I’m taking my cue from Bob from Brockley, and the comments elicited by this post on (supposedly) ‘difficult’ books. Like Norm, I don’t think To the Lighthouse really deserves to be on the list – and I also found the mixture of philosophy with fiction/poetry within the list slightly odd, as they seem to present quite different kinds of difficulty. The Faerie Queene was another anomaly – the language is a bit archaic but it’s nothing like so difficult as, say, Pound’s Cantos.
One commenter, Les, asks:
how about a list of the 10 most rewarding books you’ve read–books that, having once read them, forever change your worldview, or books that you come back to over and over again, or books that offer a unique experience simply in the way their written, or books that allow you to see a different set of possibilities in the world. while such a list would probably be highly subjective and more than a little idiosyncratic, it might be worthwhile to hear what books the readers of your blog found to be liberating when they first read them.
Waterloo Sunset asks:
Also, books you know aren’t high quality but love anyway. I adore Last Days of Christ the Vampire but I fully admit it’s trashily written pulp. And I have a strange love for those 80’s ‘teen’ books all about the adventures of rebellious young people in Thatcher’s Britain. One of them often has a mohawk.
So – would HP readers like to name a) a book which changed their world view and b) their favourite bad, or ‘good bad‘, book and c) a book which wasn’t on that list of ‘difficult’ books but should have been.