In this survey, we will look at popular books, both fiction and nonfiction, with an emphasis on fiction. We will include those books that typically make it onto lists of “the hardest book you have ever read” that are found on the Internet.
To conduct this survey, I analyzed over 2,700 responses from mostly American mostly average reader types on this website. They were then tallied and given one vote for every time they were listed. The results were then ordered according to vote. For instance, The Silmarillion got 67 votes and Ulysses got 56 votes, etc. I also looked at many other “hardest books” lists on the Net and the results were more or less the same as this one.
Hardest or most difficult books typically means the most complex or the hardest to read. However, many were listed as difficult simply because they were tedious, boring, long-winded, etc. Others were difficult because they were so emotionally draining. A number of books made the list simply because they were awful. The books of Ayn Rand and a recent novel called Twilight were often listed. I did not list those because this is a list of hardest English language books, not worst English language books.
It is interesting that The Silmarillion made it to #1 on the list. Most such lists have either Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake at the top.
What about you? What is the hardest or most difficult book you ever read? Feel free to list more than one.
1. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Ulysses by James Joyce
3. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
4. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
5. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. The Holy Bible
8. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
10. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
11. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
12. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
12. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
12. Paradise Lost by John Milton
12. Phenomenology of the Spirit by Georg Hegel
13. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
13. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
13. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
13. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
14. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
15. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
15. Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
15. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
16. Trainspotting by Ian Welsh
17. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking
20. Beloved by Toni Morrison
21. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
22. Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
22. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
22. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
23. Beowulf
23. Blood Meridian No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
23. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
24. Dune by Frank Herbert
25. Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
26. A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
26. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
26. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
26. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Lawrence Sterne
26. The Odyssey by Homer
26. The Republic by Plato
27. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
27. Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre
27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
27. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
27. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
27. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
27. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
27. Unfinished Tales by J. R. R. Tolkien
28. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
28. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
28. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
28. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert S. Pirsig
29. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
29. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
29. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
29. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
29. Ghormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
29. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
29. Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
29. Porno by Ian Welsh
29. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
29. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
29. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
29. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
29. The Origin of the Species By Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
29. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
29. The Wasteland by T.S Eliot
29. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Norma Zeale Houston
29. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstien
30. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
30. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
30. Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
30. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney
30. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
30. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
30. It by Steven King
30. Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
30. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
30. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
30. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
30. The Book of Mormon
30. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
30. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30. The Iliad by Homer
30. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
30. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
30. Valis by Philip K. Dick
30. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
31. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
31. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
31. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
31. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
31. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
31. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
31. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
31. Ecrits by Jacques Lacan
31. Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
31. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
31. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
31. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
31. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
31. Letters to a Young Contrarion by Christopher Hitchens
31. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
31. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
31. Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
31. Night by Elie Wiesel
31. Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane
31. Roots by Alex Haley
31. Silas Marner by George Eliot
31. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
31. Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
31. The 50-Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski
31. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
31. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
31. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
31. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
31. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
31. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
31. The Prelude by William Wordsworth
31. The Prince by Machiavelli
31. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
31. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
31. The Trial by Franz Kafka
31. Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
32. 1984 by George Orwell
32. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
32. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
32. A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilbur
32. A Brief History of The Universe by Steven Hawking
32. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
32. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
32. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey
32. A Light in August by William Faulkner
32. A Midwife’s Tale by Martha Moore Ballard
32. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
32. A Question Concerning Technology
32. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
32. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
32. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
32. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
32. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
32. And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
32. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
32. Antigone by Sophocles
32. Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel
32. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson or An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man’ by G. I. Gurdjieff
32. Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns
32. Brave New World by George Orwell
32. Broom Of the System by David Foster Wallace
32. Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
32. Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
32. Cartesian Meditations by Edmund Husserl
32. Cheri by Colette
32. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
32. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
32. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
32. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
32. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
32. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
32. Dr. Sax by Jack Kerouac
32. Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
32. Effi Briest by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
32. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
32. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Fahrenheit 451 by Kurt Vonnegut
32. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske
32. Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna
32. Freedom by Jonathon Franzen
32. Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
32. Glue by Ian Welsh
32. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
32. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
32. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
32. Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer
32. Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
32. Hiroshima by John Hershey
32. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
32. Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
32. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
32. Imaginary Magnitudes by Stanislaw Lem
32. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
32. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
32. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
32. Justice as Fairness by John Rawls
32. King Lear by William Shakespeare
32. Lectures on Aesthetics by Immanuel Kant
32. Literature or Life by Jorge Semprún
32. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
32. Lord Leverhulme’s Ghost: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo by Jules Marchel
32. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
32. Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse
32. Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
32. Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
32. Metaphysics by Aristotle
32. Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
32. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeymi
32. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginian Woolf
32. Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
32. Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
32. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
32. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
32. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
32. Nova by Samuel R. Delaney
32. Nova Express by William S. Burroughs
32. Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
32. Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass
32. On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
32. On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein
32. On Creativity and the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud
32. Open Mike by Michael Eric Dyson
32. Pathological Basis of Disease by Robbins
32. Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
32. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
32. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
32. S/Z by Roland Barthes
32. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
32. Self-reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
32. Setting Free the Bears by John Irving
32. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence
32. Shame by Salman Rushdie
32. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
32. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
32. Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon
32. Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson
32. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
32. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
32. The Anatomy Of Melancholy by Richard Burton
32. The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
32. The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton
32. The Bear by William Faulkner
32. The Beautiful and The Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
32. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
32. The Clouds by Aristophanes
32. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
32. The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
32. The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen
32. The Crisis of European Sciences by Edmund Husserl
32. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
32. The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
32. The Death Of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
32. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Rosa
32. The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
32. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer
32. The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
32. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
32. The Grand Design by Steven Hawking
32. The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker
32. The Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
32. The Harroway Reader by Donna Harroway
32. The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia
32. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
32. The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
32. The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
32. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
32. The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis by David Chaim Smith
32. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
32. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo
32. The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
32. The Mediterranean by Ferdinand Braudel
32. The Mind of God by Paul Davies
32. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
32. The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
32. The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek
32. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
32. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
32. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
32. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
32. The Quran
32. The Rig Veda
32. The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose
32. The Satyricon by Petronius
32. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
32. The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
32. The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
32. The Stuff that Dreams Are Made of by Steven Hawking
32. The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner
32. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
32. The Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
32. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
32. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
32. Theory of Justice by John Rawls
32. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
32. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
32. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
32. Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy by Edmund Husserl
32. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
32. Utopia by Thomas Moore
32. V. by Thomas Pynchon
32. Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
32. What is the What by David Eggers
32. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte