Der Steppenwolf was much more difficult than Siddhartha in terms of its complexity. The "Traktat" that Harry Haller reads would most likely be particularly difficult for someone who was not comfortable in German, while other parts, particularly the parts that are most "grounded in reality", so to speak, are fairly effortless as a read.

It's hard for me to judge, oddly enough, because I've been reading so much German and French recently that I would have a hard time giving an absolute assessment anymore. I could say, for example, that I had opened Traumnovelle back in November and got hung up on the first page, said "this is way too hard" and put it back.

The thing is that I didn't own any Hesse back then, so I didn't TRY to read it when I couldn't. I bought Siddhartha only, and then liked it so much I bought four more Hesse books (Unterm Rad, Der Steppenwolf, Narziß und Goldmund, and Das Glasperlenspiel) and they only arrived in late February.

Likewise, I remember looking at La Peste in French and thinking the introduction was easy but it "got hard" after that. The very thought seems silly at this point.

I've started Also Sprach Zarathustra now, but I'm not sure if I feel like reading philosophy so I might put it aside and read Remarque instead. Les Miserables is still begging me to finish it but it's so damn long and it's such an uneven book. I doubt I'm going to review it when I'm done. The beginning was so well done and since then it's been a start and stop process, where I get excited with how well a certain part is written, read 250 pages in a couple of days, then find another portion so boring I read 2-3 pages and put it aside, then force myself to read 20 pages, etc.

I'm still confident that I'll finish my challenge, though. The "heavy lifting" is over now that my German and French are both at the level I want them to be at and need them to be at for full comprehension. The rest of the year is mostly about enjoying the books and reinforcing the knowledge through repetition.