Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[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

 

[5-0]

Pride and Prejudice in my second year of high school. I was under the impression that every book from that period would be just as hard and boring to read. Frankenstein disproved that; the reality is that nothing ever happened! Watching the film proved that 3 chapters could be skipped with no ill effects.

 

[Readial]

Wuthering Heights, It gave me a headache for 2 WEEKS after reading it. Or it could be no sleep that did it because I tried so hard to UNDERSTAND of what the hell are bumbling in this "Romance" story.

 

[Klarinette]

The first time I was ever exposed to Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, in ninth grade), it was the most confusing thing I've ever had to wade through.

I also attempted the Divine Comedy once.

 

[Paddin]

The most boring book I ever read was The Phoenix and The Carpet by E. Nesbit. What a pathetic load of drizzle, it is sickeningly bad and boring. If you got a magic carpet that could take you anywhere...

Why the fuck would you only use it to have bloody picnics on the beach?!

It was a children's novel, I couldn't read it when I was 12.

 

[sp86]

Philosophische Untersuchungen by Wittgenstein. No I didn't read it in German. Its still an exercise in Mindfuckery.

 

[Aeriath]

SNIP

It's annoying to read, but understandable for me. I had a hard time reading Sunset Song mostly because we were reading it as a class, so I couldn't just stop and check the glossary for each and every one of the many Scots words the author used which I had never heard in my life. Later that year we read To Kill a Mockingbird which I did enjoy, but that was the exception to the rule that books you are forced to read seem terrible.

I tried to read LotR because I thought they'd be good, but I found it to be unbearably boring, which was dissapointing because I enjoyed the movies so much.

 

[10zack986]

The Great Gatsby, definitely. This is coming from someone who enjoyed Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gatsby isn't great. He's not even remotely eccentric. I was expecting some rich mad man similar to Sheogorath. What I got was a pretty normal guy who happened to have a boner for a spoiled whore. He's not even the main character. The main character is even MORE bland.

Fuck that book, seriously.

 

[PatrickXD]

lord of the Flies was awful, but I was pretty young, like 9 or 10, so I'd probably like it now... I don't generally find books boring anymore, Lord of the Rings is amazing and Dune is my favourite when most people tell me it's a load of bull.

 

[whatdoyouthink]

anything that schools make you read, the worst was probably Frankenstein by Mary Shelley... i think