Books that will challenge your reading integrity

If you didn’t know much about American history in the eventful second half of the 20th century, you will after reading this. Spanning from the 1950s through to the 1990s in a non-linear fashion, Underworld is an 832 page panoramic vision of America. We weave in and out of a number of intertwined themes, including baseball, waste disposal, guns and the Cold War. But what also challenges us is its exhausting roster of disparate characters, as we dip into each of their respective lives while they search for meaning. Despite this being a beast of a book, it’ll reward the most patient of readers with its remarkable awe-inspiring story. We wouldn’t recommend enjoying it with a glass of wine though as you’ll already be drunk on Don DeLillo’s words.

Trust is a book within a book that will demand your time and patience. In this Booker-longlisted novel about a Wall Street tycoon’s rise to power in 1920s New York, you’ll join the characters in disentangling fact from fiction. You’ll be taken on a quest for truth through multiple avenues of evidence: a work of fiction written about the tycoon and his wife, his own autobiography, a memoir written by an employee and the private diary of his late wife. As you slowly peel back each layer of the story, you’re challenged by your own judgement of whose version of events you can trust. Full of contradictions and manipulations, this is a work of metafiction that will have you trapped in its unpredictable pages.

Sitting at 738 pages, Moby-Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest for revenge against the eponymous great white whale. While the plot is undeniably thrilling, you’ll also have to read dense descriptions of whale anatomy that are a little intense for the general reader. Unless you’re a whale enthusiast, the true challenge is not to skip these arduous encyclopedic chapters. But if you do manage to complete this famous classic, you can boast about having read a profoundly imaginative literary creation, plus, your party trick will now be reciting whale trivia. 

If you decide to pick up A Little Life, get ready to be emotionally challenged. At the centre of the story is Jude, a victim of unresolved trauma of which Hanya Yanagihara spares us no mercy in revealing. There are explicit moments of self-harm, addiction and abuse on Jude’s journey, and despite a sprinkling of compassion from his bittersweet friendships with Willem, Malcolm and JB, he never finds relief from this suffering. If you manage to appreciate this novel’s painful honesty and brutal display of human endurance, you’ll become emotionally invested in these characters who will remain in your heart forever. A strong contender for one of the most addictively depressing books you’ll ever read, prepare for a gut-punch on each of its 752 pages of beautifully explored misery.

We all know how important the first page of a book is in drawing you in, but To the Lighthouse really makes you work for it. Written from the perspective of one’s inner voice, you are thrown straight into a blurred mesh of the Ramsay family’s thoughts and actions. Without the aid of frequent punctuation or consistent dialogue to carry you through, you’ll need to employ fierce levels of concentration to distinguish who’s inner monologue you’re in and what time of day it is. It's no easy task; if you look away for one moment, you’re lost. But there's a reason this book is regarded as one of the best novels ever written in the English language, and we promise that you will come away from this read having learnt much about the complexity of human relationships.

It’s time to rewrite all those intrinsic assumptions you have about gender, because Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl will really challenge you to become open minded. Paul is a shapeshifter who can change his body whenever he likes, and he uses it to change into different gender identities. You’ll be charmed by this playful and provocative novel that follows Paul/Polly as they enter into different kinds of queer spaces. Prepare to be hypnotised by our hero/ine as he compulsively journeys through struggle and pleasure, challenging ideas of gender fluidity in a hilariously intimate manner. So if you’re looking for an adventurous escape from our world of categorisation, this will have you hooked.

It’s up there with some of  the most powerful novels you’ll ever read, the caveat being it's also savagely violent. Set in the anarchic world opened up by America’s westward expansion, this is a potent account of the bloodthirsty violence that Glanton’s gang descends upon Native Americans. If you frequently watch action and horror movies, graphic images of violence are not something you are unaccustomed to seeing. But the fact that Blood Meridian has been labelled by Hollywood as ‘unfilmable’ says it all - the relentless onslaught of cruelty is so chaotic that all attempts to translate it on-screen have failed. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but if you’re willing to tackle a brutal and stomach-churning book, this is the one for you.

The battle for your mind has already begun, figuratively, and quite literally. When AI expert Jack Fenwick tries to decode a mysterious signal, he finds a complex alien network from an interstellar civilization. What follows is a fictional battle to protect human minds, whilst in reality our minds as readers are in battle with the text on the page. Wrapping stories within stories, as well as featuring NASA transcripts, newspaper articles, artwork and Wikipedia pages, you could call this novel the Moby-Dick of sci-fi, but it’s even longer (1008 pages is no joke). But if you manage to decipher the narrative, you’ll enjoy a story of what might happen in the wake of the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

This novel begins in the middle of a sentence (that’s what you’re getting yourself into when you open this book.) It then ends in the middle of that same sentence, giving it a circular structure, with a whole load of dreamy, nonsensical language existing in between as a stream of consciousness. So come with the expectation that you won’t be making any sense of this famously incomprehensible novel. You could call the fantastic dream-language playful or you could call it baffling, pick your side! Don’t worry, there’ll be no shame if you admit you cannot understand this book, it's definitely a universal feeling. But you’ll still be left with a triumphant feeling at the end of it, having read perhaps the most challenging novel of all time. 

You’ll need to set aside enough time to tackle all the books on this list because here’s yet another incredibly long novel, sitting at over 1,000 pages. But aside from the length, you’ll be relieved to hear that its structure and language are far more approachable in comparison to most of the books here. Set in 1805, War and Peace features a handful of Russian families whose lives intersect at society parties, building to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Our advice for reading this novel is to have a pen and paper to hand, as you’re introduced to a vast amount of characters in the first hundred pages. But if you pay enough attention to who's related to who, we promise it will make the rest of the novel a breeze, and you’ll be delighted to tick this magnificent epic off your list.