Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[Chaos-Spider]

Response Type 3: "Important" books that were relevant and changed society at the time of publishing, but the language use and situations do not translate well to modernity so you have no idea why people think highly of them. (IE anything by Jane Austen)

Jane Austen was a 19th century novelist. They did not change anything they were important at the time because they were the precise equivalents of tv soap operas. Seriously, they were published chapter by chapter and filled with 'action' that people would keep on reading because 'lord British just kissed his wife's twin sister' and 'amnesia' etc etc. They did not change things. Post WWI novels did.

You're absolutely right, there is nothing about stories where a female lead bemoans the fact that her entire existence is dependent on marriage that could possibly have any relevance to 19th century English society. Why would I think such a silly thing?

The only Jane Austen Novel I've read that didn't have zombies or sea monsters added to it was Emma, and I thought it was pretty alright after reading it twice and select portions of the Jane Austen for Dummies. I see it as a period piece showing how life and love was seen by the landed gentry in the earliest 19th century. It also allows me to say that I have yet to see any good published Romance, but then I don't get romance and like history.

Apologies if this ends up a double post.

 

[Xan Holbrook]

This is going to seem like a red rag to every potential emo/literary historian bull, but 'Catcher In The Rye' was absolutely shockingly bad. Poorly written, a protaganist who seems whiney at his most emotional and dragging on and on with its own air of self-importance like every U2 album. If there is any book to define what was to come in the sixties with the dawn of the teenager, it's Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Infinitely more interesting, life-affirming and downright rebellious, On The Road can really show you what it means to be alive.

 

[caselj01]

For me, the worst by far in terms of difficulty is Arabian Nights, a collection of middle eastern stories from the medieval age. Not only do you have Inception-like stories within stories, but people seem to do things for no apparent reason. Also, in half of the stories the resolution is in the form of "And then a genie appeared and sorted everything out".

 

[MadeinHell]

Well...
I remember a book that I read when I was about... 11? or 12. Anyway it's a book by Maria Konopnicka called "Nasza szkapa" or "Our Nag" (if I remember the proper translation).
The book was about 80 pages long, but it was THE MOST BORING BOOK I ever had read.

If I was able to read more than page a day it would be a success.

PS. Also Niche is overrated. People look far too much into that drunken gibberish of a text.

 

[Lyndraco]

The God Delusion, although a terrific book, was hard for me to read at the time; I must have been... Well, too young to read it, that's for sure. I've since gone back and read it again and it still tongue ties me from time to time.

Richard Dawkins has quite the vocab.

It took me awhile to read the God Delusion as well. I liked it, but it took forever. Almost as long as it took me to finally get through Crime and Punishment.

 

[tlozoot]

Anything by Jane Austen. Anything.

On my degree she crops up in just about every fucking module as well.

 

[tlozoot]

This is going to seem like a red rag to every potential emo/literary historian bull, but 'Catcher In The Rye' was absolutely shockingly bad.

Agreed a thousand times. I bought it expecting to enjoy, or at least appreciate, a classic. It was just really really average and uninteresting.

 

[Tomo Stryker]

The original The Modern Prometheus, that book written in the original was like driving a steak through your head.

 

[Squirrel1328]

About 90% of books that you have to read at school

 

[Dangerbean]

Just wait till you try the second Dune Novel. Its a third of the length of the 1st but took me ten times as long to read. Literally NOTHING happens for the entire book! a huge disapointment after the first.

 

[KindOfnElf]

Island - Aldous Huxley. I read it now, it's good, everything about it I understand, I guess I just read it in a wrong timing, and it's been.too.fucking.long. And I am stubborn I don't want to leave it unfinished, so I make efforts to come to it's end.

 

[Novander]

Crime and Punishment is probably the longest I've spent on a book this year. On the other hand, its the good sort of difficult.

No it's not. Three pages without so much as paragraph break and I gave up on it.

Currently reading Neuromancer, I'll admit, I had to look at a plot summary on the internet a couple of times to get myself up to speed.

I'm with you on this one. I understand how important the book is in geek life, but I can't say I enjoyed reading it.

However, the book I'd recommend for this thread is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. About three years ago I made it half way through and thought it was brilliant, but it's so hard going I haven't gone back to it yet. I've also just noticed the poster above me mentioning it too. So yeah, you should all definitely read it.

 

[queldar]

most boring and hard book iw ould say my physics book i nver get it it really sucks
i know how can i even open it but i have to

 

[Valkyrie101]

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

I like LOTR, but I can see where you're coming from. They can be difficult to get into.

I've made three attempts at Debt of Honour by Tom Clancy, getting progressively further each time until I managed about two hundred pages. It's odd, because some of his other books are very good, whereas there are a few that I just don't have patience for.

Dune, too. I really don't get how people view it as the holy grail of sci-fi. It is, ironically, extremely dry. Interesting setting and backstory, but one-dimensional (or in some cases zero-dimensional) characters and a dull story kind of cancel that out.

 

[dietpeachsnapple]

Applied Behaviorism

Text books are ok normally, really they are.

If hell could be synthesized into an ink, and the book were written on the tanned skin of the innocent, it would have been. Hell, however, is easier synthesized into baseball bats, with which they beat you while reading this book.

 

[luclin92]

dune messiah took me one year.

 

[Mr Shrike]

The Silmarillion by Tolkien.

That shit is seriously heavy.

 

[Mana Fiend]

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...

QFT x100. Tolkien's style in LotR is just dire. The Hobbit is a wonderful story, well written and great for anyone to read. In an improv group I'm in, I once got told to tell a story in the style of Tolkien, and basically ended up describing every button on a computer console in high detail.

Never got past the description of the Hobbit in Fellowship. It's so damn annoying!!!