THE BEST KRAUTROCK ALBUMS EVER

1. Yeti (1970), Amon Düül II 
2. Tago Mago (1971), Can 
3. Hosianna Mantra (1972), Popol Vuh 
4. Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973), Faust & Tony Conrad 
5. Ash Ra Tempel (1971), Ash Ra Tempel 
6. Kraftwerk 2 (1972), Kraftwerk 
7. Tarot (1973), Walter Wegmüller 
8. Ege Bamyasi (1972), Can 
9. Neu! (1971), Neu! 
10. Phallus Dei (1969), Amon Düül II 
11. Revelation (1970), Virus 
12. Sommerabend (1976), Novalis 
13. Monster Movie (1969), Can 
14. In den Gärten Pharaos (1971), Popol Vuh 
15. Faust So Far (1972), Faust 
16. D (1971), Deuter
17. Neu! 2 (1973), Neu! 
18. UFO (1970), Guru Guru 
19. Musik Von Harmonia (1974), Harmonia 
20. Together (1972), Jane

THE TOP 10 MOST DIFFICULT BOOKS

THE TOP 10 MOST DIFFICULT BOOKS
by 
Emily Colette Wilkinson & Garth Risk Hallberg

Back in 2009, The Millions started its "Difficult Books" series--devoted to identifying the hardest and most frustrating books ever written, as well as what made them so hard and frustrating. The two curators, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, have selected the most difficult of the most difficult, telling us about the 10 literary Mt. Everests waiting out there for you to climb, should you be so bold.

Emily's Picks

1-Nightwood by Djuna Barnes - Dylan Thomas called Nightwood "one of the three greatest prose books ever written by a woman,” but in order to behold this greatness you must master Barnes' tortuous, gothic prose style. In his introduction to the novel, T.S Eliot described Nightwood’s prose as “altogether alive” but also “demanding something of a reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.” Nightwood is a novel of ideas, a loose collection of monologues and descriptions. What will keep you going: The cross-dressing Irish-American "Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante O'Connor," who, when not wandering Paris, drinking heavily, or dressing in nighties, rouge, and wigs of cascading golden curls, is expounding great rambling sermons that fill most of the book. These are funny, dirty, absurd, despairing, resigned—even hopeful in a Becketty I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on kind of way. 

 2-A Tale of A Tub by Jonathan Swift - The first difficulty: The superabundant references to obsolete cultural squabbles (some obscure even in Swift’s eighteenth-century England) and then there’s the narratorial persona: an impoverished, syphilitic madman who cuts pieces out of his manuscript and his fellow citizens remorselessly. His compulsive digressiveness is deliberately baffling, but more baffling still is that this satire, aimed at “the Abuses and Corruptions in Learning and Religion” and written by a conservative, Anglican clergyman, ends finding nothing sacred. If you can bear it (and the 100s of footnotes you’ll need to understand its historical context), it’s the ultimate expression of cultural alienation and despair.

3-The Phenomenology of the Spirit by G.F. Hegel - Do you enjoy a good intellectual gobsmack every now and again? If so, Hegel’s your man and this book, a classic of German idealism and unquestionably one of the most important works of modern philosophy, is a fine place to start. Hegel’s refutation of Kantian idealism, history of consciousness, and quintessential explanation of the process of the dialectic is hard to understand and harder still to retain (“goes through you like lentils,” as one Stanford professor described it to me), due first and foremost to the breadth of its subject and its terminology. The book’s nearly impenetrable without a good edition and guide or two: The Oxford UP edition is widely considered the best (and don’t skip the notes and foreward) and the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook’s commentary by Robert Stern makes good warm-up reading; also good (and free) are J.M. Bernstein’s lecture notes for his UC Berkeley graduate course on the Phenomenology, available at BernsteinTapes.com.

4-To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even queasy-making—to be set adrift in other minds, with their private rhythms and associative patterns. It feels, at times, like being occupied by an alien consciousness. Some readers don’t ever find their sea-legs with Woolf.  The trick is to surrender yourself (true with other high modernists too), to let the prose wash over you and take you where it will—not to worry too much about understanding a dogmatic way.

