Three Percent #48: The Difficulties of Difficult Books

After a bit of a hiatus, Tom Roberge and Chad W. Post are back to discuss what we mean when we say that a book is “difficult.” They use a range of examples, from Finnegans Wake to Mrs. Dalloway to define a few different categories of reading “difficulty,” such as, not being compelled, and having to read a book like a puzzle.

For a Three Percent podcast, this one is pretty serious, and even more interesting than usual. And for those who are interested, here’s a list of all the books/artists discussed this week:

Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolff
P.T. Anderson’s movies
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Hawthorne & Child by Keith Ridgway
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris

This week’s music is Breezeblocks by alt-J (∆), which is a cool song, with a really disturbed video—but one that fits this week’s podcast pretty well, since the narrative technique employed forces the viewer to puzzle things out, with the end changing the viewers understanding of what happened quite dramatically.

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