Top Ten Tuesday: Hard Books Edition

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

This week's topic: Top Ten Books that were hard for me to read. For various reasons

1. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler - Excellent book, a brutal/honest portrayal of what life was like for a slave. No white savior nonsense here.
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - I borrowed this from my English major sister the summer before I started HS. Did not know what I was getting into.
3. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - I like Woolf, but this one's more opaque than say, Mrs. Dalloway. Wrote a college term paper digging out meaning.
4. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James - I chose this for a read-a-thon because it's short and that was a mistake. James's sentences tend to be labyrinthine, though interesting.

5. American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis - I get it's a satire, but the sheer volume of misogyny-soaked violence turned my stomach.
6. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton - The only book I read for school I straight up hated.
7. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - The best dystopia, in my opinion, but terrifying in its plausibility.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez - another book I borrowed from my sister many years ago, I feel a lot of this went over my head. I should re-read it, I'd get more out of it now that I'm more familiar with magical realism.

9. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - This book almost defeated me due to sheer length, though it's very readable. Also it's uneven: everything with Marian is awesome gothic goodness, Walter is a boring drip.

10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I loved this more than I thought I would, but I read it bit by bit over two months, setting it aside for other books whenever descriptions of Levin's in-depth love of farming got too boring but always picking it up again.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014