and embracing many thoughts. Great sermons that verge on ramblings tend to fill the most of this book. But if you are lost in it, you’ll find it a most exciting read.

A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift

If ever there was a written expression of one’s sense of alienation and despair in the face of cultural challenges, it’s this one – A Tale of a Tub. The book refers to many obsolete cultural issues, some of which are somewhat obscure. The narrator is a man who is a bit of a madman, impoverished and speaking in mostly satire of his baffling challenges. This novel may have you studying the hundreds of footnotes to understand the frames of reference in history that find a mention in this book! Happy studying!

The Phenomenology of Spirit – G.F. Hegel

Hegel did an excellent job of producing an intellectually dumbfounding piece of literature with this book. The novel is a classic and may even qualify as one of the most pivotal works of modern philosophy. Hegel uses the book to demonstrate his refutation of many ideals, and the dialectic is undoubtedly challenging to comprehend and even harder to retain. Full of terminology and comprehensive in its scope, this is certainly not a book to bore you!

Being & Time – Martin Heidegger

This may be the hardest book of the lot since it is almost intentionally obscure with it presenting itself almost like a new sort of science, in a way. It is almost as though Heidegger aims to make a new foundation on which a contradictory world of science may be built upon. The book is abstract a rigorous, and Heidegger manages to keep most of his secrets still secrets by the end of it all. Trudging through the book is very much a worthwhile read, though, as it will likely change your life!

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is a well-known author, and she is a highly intellectual one, too. Her fiction is rather challenging, and it is tough to determine one character from another. Or, for that matter, even to establish who is speaking or thinking and what’s generally going on. This novel is, in a way, slightly disconcerting, with its nature being a product of one whose mind is genuinely adrift. It also seems as though a different consciousness takes over you when reading this book, making one feel practically queasy. The key to reading Woolf’s works is to allow the prose to wash over you and carry you away.

If you can read all of these books and understand them or gain some insight from them, you’re probably a genius! If you’ve read even one of these books, we’ll go ahead and give you genius points because there sure is a lot to chew! But worthwhile they sure are, especially if you want to experiment with new genres or if you’re looking for something particularly exciting. Dive into one of these reads, and we promise any one of them will keep you occupied for way longer than any novel you’ve ever read before.