Sorry I wasn’t that clear: I wasn’t taking about difficult books. I meant books that hit hard and put us in a deep depressed mood.

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Assuming we're not counting non-fiction here....

(Otherwise the winner would be a textbook that I guarantee no one here cares about.)

I'll go with Mason & Dixon. It's a difficult read and it's also by far the best book of the 1990s, in my opinion.

>Do you feel entitled to walk into a bookstore and grab a second copy for free because you already "paid for access" to the text itself?

No because a book is an actual physical thing that costs money to produce, an ebook is not.

You have already supported the author and they are not losing anything by you downloading a different format.

Personally I think that someone having access to a book is always more valuable than a publisher getting paid, and don't see an issue with people pirating everything if it's not economically accessible. But if you feel the corporatist urge to make sure they get every cent they possibly can, go ahead.

Umberto eco focoults pendulum. Great book, just hurt my brain

It follows the student Kurt Gerber as he's approaching the final exams at his school. He's basically disoriented, depressed and well, you know... the typical stuff lots of young people deal with. It also talks about oppressive authority from the teachers and the ending is unfortunate and devastating.

It was published when Torberg was only 22 years old. He was inspired by his own experiences and the fact, that there were a lot of student suicides in the year 1929 (in Austria I'm guessing).

When was the last time the west invaded and attempted to annex a democracy?

It has tons of sci-fi gibberish all the time. Once you catch on the book isn't that hard to follow, but the beginning is pretty rough.

I think the appendix in the back has like 100+ made up terms

In the summer of 1963, when I was thirteen, I stabbed my father in the chest with a Davy

Crockett Explorers pocketknife. - Kings of Colorado

Gardens of the Moon. Steven Erickson.

Ahh nice one. As the word is used at multiple places in the story, I will anyway remember it. Thankyou

Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Gave up part way through both and just read the Wikipedia entry.

The rule I usually see for when you're reading in a second language is if you come across the same word you don't know five times, look it up. It's obviously important to the story and you'll be more likely to remember it. Otherwise it's better to absorb new words unconsciously by seeing them used in context. Read enough and you'll learn them naturally.

Ulysses by James Joyce, at least for me it kinda was a bit difficult.

What’s the young gerber about?

Maybe not difficult, but one I struggled with recently is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Too much spy lingo/slang, whatever you call it, I couldn't follow what was actually going on in the story. I had to DNF. I would like to read some le Carré, so maybe I'll try somewhere else to start.

Get to chapter 10, it’s a pretty different story from there onwards.

It's not that. I've read some old books, quite a few from Agatha Christie, some stories from Poe, also S. Fitzgerald. They were a bit more fast paced.

I think for me it's the fact, that for over 100 pages they basically walk through the woods haha. I like their food breaks the most for now lol. I will keep reading, hopefully it will pick up that exciting tone you're talking about!

Don't worry , there is nothing that I took bad in our conversation

Weirdly enough the first book I thought of was "The Royal Game" by Stefan Zweig.

But two others come to mind as well:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (though for me the movie was even darker)

Young Gerber by Friedrich Torberg (now that I think about it this is probably my definite answer, but I don't know if it would still have that effect on me because it might have just been due to the time I read it in... then again, I think it would still be devastating)

I'm sorry if I take that as a joke in last one. Best of luck for whatever you are trying to do and thanks for coming here and giving good ideas.

Yup, I lost a lot of things during hight school and even before. Like curiosity, love of reading, opne mindedness... I am working on my self to win them back! It is quite hard but it is the most valuable thing that I ever did

Haha, looks like someone tried book reading really hard

Grey Steel and Blue Water Navy

Supposedly a book looking at the creation of the American military-industrial complex by covering the creation of the modern military shipbuilding industry. By itself that seems like a relatively dry topic, but I really think there's interesting things to be looked at there.

Instead it just kept going into incredible detail on the specifics of various contracts, spending so much time on details that just seemed entirely irrelevant. Like, the overall process of selecting contractors for the Navy does interest me. But the book just kept going into absurdly specific levels of detail on certain contracts, contractors, and requirements. X contractor could only make steel plates of Y size, but that was too small for Z ships, so Congress put off expanding the Navy for a year, and then next year they set a deal up with contractor A who could make steel armor of B thickness in the correct size, etc.

I don't know, maybe it was just written for people who are more nerdy than I am, but regardless I found it incredibly boring.

Makes sense. Thankyou