Ten literary slogs that are worth the effort

Emily Temple is the author of The Lightness and the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize.

[My Book, The Movie: The Lightness; The Page 69 Test: The Lightness]

At Flavorwire in 2012 she tagged ten "notorious literary slogs — long, difficult, and/or complicated enough to scare even the strongest reader — that are definitely worth the effort." One title on the list:

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

It’s not the length of this novel that keeps some people pushing it to the bottom of their to-read pile, but rather the sheer, unrelenting bleak-and-bloody of it. We don’t have much to say to you on that score — it’s bleak, and it’s bloody, and it stays that way all the way through, with very little let up. That said, even if descriptions of scalping are not your thing, the book is worth reading for McCarthy’s masterful use of language, his perfect, terrifyingly evocative sentences that leave you feeling the dust in your mouth. Then again, if descriptions of scalping are your thing, boy do we have the book for you.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Kevin McColley's five best books about surviving war (or not), Bruce McCandless III's top six books about crime & colonialism at the U.S.-Mexico border, Paul Howarth's top ten tales from the frontier, Craig DiLouie’s ten top fantasy books steeped in the Southern Gothic, Graham McTavish's six best books, ShortList's roundup of literature's forty greatest villains, Brian Boone's five great novels that will probably never be made into movies, Sarah Porter's five best books with unusual demons and devils, Chet Williamson's top ten novels about deranged killers, Callan Wink's ten best books set in the American West, Simon Sebag Montefiore's six favorite books, Richard Kadrey's five books about awful, awful people, Jason Sizemore's top five books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, Robert Allison's top ten novels of desert war, Alexandra Silverman's top fourteen wrathful stories, James Franco's six favorite books, Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue