Most boring books

[Miss Chicken]

I am currently reading Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde. One of the minor characters in the book is very old is in a nursing home but is cursed. She can't shuffle off this mortal coil until she has read the ten most boring classics.

What books do you think should be in this top ten?

 

[trekkiebaggio]

Pride and Prejudice.

The situation and the style of writing just didn't work for me at all.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Buddenbrooks, for that matter, most anything by Thomas Mann. Read it in college as part of a German History course. Mann was a writer who'd take two pages to say what another author might say in a few sentences. He gives tedium a whole new level for me. In a similar vein of family history, Gabriel García Márquez's 'A Hundred Years of Solitude' as as tedious a journey for me. Henry James was less boring for me that those two authors.

 

[Relayer1]

The complete works of Thomas Hardy. Oh, and Dune.

 

[Methos]

Armand by Anne Rice...

I love all her vampire chronicles, but Armand... god... i've tried, god i've tried to get through it... probably read the first 5 chapters a dozen times or more now... i just can't get into it... the plot is utter drivel, and the main character is about as dry and useless as Charlie Sheen at an AA meeting...

M

 

[Winterwind]

Melville's Moby-Dick. I enjoy classic literature. I love Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy but Melville's masterpiece bores me to tears. For me it's one of the few exceptions where a movie adaptation is better than the book.

 

[Gov Kodos]

'Moby Dick' a title where I often wondered 'Why is he telling me all this?' It could have been boiled down to a cracking novella of an adventure, though. 'Silas Marner', there was a story that seemed endless. The character study Eliot goes on with at the pub, I can still feel the boredom after all these years.

 

[Caliburn24]

Is it too much of a sacred cow to toss Shakespeare's stuff into the pile?

It is brilliant stuff for performances, but horribly boring to read through. Which is probably a large part of the reason I found my English literature classes such a chore.

 

[Methos]

actually i never particularly minded Shakespeare... aside from Midsummer Nights Dream... even a copious amount of narcotics couldn't make that one interesting lol

M

 

[ancientone51]

I have to second Dune and add Lord of the Rings.
I never could get more than a 100 pages into either, and I tried.

 

[Avon]

hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

its a few funny gags interconnected with large amounts tedium

 

[Roger Wilco]

hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

its a few funny gags interconnected with large amounts tedium

I expect you might get some angry replies to that, but I can see what you mean. I absolutely love Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but it has a certain "flow" that I suppose you can enjoy or not.

 

[J.T.B.]

'Moby Dick' a title where I often wondered 'Why is he telling me all this?' It could have been boiled down to a cracking novella of an adventure, though.

Then we wouldn't have a fascinating "documentary" about 19th century whaling. I love Moby Dick, I read it every couple of years and it always rewards.

Is it too much of a sacred cow to toss Shakespeare's stuff into the pile?

It is brilliant stuff for performances, but horribly boring to read through. Which is probably a large part of the reason I found my English literature classes such a chore.

Of course it's boring that way, that's not what it was written for and it's a terrible way to experience the material. Lit teachers should be forbidden from assigning Shakespeare that way.

I remember being fairly bored with Ivanhoe, but I was pretty young and I should probably give it another chance.

Justin

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I'm going to throw in The Scarlet Letter.

 

[Deckerd]

The question's too subjective to be useful. It's like asking about boring films.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Any Trek novel written by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.

 

[Misfit Toy]

actually i never particularly minded Shakespeare... aside from Midsummer Nights Dream... even a copious amount of narcotics couldn't make that one interesting

As J.T.B. said, these were meant to be performed. I was bored by Midsummer Nights Dream when I read it in high school, but 10 years later I was in a production of it that was incredibly fun - and the audience seemed to be enjoying the hell out of it too...

 

[DrEvil]

God Emperor of Dune...first book I've never made it all the way thru and didn't even want to bother trying. With a close second of Children of Dune.

 

[Shaytan]

L'Assommoir.

I gave up in the middle of the book.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

If by "boring" you mean "absolutely incomprehensible", try Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori. It's full of crap like this:

Ecstasy//the beast of the soul/gram that liquefied blood::the internal organ of a dog hyper-links::the psychosexual drone is exposed to the insanity of a chromosome//the hologram hormones of the cold-blooded disease animals that were encircled and slaughtered in the Cadaver City//The defleshed skeletal streaming=murder memory that the reproduction quantifies::evolved to the self ruin=serum of the drug embryo::<<sleep>>;;<< . . .

I swear, the entire book is just like that. A bunch of random phrases. Translated from Japanese to English by a COMPUTER!