I am so glad to have finally read this work. It has been on my incredibly small to-read list for years, and whenever I have tried I have maybe managed a chapter or two and then found it hard to progress. I have only now managed to do so because I have come into possession of an old Kindle, and downloading the ebook off Project Gutenberg. I'm not kidding about finding it nauseating to read though with long meandering sentences with irrelevant detail thrown in repeated over and over. Maybe this is part of the charm that paints this world that feels real and lived in. And who starts a sentence with a conjunction anyway?
I only read his Gödel, Escher, Bach (often referred simply as GEB). His style can be annoying, conjunctions are one of the more apparent traits. [And,] if GEB intrigued you, leaf through but don't buy into the hype: Hofstadter's true accomplishment is inspiring countless people to talk about aspects of GEB with half the vocab and tenth of pretentiousness.
I'll give it a look when I'm done this week, but everyone's difficult book is different. Sapiens didn't take me six hours, the stupid-long 140 pages of Piketty's preface took me a month followed by not giving enough of a shit to finish the book.But I never managed to get through "The Quark and the Jaguar" by Murray Gell-Mann.