Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[the Dept of Science]

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. With each page, I would put the book down and think "Why am I reading this crap?". Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person on planet earth who thinks this way.

Don't worry, you are not. I didn't enjoy it, my mum didn't enjoy it either (she likes funny books but her sense of humor is quite different from mine, I partly recommended it to her out of curiousity whether she would enjoy it). People told me it was funnier than Catch 22 and Hitchhikers Guide. Having recently reread HHGTTG, I can say I probably laughed more times in its 150 pages than I did in however many Confederacy of Dunces has.

The thing is, it kindof made me feel like I was stupid when reading it. I kept on thinking "am I missing something? are they making tonnes of jokes that I'm just not getting?"

 

[Jonluw]

Growth of soil is the most boring book I have ever read.

Edit: Oh, and The world without end. One of the few books I did not finish.

 

[drummond13]

Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. The first third or so is written from the stream-of-consciousness style perspective of a retarded adult (I mean this literally). My god what an awful read.

 

[Rosm101]

Sun by David Eagleman, a very poor excuse for a book

 

[Seydaman]

I found Romeo and Juliet to be the biggest pile of rom-com dreck I've ever read. (Followed closely by A Midsummer Night's Dream.) Though in balance, MacBeth, Hamlet and Othello were pretty good.

A Midsummer Night's Dream wasn't that bad, I'm suppose to read Romeo and Juliet this year, but the thing is, a huge amount of ancient and classic works are redone in modern works, so when you actually read the classics they are dull and boring because you've already seen it a thousand times.
Like playing COD 4 then Doom, Doom is a classic but, you get it.

 

[imnot]

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

I sort of agree, I found the good bits good, but the bits in between just dragged on and ooonnn, not to mention the eyestrain you get from reading tiny text.

 

[XIII's Number XIV]

All Quiet on the Western Front. Heart of Darkness runs a close second.

 

[Duskwaith]

River boy. What the fuck.

The book was so shit i "lost" it i.e. it got destroyed due to shitty handeling.

Mein Kampf was just abit fucked aswell "we hate the communists"-"here we shall use communist ideas!"

To kill a mocking bird was insightful into that era but other than that so boring

 

[Michael Logan]

Ill have to say the illiad I tried to read it because its famous, but the poemlike writing was just so annoying.

Might try to read it again sometime though.

 

[zombiestrangler]

Catcher in the Rye. I fucking hated that book and had to read it junior year of high school. I picked it up like a year or two before junior year and could not finish it at all. Meanwhile it was my JY English teacher's favorite book. He even named his daughter Phoebe. He was still a pretty cool teacher.

 

[Heart of Darkness]

Have to say Tess of the D'Urbervilles, though Heart of Darkness is a close second.

Hey, who gave you permission to read me?

OT: Oh, jeez, most of the things I read in high school. A Separate Peace, Hamlet, Miss Julie, Desire Under the Elms, Anthem, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Stranger, The Metamorphosis, Julius Caesar (I think), and the Emily Dickinson anthology. Dear Lord, how I hate Emily Dickinson.

 

[SageSteven]

Old Man and the Sea

So very, very dull. The only way I could get through it was telling myself to keep reading and something interesting is bound to happen. I was so horribly wrong that it was tragic.

 

[Something Amyss]

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

I will proudly blaspheme with you.

 

[Uberman5000]

I tend to stop reading books pretty early if I can tell they're going to be a long, pointless slog. I stopped reading Wizard's First Rule (recommended highly to me by a friend of mine who mostly reads those and the Dragonlance books) when I noticed that it was just Ayn Rand in Middle-Earth, and I almost read the first Wheel of Time book when I noticed that it was about virtually nothing. I'm also still in the middle of Atlas Shrugged, and I've got The Fountainhead sitting on my shelf there. Might make time for those someday soon.

One dull book that I had to read cover-to-cover (for a school assignment) was Driver's Ed, by Caroline B. Cooney. The ENTIRE BOOK was about a bunch of teenagers moping because some woman crashed her car and died. If you cut out anything that wasn't plot, the book would be about 20 pages long. Most tedious thing I ever read all the way through. Guh.

Redwork by Michael Bedard was also pretty awful. It was about some kid that lived in a flat above an old man who I think was an alchemist, but it was so boring that my CLASS didn't finish it.

 

[Crimson_Dragoon]

Had to read Wuthering Heights in middle school (don't ask why, I don't know either). Oh, god, is that book a boring pile of nonsensical crap. Even the Cliff notes didn't help.

 

[sheogoraththemad]

the bible, no I'm not being a asshole. I just found it difficult to read

 

[CrashBang]

Washington Square by Henry James
OH MY HUNGRY JESUS! I had to read it for a literature class a few years ago and it is so so oh so very very boring! The main character is a stuck-up, whiney little ***** being forced to marry an incompetent arse-bite. Their respective families are equally annoying and caused me to instantly hate every book a teacher/lecturer forces me to read before I've even glanced at the front cover

 

[FullMetalTrenchcoat]

I tried to read Mein Kampf once. I failed. It's not the subject matter that makes it difficult, it's how insanely boring it is.

Last thing I had any difficulty with was something by Jacques Derrida, but I don't remember the name.

 

[Undeadpool]

Ethan Frome.
Lemme give you a summation: Ethan Frome is an incredibly boring man with a harpy for a wife. He wants to bang his maid, but doesn't and instead the two try to commit suicide by plunging their sled into a tree (yes really). They fail (SHOCK!) and now the harpy wife has to take care of them both.
That story is about 200 pages. Those are literally the only things that happen. The rest of the book is just padding.

 

[Sallix]

In year 10 English (I did my English GCSEs a year early), we had to read two books of equally bad writing. The first one was called "Things Fall Apart" which can simply be summarised to "Tribesman bitches about his yams". The other one was the Aqa anthology. A collection of poems and short stories. Each more boring and tedious then the last