Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[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!!!

 

[ninja555]

Lord of the Rings was a difficult stretch, though I was 8 at the time when I read it. Anything by Ayn Rand is bloody boring and difficult. And then theres the fifth Dune book. Dear god that was boring. I managed to get maybe a third of the way in before I gave up.

 

[minus_273c]

The second of the 'Thomas Covenant' series.

A friend had recommended it, but I had no sympathy for the character (he's definately an 'anti-hero') and just got completely disinterested in what happened to him, so I dumped it.

 

[minarri]

Out of This Furnace.

Without a doubt it was one of the most difficult books for me to read. I read this book for my 10th grade English class and even 8 years later Kracha's sexual exploits haunt me.

 

[Custard_Angel]

Moby Dick is a cross between very difficult and quite boring. Ahab dies attempting to exact his revenge (spoiler warning). As big a classic as it is, it's just takes such a slog of effort to read it.

Tolkiens stuff is super boring with about 100 pages of interest in the total 1100 odd pages of Lord of the Rings.

Lovecraft's stories are fairly difficult to read but are super rewarding in return. The chase sequence in "Shadow Over Innsmouth" is the only sequence that has made my heart race while reading a book. The man wrote well, but alas the times have changed and some words he uses are completely unknown to me, so I have to try and guess their meaning.

 

[Jaeke]

Children of Hurin was my favorite of all Tolkiens epics. Technically the bible is a book though right? so yeah that, the bible.

 

[Neonsilver]

I had to read the book Effi Briest in school. I only read the first few pages and I had to read them several times to get what was written there. My classmates had similar experiences.

 

[Samwise137]

Gonna go with "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald but then again, I'm well read and have read some pretty bad books.