You tried, you did not conquer: When a book becomes unreadable

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 and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.

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