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    The 25 Most Challenging Books You Will Ever Read

    If you've made it all the way through any of these, give yourself a pat on the back. Bonus points if you actually understood what you were reading.

    1. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

    2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

    3. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (14th Century)

    4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

    5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

    6. The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975)

    7. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1927)

    8. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943)

    9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

    10. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

    11. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (1977)

    12. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

    13. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)

    14. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

    15. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)

    16. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

    17. Underworld by Don DeLillo

    18. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)

    19. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (1981)

    20. The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

    21. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)

    22. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)

    23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)

    24. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

    25. The Recognitions by William Gaddis

    Have you suffered through a challenging book that didn't make the list? Add yours in the comments.