Most of us have books that we just can’t finish, no matter how many times we try.
This hour, a look at those books that we find unreadable, whether they’re too long, too difficult, too confusing, or too dated. What makes a book unreadable?
Plus: The Voynich Manuscript, an unreadable and undeciphered book housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.
We asked our listeners for their list of unreadable books. Here are those responses:
- The Bible
- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- Rim by Alexander Besher
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- Collapse by Jared Diamond
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- anything by William Faulkner
- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James
- The Dubliners by James Joyce
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Wicked by Gregory Maguire
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Faithful by Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- How to Write by Gertrude Stein
- Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
GUESTS:
- Ray Clemens: Curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
- Rand Richards Cooper: Fiction writer, contributing editor at Commonweal, and restaurant critic for The Hartford Courant
- Dennis Duncan: Lecturer in English at University College London and the author of Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
- Juliet Lapidos: Ideas editor for The Atlantic and the author of Talent
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Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired September 14, 2022.