 

5-Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson - Richardson’s Clarissa is a heavyweight in more ways than one. The novel’s physical heft is part of its difficulty (she weighs in at just under three pounds in Penguin’s oversized edition), especially as her 1500 pages are light on plot (Samuel Johnson said you’d hang yourself if you read Clarissa for the plot). But what the novel lacks in plot it makes up for in psychological depth. Richardson was the first master of the psychological novel and he hasn’t been bested since. These depths are also dark and psychically wrenching: Clarissa's rejection and dehumanization by her monstrous family and the sadistic torments she undergoes at the hands of her rescuer turned torturer, the "charming sociopath" Robert Lovelace, offer some of the most emotionally harrowing reading experiences available in English.

   

Garth's Picks

1-Finnegans Wake by James Joyce -Finnegans Wake is long, dense, and linguistically knotty, yet hugely rewarding, if you're willing to learn how to read it. By this, I don't mean wallowing in the froth of scholarly exegesis the Wake churned up in its wake. Not the first time out, at least. (I take Joyce's talk about setting traps for his readers as an expression of hostility born out of years of frustration.) Rather, I mean surrendering to Joyce's music. Meaning here is more a question of effect than of decoding; in this way, this Difficult Book is paradigmatic of great literature more generally. Try reading 25 pages a day, out loud, in your best bad Irish accent. (Seriously - some of what seems like idiolectic obscurity is just a question of how you pronounce your vowels.) You'll be maddened, you'll be moved, and you'll be done in about four weeks.

 

2-Being & Time by Martin Heidegger - Being & Time is probably the hardest book I've ever read. To contradict what I said vis-a-vis Joyce, I don't feel comfortable as a reader of Heidegger letting things wash over me. Literary meaning and philosophical meaning are different beasts, and Being & Time, with its intentionally obtrusive neologisms, isn't meant to be dreamlike. It aims instead to be, among other things, a new kind of science, or a new foundation on which to build the sciences - an understanding of what it means "to be." Heiddeger gets a lot of things shockingly right, and yet the book's abstractness and rigor mean that most of his discoveries remain well-kept secrets. Even reading the first half in a graduate-level seminar, it took me over a year to get through this one. Was persevering worth it? Well, it changed my life. I don't know how much more a reader can ask for.

3-The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser - The difficulty and the pleasure of reading Spenser's masterpiece arise from a common source: its semiotic promiscuity. The Faerie Queene is allegory to the power of allegory. Or it is allegory drunk out of its mind on sugary wine, dressed up in layers of costumery, made to run singing through the garden of Eden at four o' clock in the morning before falling down in a heap at sunrise to make silver love to itself. Or it's the product of that lovemaking, tenor and vehicle copulating so variously and complexly that each becomes the other. There is much madness here, not least in the sheer hubris of Spenser's plan. (Like Heidegger, he only finished half of his magnum opus.) The Faerie Queene is also, bizarrely, a work of exquisite poetic control, hundreds upon hundreds of perfectly turned stanzas. I read it in college. It was hard as hell, and I forgot the plot even while I was reading, but many of its images remain burned into my brain ten years later.

4-The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein - I've been working my way through The Making of Americans for many summers now. I keep getting several hundred pages in, switching to something else, and then, as with Heidegger, returning to find I've lost the thread. But what Heidegger describes, Stein evokes; to read even a page of The Making of Americans is to be thrown into a unique state of attunement. The fineness of attention its exquisite narrative tedium promotes is like an antidote to the shallows of the internet. Beyond the page, birds sing louder, sunlight grows thicker, car horns bare their souls. "The first stunningly original disaster of Modernism," someone wrote about this book, and while I'm not sure it was intended as a compliment, it makes me wish there were more disasters like this.

 

5-Women & Men by Joseph McElroy - In this space I could put any number of postmodern meganovels - a subgenre I've been smitten with for many years now. There's William Gaddis' JR, which is easier than people make it out to be, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which is harder. There's The Recognitions and Mason & Dixon. There's William H. Gass' The Tunnel - verbally lucid, but morally arduous. Of the lot, though, I'd like to shine the spotlight again on Joseph McElroy's Women & Men. It is longer than any of the foregoing, and, in the idiosyncracies of its prose, on par with the hardest. Parts of it, anyway. Its temperament, though, is completely sui generis - warm, humanist, synthetic rather than analytic. As I wrote for the L.A. Times a few years back, it's like an entirely different version of what comes after Modernism. It's a weird and wonderful book, and I can't wait to dive into it again.

Emily Colette Wilkinson is a critic living in Washington, DC. Her reviews have received commendations from The Society of Professional Journalists and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and is a contributing editor at The Millions.

