Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[Colonel Alzheimer's]

Moby Dick.

It was terrible.

There's a chapter about a man who wears the foreskin of the whale, and a chapter in which sailors dig their hands in whale sperm and squeeze each other affectionately.
Because of this, I believe that the people who decided Moby Dick was a classic did not really read the book. At all.
OT: Moby fucking Dick. Pretty cool shit going on sometimes, but there are so many chapters about nothing at all.

 

[Trogdor1138]

Displaying my heresy here, I'll say ANYTHING BY TOLKIEN.

I agree. Oh so much.

And then they came upon a tree. And it was a fine tree with many branches, and its many branches had many leaves. On their quest to stop the evil sauron from destroying middle earth, they stopped for a picnic beneath the tree. They built a house and lived beneath the tree for 15 years, and had many lunches. Sometimes frodo had 6 slices of ham for lunch. He wrote a songs about his ham. These songs go on for 9 pages. The song went like this...

Okay, is that an actual quote from the novel? I'd expect it to be with the parts I've read :/

 

[Nemu]

Hands down: Moby Dick.


I hated, Hated, HATED that book with a passion. Terrible to read, not difficult (as I never found "hard" books too hard to read), just bloody boring and poorly written.


2nd place goes to The Hobbit. Again, terrible to read.

 

[Mr.Mudkip]

Displaying my heresy here, I'll say ANYTHING BY TOLKIEN.

I agree. Oh so much.

*snip*

Okay, is that an actual quote from the novel? I'd expect it to be with the parts I've read :/

Based on how that's not even close to his rhetoric and style, I'm gonna say no.

 

[Iron Lightning]

Crime and Punishment it was pretty good but it was way too serious.

 

[VirtualInsanity91]

LUNACY
well..anything after the rings was pretty bad

 

[Mechalemmiwinks]

Any Twilight book. I thumbed through a few pages of one of my wife's copies and it was like trying to read a college term paper, written by a 8 year old.

 

[Cold Disciple]

Most difficult would be the Vellum/Ink duo of books by Hal Duncan. Couple of books about three or four gay British/Irish guys who can step back and forth through time, alternate realities, etc. The concept is amusing, until the same scene is playing in five different eras of time and nobody's the same person. There's an apocalypse, angels and demons, a bunch of philosophy that makes little if any sense, a lot of mythology history (seriously, ask me about ancient Babylon. Do it.), and OH CHRIST I CAN'T GO ON, THIS SHIT'S BANANAS [sorry, had to]. I never finished Ink, but I've re-read Vellum about 20 times trying to get the point, if there even is one to discern.

Most boring... That's a hard one. Public education managed to sling a lot of them at me. Great Expectations comes to mind, man I really hated that book.

 

[Roxas1359]

An American Tragedy... I think it actually stopped my brain functions while I read it.

So I am not the only one who read it then. Literally this is what I felt when reading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. I was in the 8th grade and I noticed it was in my level of books, we had to read books to get points for our grades, and this book was worth over 75 points. I felt as if my brain was going to melt because of how long it was, and some parts of it were kind of messed up. Also didn't help that the text was extremely small so it could be hard to see it.

 

[Mr Pantomime]

Id agree with Children Of Hurin. I enjoyed it sometimes but it was a long slog. Also, the Chapter titles kept ruining what was going to happen.

 

[Doc Funky]

Anything by Jane "I suck at writing" Austen. Pride and Prejudice is probably her greatest crime against humanity.

I scanned through the first page and was shocked to see that this wasn't in the discussion yet, so I jumped to the last page to complain about it...thank God there's at least someone who said Pride and Prejudice.

There's a Japanese book I read for my Asian Lit class in college that would be perfect for this, but I can't find it in my pile of old college books. It was about this older man who married a young girl, and she used, abused, and disrespected him 100% of the time, but he still worshipped and loved her, partly because she had tiny, perfect feet. The author would describe these fucking feet for paragraphs at a time...so not only did I have to read about this worm of a man whining and wheedling to get this horrible ***** to pay any attention to him at all, even as he gave her everything in the world, but I also had to slog through page after page of the author's foot fetish ramblings.

I only wish I could remember the name of that book, so I could steer everyone else away from it...or, perhaps, steer masochists with foot fetishes toward it?

EDIT: Fuck, I found it. Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki. If you see it on your reading list, RUN.

 

[warprincenataku]

Tales of the Otori was a dredful book. I gave up halfway through it.

EDIT: The first one in the series, "Nightingale Floor" or something like that.

 

[Mr.Mudkip]

Lord of the Flies -.-

My entire attempt to follow that thing was just dumb staring at the sheer contrivance.. I found it no surprise at the end of the course to discover the author had explained there were no girls in the story because he felt it would undermine his message about children being a bunch of animals.

Now this, I can agree with. The damn book was boring, and I love reading ANYTHING.

 

[coldfrog]

I remember Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman being particularly slog-worthy and drab, but it may not have been my ideal read at the time, IE high school. However, I also remember a book that people tend to either love or hate, that being A Separate Peace. That was the only book I faked my way through in high school. I never read it, never tried to read it. Every page was tedium incarnate, every description of a drab, sepia-toned world even less colorful than the characters that inhabited it, to the point that even the death of a child failed to rouse me to even mild outrage or even the slightest amount of emotional attachment. The imagery evoked nothing more than gray people in a gray world on a gray backdrop that blurred together to form a cheap newspaper text smudged by so many uninteresting children's hands into an unreadable mess. No book before or since has made me find such joylessness in my favorite hobby, and even writing about it makes me yearn for a time before its soulless subsistence infected me with the seed of such contempt.

Nevertheless, now that I'm older I might give it another try.

 

[Croix Sinistre]

Hardest has got to be House of Leaves...but it is amazing and I think everyone should. But do be warned, it will send you crazy.

ninja'd me. Seriously, House of Leaves is literally hard to read sometimes, the text itself goes crazy in some parts.

 

[superbatranger]

ayn rand's fountain head
its cliche, boring, etc.

The Fountainhead is my favorite book ever. What didn't you like about it?

Ayn Rand is a difficult author to read. I still have as of yet to finish Atlas Shrugged. It's good, but difficult.

I don't even know if I'll ever finish that book. Damn text is so small I keep losing my place, and half the time I don't even care about what's going on.

So true, when you tell someone that the book is 1100 pages long, it doesn't really capture the magnitude of its size. According to wikipedia, AS is the 11th longest novel ever published at 540,000 words.

540,000 words?! Christ, no wonder the font is size negative 10.

 

[Naeo]

Tale of Two Cities was a very good read, but very difficult to follow.

The Custom House Introduction to The Scarlet Letter was the worst thing I've ever read, probably.

Oh wait, the 1800s Chapman translation of the Illiad has to take the cake there. Only book I've ever decided "No I am not finishing this because fuck this book". Other translations are fine, but not that one. Assuming I'm even remembering the translator's name right.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Anything from Irish class back in school.

Fucking Peig Sayers.