The toughest book you have read or tried to read

Without question the 3-tome book(s) Remembrance of Things Past.

Probably some stuff by Dostoyevsky. Not only were they translated from Russian but they were also set in a time and a place I'm not too familiar with.

"Of Human Bondage" W. Somerset Maugham. I want to say 5,000 pages of some loser with clubfoot pining over some loser skank.

I'm going to ignore any assigned reading I've struggled with and go with something I tried reading for leisure: Innocence by Dean Koontz. I was a big fan of Koontz when I was younger and read a lot of his stuff but this book was just painful to get through.

I recently read a book about life in "Middletown" America. The subject was interesting but the book was a tough read. Partly, I think, because it got too bogged down in statistics. It would have been better if they'd included charts or graphs instead. But, to be fair, it was published in 1929 and maybe nobody thought about doing that. The syntax was quite different, too. One issue is that when they wrote about percentages, they wrote "18 per cent. of workers..." Putting the period after percent drove me crazy because I kept thinking it was the end of the sentence. Nope, but all the way through the 500 pages I stumbled over it. Habits die hard, I guess. Interesting book, though. Comments from interviewees were fascinating. Folks a hundred years ago had the same concerns we do today.

As I lay dying. I still enjoyed it without understanding it.