I found The Emigrants by W.G. Seabald a pain in the... neck to read. I think the first twenty pages of that was a guy describing his garden.
I got two-thirds of the way through To The Lighthouse, and yes, that was also a chore throughout every page.
I've had others which were hard going, yet immensely enjoyable. For example: Franz Kafka's The Trial is really difficult in places (I had to re-read the section with the door that's only for him around five or six times) but I loved every second of it.
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