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Anonymous06/23/25, 15:29No.24490041
Can you ESLs read difficult books in English?
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Anon06/23/25, 15:53No.24490085
I struggle as an EOP
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Anon06/23/25, 16:25No.24490150
I just finished Scylla & Charybdis. I'm struggling, a lot. Proteus was a massive filter in particular.
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Anon06/23/25, 16:26No.24490152
I thank the interwebs for letting me grow up here. I couldnt have read difficult books in English without my internet addiction!
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Anon06/23/25, 17:05No.24490227
I'm honestly getting pretty filtered by Blood Meridian right now, and the funny thing is I bought it as a quick in-between read before starting another longer novel. It might be the most difficult thing I've read yet.
>They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.
Yeah I'm sorry I've no idea what like a third of these words means. Still I press on, of course.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:13No.24490248
i read most of my lit in english so yes. havent read ulysses yet but its on my list.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:16No.24490255
i'm usually more impressed by a book that finds difficult ways of wrapping up its themes in unfamiliarity like kafka did in his time rather than use colloquialisms and difficult english to get a point across which i find pretentious
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Anon06/23/25, 17:18No.24490260
I don't know what you consider difficult but I have read As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian without big issues. I haven't read Ulysses or GR yet. I haven't read a book in English in a while, though.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:23No.24490271
I read through about a third of The Federalist Papers and that was more difficult to read than than most other things I read in English, but I did understand it pretty well. But that one's mostly due to pretentiously complicated sentence structure.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:31No.24490283
There are levels to the difficulty. Some books are hard because of the prose, some are hard because of the vocabulary, some are hard because of the references. For me, the first kind are the hardest. The other things I can just look them up. For example, 18th century English books filter me more than Shakespeare, I admit. There's this longwinded and obscurantist nature in the way they're written that I have to constantly go back and read them again. Just having a character say 'thank you' takes the writer two dozen Latinate words. And all the nouns are capitalized which is annoying. So for me it depends. If we're talking about the famous difficult books like Infinite Jest, Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow and whatnot, I admit I haven't read them but I have flicked through them and they're nowhere near as hard as 18th century English books for me.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:52No.24490341
Depends. I'm ETL, but these days I read almost exclusively in English (on account of being interested in many English speaking authors at the moment). Obviously more difficult books are more difficult but I'm sure that would be true no matter what language I'd read them in.
Though I would be so bald as to say that my English is pretty good for a non native.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:58No.24490357
Nope. A lot of the books you guys recommend here read like nonsense.
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Anon06/23/25, 20:37No.24490794
i am on chapter 8, started reading it some months agot. english 3rd language
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Anon06/23/25, 20:46No.24490817
Chaucer is where I personally start to feel filtered, also some verses of Hopkins made me do double or triple takes. It's antediluvian material or tortured verse that makes me sweat, really. Latinate English is pretty easy, however.
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Anon06/23/25, 20:50No.24490826
I read this 4 times in translation but quit it at aeolus when i tried in English
I did read the recognitions and the tunnel in English but I plan to read the former in translation eventually
I try
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Anon06/23/25, 20:53No.24490833
I won't have a good time. Mind you I would not have a good time in my mother tongue either. Some books I just can't read. Such is life for a midwit.
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Anon06/24/25, 05:18No.24491885
Of course. Actually, I read difficult books exclusively.
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Anon06/24/25, 05:27No.24491906
No, English is a surface language without much depth. That's why it's so easy to learn it, perhaps this is why it has become the lingua franca. Nonetheless, most of us ESLs have been learning the language since childhood so these limitations I think wouldn't really apply; now, try reading Voyage au bout de la nuit or La Celestina as a non-native, that's a level of difficulty I've never found in an English work.