Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Literary Blog Hop -- November 11-14

Literary Blog Hop

This week the question is the following:  What is the most difficult literary work you've ever read? What made it so difficult?












That's an easy one.  A few years back I read two books, both called Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic.  The trick was that one edition of the books was labeled "male" and one was labeled "female,"  and between the two books everything was the same except for one paragraph.  The difficulty came in trying to find the paragraph in question, and that meant reading line for line through both books.  The book itself is excellent, but it took so much time to find this one paragraph.  In case anyone wants to read it, I won't give away the show, but it was definitely a chore to finish!  I suppose I could have cheated, but I just couldn't do it.

16 comments:

  1. Wait WHAT? There was a different paragraph for males and females? How intriguingly strange. I'm dying to know what it said!

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  2. I think it's on the Internet somewhere, and as it turns out, it is quite meaningful. I wouldn't recommend anyone doing it the way I did, unless you're up for a major challenge.

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  3. That's seriously a shame! It's an awesome book!

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  4. wow! Such strange and wonderful books I'm coming across in this blog hop. I'm going to try it your way.

    This book reminds me of 'Only Revolutions' by Mark Danielewski. It's a similar concept. The book is about two lovers Hailey and Sam. Their story is told simultaneously in same book but you have to flip the book upside-down to read the other version. It's wonderful when you get to the middle, because it's like their stories finally converge and then move off in the opposite direction.

    Very difficult to read, but so rewarding.

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  5. I'm definitely going to look that one up! Thanks!

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  6. Really??? I've never heard of anything like that - will have to try and look it up...

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  7. I actually tend to read a lot of oddball stuff!

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  8. I've never heard of this book. It actually sounds really interesting!

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  9. Oh, the humanity, and the originality of just one paragraph making all the difference between the reading experience of the two genders. What a hoot. It's awfully hard to not want to cut to the chase, indeed!

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  10. This sounds just the kind of book(s) i like & the idea of ploughing through the whole lot for the one paragraph, makes me chuckle.
    Thanks.
    Parrish

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  11. Gautami: I think we ALL have had that experience now and then!

    Amanda -- definitely interesting...it's a novel in lexicon form!

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  12. Joanne/ Amanda: it's just my kind of quirky read, definitely!

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  13. Dan: yes. The other most bizarre book I read was House of Leaves, although I actually got through that one easily. I was so tempted to cheat on Dictionary of the Khazars ... so tempted I had to physically restrain myself from turning on the computer. Would I do that again? Probably.

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  14. Parrish: that's why I love reading your blog. You and I definitely have similar quirky tastes.

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  15. Thanks for stopping by my blog.

    This has to be the most interesting book I've seen on this hop so far. I'd never heard of it before. I bet it took forever to find the difference! But I bet by the time you did you really knew the book well. I'm glad you brought it up. I'm definitely going to have to go check it out, even if I only read about it online somewhere.

    - Emily @ Reading While Female

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  16. Why? I have to know! Was the writer making a political statement? I would have done just as you did, obessively searching for the single paragraph. I'm getting a little anxious just thinking about it!

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