BEST NOVELLAS EVER

1. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
2. Heart of Darkness (1902), Joseph Conrad
3. Notes from Underground (1864), Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. The Death of Ivan Llyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy
5. The Little Prince (1943), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. Ward Number Six (1892) Anton Chekhov 
7. A Christmas Carol (1843), Charles Dickens
8. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway
9. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson
10. Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell
11. Of Mice and Men (1937), John Steinbeck
12. Michael Kohlhaas ( 1811), Heinrich von Kleist
13. The Royal Game (1942), Stefan Zweig
14. The Dead (1914), James Joyce
15. Daisy Miller (1878), Henry James
16. The Steppe (1888) Anton Chekhov 
17. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. Death in Venice (1913), Thomas Mann
19. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Leo Tolstoy
20. Billy Budd (1892; first published in 1924), Herman Melville
21. The Turn of the Screw (1898), Henry James
22. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000), César Aira
23. Prince Ehtejab (1969), Houshang Golshiri
24. The Alienist (1882), Machado de Assis
25. The Aspern Papers (1888), Henry James
26. Running (2008), Jean Echenoz
27. Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa (1994), Antonio Tabucchi
28. Stevenson under the Palm Trees (2003) Alberto Manguel
29. Dream Story (1926), Arthur Schnitzler
30. The House of Paper (2002), Carlos María Domínguez 
31. The Pearl (1947), John Steinbeck
32. San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1930), Miguel de Unamuno
33. A River Runs Through It (1976), Norman Maclean
34. House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961), Yasunari Kawabata
35. The Golden Pot (1814), E. T. A. Hoffmann
36. Earth and Ashes (2000), Atiq Rahimi
37. Three Years (1895), Anton Chekhov 
38. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), Joseph Roth
39. Benito Cereno (1855), Herman Melville
40. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Joseph Conrad
41. Aura (1962), Carlos Fuentes
42. The Rider on the White Horse (1888), Theodor Woldsen Storm

THE BEST BRITISH NOVELS OF 20th CENTURY

1. To The Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell
3. Nostromo (1904), Joseph Conrad
4. Mr.Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf
5. Sons and Lovers (1913), D. H. Lawrence
6. Under the Volcano (1947), Malcolm Lowry
7. A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster
8. Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding 
9. The Golden Notebook (1962), Doris Lessing
10. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), John Fowles
11. Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad
12. Brave New World (1931), Aldous Huxley
13. The Way of All Flesh (1903), Samuel Butler
14. Midnight's Children (1981), Salman Rushdie
15. The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), Lawrence George Durrell
16. Howard's End (1910), E. M. Forster
17. I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves
18. The Power and the Glory (1940), Graham Greene
19. Brideshead Revisited (1945), Evelyn Waugh
20. A Bend in the River (1979), V. S. Naipaul
21. The Lord Of The Rings (1954-55), J. R. R. Tolkien
22. Lanark (1981), Alasdair Gray
23. Money (1984), Martin Amis
24. The Rainbow (1915), D. H. Lawrence
25. The Forsyte Saga (1906-21), John Galsworthy

