I just read Moby Dick a while back.
Well worth it! And I am currently working on the following. As you can see, I am not that far into most of them. The ones where I don’t list how many pages I’ve read means I’ve barely touched, them, just a few pages in at most. This is how I read. If you count books like that, I am reading 170 books right now but most of them are just a few pages in.
Currently reading:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Novel.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Novel.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness (reread), Novella.
Conrad, Lord Jim, Novel, (35 pages).
Dickens, Great Expectations (reread), Novel.
Dickens, Hard Times, Novel.
Dickens, Oliver Twist, Novel.
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Novel.
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Novel, (15 pages).
H. A. Grueber, Myths of Greece and Rome, Nonfiction, Mythology.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Non-fiction, Philosophy, (26 pages).**
Thomas MacAulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, Narrative Poem Collection***
Melville, Billy Budd, Novella.
Milton, Paradise Lost, Epic Poem (type of Narrative Poem), (156 pages into Book One).***
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Non-fiction, Philosophy**
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Nonfiction, Military.
Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake, Narrative Poem, (47 pages).*
Tolstoy, War and Peace, Novel, (15 pages).
Wells, War of the Worlds, Novel.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Novel.
* Difficult, archaic language.
** Hard to understand, conceptually/narratively difficult
***Both difficult, archaic language and hard to understand, conceptually/narratively difficult.
None of the rest are particularly hard to read in my opinion. You have to go slow with Conrad though because he’s so dense. You can read him fast, sure, but then you will be missing a lot of it. It’s like Moby Dick in that respect. I also found the Brontes quite dense for some reason. I had to read them slowly, but I’m not sure why. They’re not dense in the same way Conrad is; instead they are different.
Dickens, Dostoevsky, Melville, Tolstoy, Wells, Wilde, and even Sun Tzu are not particularly hard to read, though Melville and Sun Tzu are both pretty dense.
