50 Incredibly Tough Books

Flavorwire's 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers

1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
4. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
7. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
8. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
9. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
10. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11. In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu #1-7) by Marcel Proust
12. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
13. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
14. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
15. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
16. Underworld by Don DeLillo
17. The Restored Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
18. The Castle by Franz Kafka
19. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
20. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
21. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
22. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
23. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
24. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
25. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
26. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
27. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
28. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński
29. Out by Natsuo Kirino
30. JR by William Gaddis
31. The Tunnel by William H. Gass
32. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
33. Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
34. The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis
35. Tampa by Alissa Nutting
36. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
37. Cosmos Witold Gombrowicz
38. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
39. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
40. Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami
41. The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
42. The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson
43. A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
44. Archipelag Gułag 1918-1956. Tom 1-3 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
45. Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish
46. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
47. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
48. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
49. The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann
50. The Demon by Hubert Selby Jr.

Well, this does not need to be taken very seriously. I read The Castle by Franz Kafka and enjoyed it very much.

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