it doesn’t have to be your favorite book or anything. It can be any book that you find yourself thinking of with a sense of pride for having read it.
Personally, I am really proud of myself for not DNFing A Little Life and pushing forward. I read a very good chunk of that book with tears running down my face–mind you, I was reading it on my phone during lectures for the entirety of my first semester last year–and I was always on the verge of putting it down just because of the horrible content. Also, it was pretty long; too long, actually. So when I was done, I was simultaneously Heartbroken, broken (just like in general), and relieved. It was truly a feat.
An honorable mention is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, because I swear to God I did not understand a single thing about it even 10 chapters in. Charles Dickens is too much.
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I too had tears running down my face when reading A Little Life. It was much the same as when I was reading Ready Player One.
Both books were so utterly awful that it felt like physical pain to keep reading.
I confess, I just could not bring myself to finish A Little Life.
Anything longer than 600 pages. 11/22/63 comes to mind. Took me a couple months to read.
Gilgamesh. Not sure why, but because it’s old, Sumerian, it’s got a sort of moral or truth. Because it shines a light on that ancient time and yet speaks of friendship and the pain that comes with it. I’ve read several translations. I’m also proud of reading Homer but Gilgamesh is my favorite.
Infinite Jest. I feel like David Foster Wallace wrote this book with the goal of including as many obscure vocabularies as possible. I eventually got hooked about 60% through, but this was a struggle. Literally forced myself to read it as a challenge.
It was a long and tedious and overly complex book. But it was well-written. And to think, I put myself through it all because of “This is Water”.
The Quran, because it completely changed my life for the better.
The Hunchback, it is so long and archaic, but it gets better. Dont give up. The last quarter made me cry multiple times.
IT by Stephen King, mainly due to sheer volume. I was 16 or 17 at the time I read it, and having read such a tome in only 10 days made me feel really proud!
I would have never imagined that IT is more than 350 or so pages, if it weren’t for these replies, I’m so shocked
I’m pretty proud of reading “An Introduction to Buddhism” by Peter Harvey this summer. It’s only 550 pages, but it’s a lot to absorb. I’ve been reading religious texts recently (just for general knowledge, no religious motivation) - I started with the Tao Te Ching and the Quran - and when I got to the Lotus Sutra, I realized I understood absolutely none of it, so I got the Harvey book first. I did read the Lotus Sutra afterwards, and could finally make some sense of it. But yeah, the Harvey one was a high intensity read. Lots of note-taking, lots of flipping back and reviewing and memorizing and contextualizing.
The Song of Ice and Fire series because they were boring as hell and I could just watch the TV series (which was way better). It was pure tenacity.
Pickett’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ and ‘Hamlet’s Mill’