THE BEST 50 PLAYS OF 20th CENTURY

1. Waiting for Godot (1953), Samuel Beckett
2. Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), Bertolt Brecht
3. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), Eugene O'Neill
4. Death of a Salesman (1949), Arthur Miller
5. The Cherry Orchard (1904), Anton Chekhov
6. The Bald Soprano (1940), Eugène Ionesco
7. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Luigi Pirandello
8. A Dream Play (1901), August Strindberg
9. The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), Federico Garcia Lorca
10. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Tennessee Williams
11. The Man Outside (1946), Wolfgang Borchert
12. Look Back in Anger (1956), John Osborne
13. The Threepenny Opera (1928), Bertolt Brecht
14. A Clinical Case (1953), Dino Buzzati
15. Private Lives (1930), Noel Coward
16. The Crucible (1953), Arthur Miller
17. Three Sisters (1901), Anton Chekhov
18. Marat/Sade (1963), Peter Weiss
19. Kaspar (1967), Peter Handke
20. Major Barbara (1905) George Bernard Shaw
21. The Last Days of Mankind (1922), Karl Kraus
22. Rhinoceros (1959), Eugène Ionesco
23. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Tom Stoppard
24. The Caretaker (1959), Harold Pinter
25. Pygmalion (1912), George Bernard Shaw
26. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), Edward Albee
27. Death and The King's Horseman (1975), Wole Soyinka
28. The Balcony (1955), Jean Genet
29. Andorra (1961), Max Frisch
30. The Investigation (1965), Peter Weiss
31. Endgame (1957), Samuel Beckett
32. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), T. S. Eliot
33. The Lesson (1951), Eugène Ionesco
34. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), Dario Fo
35. Hoppla, We're Alive! (1927), Ernst Toller
36. Master Harold...and the boys (1982), Athol Fugard
37. The Physicists (1962), Friedrich Dürrenmatt
38. Noh Plays (1950-60),Yukio Mishima
39. The Ghost Sonata (1907), August Strindberg
40. Our Town (1938), Thornton Wilder
41. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1937-43), Bertolt Brecht
42. The Homecoming (1964), Harold Pinter
43. The Iceman Cometh (1946), Eugene O’Neill
44. Man and Superman (1903), George Bernard Shaw
45. Angels in America (1993), Tony Kushner
46. The Chairs (1952), Eugène Ionesco
47. The Cocktail Party (1949), T. S. Eliot 
48. Antigone (1944), Jean Anouilh
49. The Madman and the Nun (1923), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
50. The Satin Slipper (1929), Paul Claudel
51. Juno and the Paycock (1924), Sean O'Casey
52. Caligula (1944), Albert Camus
53. The Captain of Köpenick (1931), Carl Zuckmayer
54. Ping Pong (1955), Arthur Adamov
55. The Marriage (1965), Witold Gombrowicz
56. Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Samuel Beckett
57. The Good Person of Setzuan (1943) Bertolt Brecht
58. No Exit (1944), Jean-Paul Sartre
59. Pandora's Box (1904), Frank Wedekind
60. Electra (1937), Jean Giraudoux

THE GREATEST PLAYWRIGHTS OF 20th CENTURY

1. Samuel Beckett
2. Bertolt Brecht
3. Arthur Miller
4. Anton Chekov
5. Eugène Ionesco
6. Eugene O'Neill
7. Luigi Pirandello
8. George Bernard Shaw
9. Harold Pinter
10. Tennessee Williams

The Best Of The 20th Century (TIME Magazine)

Best Children Books:

1.      Charlotte’s Web

2.      The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis;

3.      A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Best TV Shows

1.      The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening (1989- )

2.      The Mary Tyler Moore Show;

3.      The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite

Best Dances

1.      The Four Temperaments by George Balanchine (1946)

2.      Esplanade by Paul Taylor;

3.      Jardin aux Lilas by Antony Tudor

Best Films

1.      Citizen Kane, directed by and starring Orson Welles (1941)

2.      Day for Night by Francois Truffaut;

3.      Chinatown by Roman Polanski

Best Novels

1.      Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

2.      One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez;

3.      Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Best Nonfiction Books

1.      The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974)

2.      The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank;

3.      The Double Helix by James Watson

Best Operas

1.      Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten (1945)

2.      Wozzeck by Alban Berg;

3.      Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini

Best Comedies

1.      Routine "Who's on First?" by Abbott and Costello (1938)

2.      "Dead Parrot," Monty Python;

3.      "Rope Tricks," Will Rogers

Best Songs

1.      Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday (1939)

2.      Corcovado by Antonio C. Jobim;

3.      A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan

Best Designs

1.      The Eames molded plywood chair, designed by Charles Eames (1946)

2.      The S-1 steam locomotive by Raymond Loewy;

3.      the Swatch watch

Best Plays

1.      Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)

2.      Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw;

3.      Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Best Classical Compositions

1.      Symphony of Psalms by Igor Stravinsky (1930)

2.      String Quartet in F Major by Maurice Ravel;

3.      Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland

Best Poems

1.      The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922)

2.      The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats;

3.      Home Burial by Robert Frost

Best Paintings

1.      The Red Studio by Henri Matisse (1911)

2.      Still-Life with Chair Caning by Pablo Picasso;

3.      Dog Barking at the Moon by Joan Miro

Best Sculptures

1.      Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi (this version c. 1941)

2.      Guitar by Pablo Picasso;

3.      The Chariot by Alberto Giacometti

Best Buildings

1.      The chapel at Ronchamp, France by Le Corbusier (1955)

2.      The Seagram Building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe;

3.      Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright

Best Albums

1.      Exodus by Bob Marley & the Wailers (1977)

2.      Kind of Blue by Miles Davis;

3.      Are You Experienced? by Jimi Hendrix

Best Photographs

1.      Place de l'Europe, Paris by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1932)

2.      Identifying the Dead, Russian Front by Dmitri Baltermants;

3.      Wall Street by Paul Strand