I do recommend finding an edition of it that contains the actual final chapter, truncated from American editions (and Kubrick’s film adaptation), as it is really necessary to understand Burgess’ meaning.

Vonnegut’s book I also read in high school and I found it immediately charming and captivating…the prose is simple and the shifts back and forth in time and place are not in the least difficult to follow.

I’m glad A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS was listed. Again, I didn’t find it difficult to read at all, but it’s meaning is obscure and mysterious. Because of its obscurity, I have bought numerous copies of it in different editions as I have found them here and there. I will read it again.

I’m a bit surprised no one mentioned Ballard’s CRASH. I tried to read it back in the 80s and just could not get through it, despite its relative brevity. The prose is clear and free of experimental technique, yet there is something so…base and depraved about it that I felt it almost contaminating to read. Perhaps it is the dispassionate description of extreme events and behavior, the non-judgemental and almost drably matter-of-fact telling of the tale that makes it so unsettling. I set it aside.  I took it up again 16 years later when Cronenberg’s film adaptation was near its release. As a fan of Cronenberg, I intended to see the film, but I felt an obligation to read the book first. I did still find it difficult going, but I stuck with it to the end and found, having taken it all in, that it was a powerful and great novel. (I had a similar experience in reading Heller’s CATCH-22: though mostly quite entertaining, I found it a challenge and almost too much; on finishing its last page I knew I had read one of the great modern novels. It was truly cathartic as few books are.) CRASH is a masterpiece of perversity.

For a different perspective on his works and life, please read SFRevu’s tribute to A. E. van Vogt posted by Ernest Lilley. To quote Mr Lilley—

I’ve asked some of today’s SF writers to share their thoughts about him with SFRevu and thank them all for their contributions. Here they are, starting with a tremendous piece that Harlan Ellison wrote for the introduction to Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A.E. van Vogt:

Van is Here, But Van is Gone by Harlan Ellison

And Robert J. Sawyer’s remembrance is especially moving…

Either Mr. Wright is posing, one might say, as someone who knows Knight’s criticism, or he doesn’t care about fairness or accuracy. It only remains to say that  WORLD OF NULL-A is an awful dumb book that is of merely historical interest for sf. Many of Van Vogt’s short stories are worth reading and rereading, though–as Knight acknowledged (see his 1960s anthology BEYOND TOMORROW).

Seriously there is no need for this swipping, its petty and for me its spoiling a thread I am enjoying. I like to set myself difficult challenges as a reader and I am eager to hear what series people find both challenging and rewarding…. becuase it gives me more books to add to my going to read list (which is already at epic proportions, but….. I read prodigiously….)

What sacred cow do you think I’m defending? Good writing? Clarity? As for stoning glass houses, well, I’m not making similar claims to Wright, so I’m not too upset at the thought of not living up to them. I can be as obscure as I like, so there. If Wright, on the other hand, is going to make absolute value judgements about what constitutes good writing, he ought to make some kind of effort to live up to them.

This is a description of one of Seth E.’s projects, taken from his website:

“The basic text was generated from randomly selected items from various 12-step programs, and a series of unrelated images. The results were then collaged together, along with a fairy tale about a bunny.”

Mm hmm.  He who lives in a glass house should not throw stones.

Because it’s fun to make use of the wealth of words in the English language. Hebetudinous prose will simply inflict somnolence on your audience. We didn’t invent these words for them to be cast aside as the tools of a poseur; fancy words only indicate poseur-ness when the poseur attempts to substitute them for depth in writing. Mr. Wright isn’t claiming to be deep, he just likes having fun with English. I, on the other hand, was totally posing as an erudite scholar in my second sentence

“and you’re not one of them; you’re neither profound, nor clear. Your ideas are generic and vapid, and so you hide them in a burst of clumsy language, like a squid in its ink cloud. And not a very interesting squid.”

He never claimed to be one, he claimed to be “an obscure midlist author of middling talent”.

