Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[MetalDooley]

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.Could not finish that shit.It was so boring it would start putting me to sleep after a few pages

 

[Harkonnen64]

The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. Boy was that a slog, and ultimately unsatisfying.

I honestly can't see what makes that book a 'classic'.

Yeah, that or "The Scarlet Letter." Honestly, we read the book, which took like 3 weeks to do, and I didn't know what was going on. Then we watched an old, episodic play about it (which took another week and a half) only to realized that I gotten the two main male characters mixed up. That was the only thing I learned, however. That book is shit.

 

[Viking Incognito]

Three Cups of Tea, The Bomb, A Man For All Seasons.

 

[michael622632]

Lord of the Rings was boring at the start and peaked out on boringness during the Tom Bombadil part. I had to restart about 3 times (with about a year's gap in between) jsut to get past that bit.
My answer is probably The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It was short but took me bloody age to read, at lot longer than it took me to read LotR.

 

[marc951]

agreed. also z for zakarias (probs not correct spelling), worst most boaring book ever!

 

[Senial]

Gideon's Trumpet. Probably the fifth most boring book in existence.

 

[Jamiemitsu]

Personally, I couldn't get into Steinbecks "grapes of wrath". Now, don't get me wrong, I loved "of mice and men" with a passion, and knowing Steinbeck, I'm absolutely certain the slow pacing picks up into something brilliant, but after a while, I just lost interest.

(May be ninja'd, can't be arsed to check all the pages)

 

[Breaker deGodot]

To kill a Mockingbird. I slept through the book AND the movie.

Not to be offensive, but I fear for you.

Why? From what I understand about the book its pretty boring. I imagine the films is pretty much the same.

Because, To Kill a Mockingbird is both one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite movies. There isn't much of a story to it, but for me it's all about the interactions between the characters. Also, I think it made a big difference for me to see the movie first.

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

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

just play bioshock. its supposed to be based off of her proposed ideas from Atlas Shrugged.

Been there, played that. Also, they are based off of a collective of her works, not just Atlas Shrugged.

 

[What890]

Hemingway's 'The Old Man and The Sea'. The pacing is really slow, meaning it takes forever and a half to get to the good stuff.

What good stuff? I hated that book like it was trying to light my testicles on fire.

Well stated, sir.

 

[Sprong]

Most difficult to read - to me, anyway - would be Robinson Crusoe, simply because of the insane amounts of semicolons in every mammoth-sized sentence, that once you finish you immediately forget what it was all about.

I'm currently reading Robinson Crusoe, I haven't found it toooo bad for that.

Along similar lines though, Henry James. Great stories, but fuck him and his million-clause sentences. Seriously, it's like he's doing it just to be a dick to the reader.

EDIT: Just noticed I've been ninja'd. D'oh. Anyway, I agree with this.

My answer is probably The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It was short but took me bloody age to read, at lot longer than it took me to read LotR.

 

[gillebro]

Life of Pi's easy to read, but it's pretty crap.
I hated Lord of the Rings.

 

[Valerizzle]

Dune is probably the most difficult book I've read so far. It's not that it's boring, theres just SO MUCH STUFF. I would read thirty pages and have to stop to sort it out. However it is still one of my most favorite books EVER

Boredom wise, I'm going to have to say To Kill a Mockingbird, anything we had to read by Hemingway, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. *shudder* I never finished TKAM(i did get full marks on a project i bullshitted my way through for that one), what little we read in class by Hemingway had such beige prose it was boring, and Huckleberry Finn ... is just plain boring. I mean, lots of shit happened, but I couldn't get past the narrator. AGHH

I must say I actually liked Gatsby. It was a decent movie too.

 

[stefanbertramlee]

Monster Republic
lordy lordy... it was like reading retarded male fanfiction (retarded male fanfiction is diffrent to retarded female fanfiction, equally retarded but diffrent)

 

[Lukeje]

I tried reading Ulysses by James Joyce over the summer because I was trying to get through a bunch of those "greatest books ever" and it showed up more on any greatest books ever list than any other book.

If anyone tries to read it, good luck. It isn't hard to understand, but it is so, so dull. I stopped about 200 pages in and had nearly 800 to go.

You didn't get far enough for it to be hard to understand. As an example, the last chapter has no punctuation. It's definitely the most difficult book I've ever read; I mean to read it again after having now read Homer's Odyssey, but I just don't have the time.

...as for most boring, that would be The Great Gatsby. I've given it several goes, but I still can't see anything redeemable in it.

 

[dancinginfernal]

Well, it was boring, and horrible. The Color Purple. "It's won awards". I don't give a fuck. That book was horrendous.

Oh dear fucking lord, this.

Also, Insomnia by Stephen King. Not to say it was bad, I just found it disastrously dull.

I never finished TKAM

I won't lie, the first like 20 pages are all setting and expository stuff that is really fucking boring. However, once you get past it the story is very well thought out and well executed.

 

[Sebenko]

Probably Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers [small]oh, fuck you, spellcheck. How do you now know the Strugatsky brothers?[/small].

It wasn't so much a difficult read as it was difficult to get my head around (not helped by the translation from Russian) the story- like the last chapter. Where the hell did that come from? why him? It took me a couple of reads to work out anything basic about the ending chapters (the first chapter seemed pretty straightforward though)

In the same vein, the movie Stalker. I watched the first part, but haven't watched the rest yet, and I can't really bring myself to.

Reading and watching them, it's clear that they're classics, but I can't help I'm missing something. Maybe all those gunfights in the games were good for washing everything down with.

 

[InnerRebellion]

Never Give Up....by fucking Tedy Bruschi.

 

[Gunner 51]

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.

You raise an interesting point there. Zeitgeist does have quite the role to play in how stories are remembered.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Boring/Pretentious:

The Good Earth
The Grapes of Wrath (though I suspect this is the book's intention)
Catcher in the Rye (Behold, the Proto-emo!)

At least I was surprised at how good Don Quixote was. Cervantes has quite a sense of humor, despite being a prisoner of war for a good chunk of his life.