What non-fiction book was the hardest for you to understand?

[squarejohn]

For me it was Carl Jung's Synchronicity. Read it twice years ago and I'm just now beginning to see what he was driving at.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

EVOLVING THE MIND by A.G.CAIRNS-SMITH

Let's simplify things and say its a book about molecular biology of mind.

NEURAL DARWINISM by Gerald Edelman is tough to fathom. In a nutshell its Edelman's theory of how memory doesnt exist, and what we think we recall is mostly bullshit.

 

[PennLady]

I never could finish Stephen Hawking's book, A History of Time.

 

[SamScribble]

I never could finish Stephen Hawking's book, A History of Time.

According to a survey a few years ago, A Brief History of Time was the least-read best seller of all time.

 

[soflabbwlvr]

According to a survey a few years ago, A Brief History of Time was the least-read best seller of all time.

You should get more current data. I suspect more people have not finished it since that survey was taken.

 

[oggbashan]

The Economic Prospects of SE Asian Hybrid Mammals.

Og

 

[Zeb_Carter]

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie.

When I found out SR was a disciple I threw it in the trash.

 

[SamScribble]

I suspect more people have not finished it since that survey was taken.

I suspect you're right. In which case, it's probably still the least-read best seller ever.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

There were a few points in Umberto Eco's Kant and the Platypus that I had to reread a couple of times.

 

[bashfullyshameless]

Descartes.

The man taught me how to hate in a way that I had never hated before.

 

[TE999]

Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain'. It's long, boring, angst -ridden, symbolic in the extreme and overwrought. It's good for a doorstop and that's about it.

I know it's fiction, but non-fiction's easier to understand than that crap.

Come to think of it, Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' wasn't exactly 'Dick and Jane Go To The Farm' either.

 

[sr71plt]

Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain'. It's long, boring, angst -ridden, symbolic in the extreme and overwrought. It's good for a doorstop and that's about it.

I had to read this one in German--so naturally I don't remember a thing about what it was about.

I have been trying to read Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic for fourteen years, and I've now made it to page 67 (of 335 pages).

 

[past_perfect]

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which bugged me immensely at the time - he himself apparently had the same difficulties later on though, as he admitted in letters from his twilight years.

 

[Liar]

Aristotele's Nicomachean Ethics.

Not really because the points made in it were hard to fathom, but because it's in rambling Ancient Greek syntax and I had to read it in Danish with a dictionary in one hand, because my professor insisted that there was no Swedish or English translation that didn't mess up the original semantics.

I don't know. I think he just wanted to torture me.

 

[LettersFromTatyana]

Tough call.

I'm going with anything by Jürgen Habermas. I found all of his books (or at least those I read) equally painful.

 

[Dragonlipz]

Anything by L. Ron Hubbard...............

 

[Liar]

Anything by L. Ron Hubbard...............

Hackneyed sci-fi with delusions of grandeur has you that stumped?

Hard to enjoy? Yeah. But hard to understand?

 

[ishtat]

Fluvial Aspects of Glacial Geomorphology by Leopold, Wolman, and Miller. It contained on about page 3 the phrase "strongly leptokurcic log normal bi-variate distribution."

I lost interest soon afterwards.

 

[neonlyte]

The Idiot's Guide to Janet and John.

I mean... are they brother and sister, or what?

 

[stephen55]

Fun with Dick and Jane...


See Spot.

See Spot run.


I mean...okay...now what?

 

[oggbashan]

I've remember another that I had in my bookshop:

It was a manual, in Russian, published by the Soviet state in the late 1920s for collective farmers on how to drive, use and maintain a tractor.

I couldn't read it because it was in Russian, in Cyrillic script with no diagrams. One of my customers who could read it, thought that the author had NEVER seen a tractor but might have had one described to him...

Og

 

[LettersFromTatyana]

I've remember another that I had in my bookshop:

It was a manual, in Russian, published by the Soviet state in the late 1920s for collective farmers on how to drive, use and maintain a tractor.

I couldn't read it because it was in Russian, in Cyrillic script with no diagrams. One of my customers who could read it, thought that the author had NEVER seen a tractor but might have had one described to him...

Og

Oh my. I spent a solid chunk of my undergraduate years writing about forced collectivization, dekulakization, and various Soviet misadventures in technology.

I'm kind of salivating at the thought of seeing that book, even now.

 

[oggbashan]

Oh my. I spent a solid chunk of my undergraduate years writing about forced collectivization, dekulakization, and various Soviet misadventures in technology.

I'm kind of salivating at the thought of seeing that book, even now.

Sorry. I eventually sold it to a university type who also studied the early Soviet state. He was pleased to pay me a whole one pound for it.

Og

 

[SamScribble]

I think my candidate for the most unreadable book (in English) would have to be A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations by James Hutton.

I had several unsuccessful attempts to ‘get into it’, but never managed to get beyond about page 20. It wasn’t that the concepts were difficult. It was just that Hutton was a particularly opaque and graceless writer.

Recently, I saw A Theory of the Earth described somewhere as ‘the least read important book in science’.

 

[Dragonlipz]

Hackneyed sci-fi with delusions of grandeur has you that stumped?

Hard to enjoy? Yeah. But hard to understand?

Pretentious AND hackneyed sci-fi with delusions of grandeur was impossible to enjoy - I haven't found a technical tome that has stumped me yet but yeah, L. Ron H was quite a lot of crap....rivaled only by anything that Alisa Rosenbaum authored..........more pretentious crap.....