I suppose it’s because you’re such a lousy writer. You say that you value clarity in writing, and yet in your response here you issue forth paragraph after paragraph of cloudy nonsense in order to express what could have taken three sentences. Your original post is full of windy, meaningless, repetitive verbal tics like “let me list” (you were asked for a list, you’re pre-allowed to list) and de facto contradictions like “the surface tale is straightforward, if baroque,” which exist for no other reason than for you to show off what you fondly imagine to be your superior vocabulary and syntax. Why not just say “the plot is simple?” No reason, except your own stance as one of the “literati.” That’s why people think you’re a poseur; you keep posing.

“The number of writers who are good enough to be profound, but not good enough to be clear, is small,” and you’re not one of them; you’re neither profound, nor clear. Your ideas are generic and vapid, and so you hide them in a burst of clumsy language, like a squid in its ink cloud. And not a very interesting squid.

China Miéville is an other author who I consider a constantly difficult author to read but also one of the most rewarding, not every novel is perfect there are a couple I am in no hurry to re-read but the rest of his novels… I absolutely adore. China’s use of prose his ideas and world building are superb and his talent for mismatching different genres to make something both derivivative and unique leaves me in awe.

Harry Turtledove – I have read every novel this hugely prolific author has published that I can find, however given his prodigious out put and fondness for pen-names keeping track of his works is chore… even with the aid of the internet and Amazon. Many people complain about his huge open ended sagas that feature hundreds of characters each telling a tiny peice of the ‘global’ stories that he is telling, but I love them. Yes its difficult fitting all the peices together at the start of each novel and returning to a series (as he often does) can be a manic headache as I try to figure out/remember who everyone is again and their individual stories are… I suppose I could check the internet but I like to consider myself a bit of a purist and think thats cheating…. the simple size of the canvas’ that Turtledove repeatedly uses leaves just about every other author look like they are writing on the back of postage stamps…. Even Peter Hamilton and his massive sagas (which have been mentioned) tend to pale into insignificance.

As to what “challenging” means, I think the responses here demonstrate that it another one of those terms that becomes personal quickly, and that can have multiple meanings. But it’s enjoyable to see people tackle the question, and educational, particularly Farah Mendlesohn’s description of the necessity of reading Joanna Russ.

And my comment about Damon Knight hardly counts as “savaging” the man or dishonoring the dead — unless we define it as savage to say someone was savaging someone else. Mr. Knight dwelt for many pages on the shortcomings of Mr. Van Vogt, and expended not a little effort to squeeze him out of the field. On the other hand, what I said was — don’t call it easy if you try it and find it too hard for you. I made no personal comments — I did not call him a pigmy with a giant typewriter (the sneer he leveled against Van Vogt) nor did I call his plots a cosmic jury rig — and I made no comment about the main body of his work aside from his one Van Vogt pastiche. I made no comment about his merits as an editor, in which capacity he aided Mr. Wolfe in starting his career. Allow me to rectify: Mr. Knight merits all praise and honors for having helped the early Mr. Wolfe.

I doubt if anyone can call me a poseur, not in an article where I refer to myself as an obscure midlist author of middling talent — unless, of course, you believe my skills as a writer of light space opera falls so far short of “middling talent” that this is a pose? If so, I accept your judgment as stern but fair.

James Joyce, one the other hand, is a poseur, in that he is a humbug and a sham: he poses as one who addresses great themes, but he dwells on the quotidian, the common, the low, and the disgusting. The whole point of his ULYSSES is precisely to show how unheroic and un-Homeric middle class Dublin life was.

The pretense that he is too deep to understand will not work on those of us comfortable in the deeps. And if Joyce was not writing for the literati, for those of us seeped in great literature, we who can read Homer in Greek, for whom does he write? Absent that pretense, what is the argument for his fame? What great ideas do his works address? What, aside from merely stylistic pyrotechnics, is there to him? And something that pretends to be a great book but which is barren of great ideas is a pose.

Challenging in more subtle ways:

Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock.

Little, Big by John Crowley.

Almost anything by Robert Aickman or Thomas Ligotti.