Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[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.

 

[Red Right Hand]

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.

I do understand most of it, because I am Scottish, it's just that i'm not used to reading it but rather hearing it. So it makes it very difficult because I takes longer to process each sentence, that meant I never could really get into it properly. It kind of frustrated me I suppose.

 

[CK76]

The Scarlet Letter. Thank you, Mr. Hawthorne, but I don't want an eleven page description of a woman walking through a door.

There it is! A good story butchered by excessive descriptions. It's just so much padding.

 

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[CK76]

Brave New World sounds interesting, my older brother read it and told me a little about it, was interesting but then again he's a really good story teller.

Huxley was blasted at the time for thinking humanity would ever reach a state that it would be controlled by self inflicted distractions. He's been proven right over Orwell's vision in the modern era. As another author I like put it...

"Big Brother isn?t watching. He?s singing and dancing. He?s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother?s busy holding your attention every moment you?re awake. He?s making sure you?re always distracted. He?s making sure you?re fully absorbed."
? Chuck Palahniuk

 

[Kenbo Slice]

Pretty much anything by Shakespeare. I get what's going on, but it's just...so boring. My friend was all you just don't get and I told him I get that it's boring.

 

[littlebunnyfifi]

Hmm. The Giver really sucked. And Catherine Called Birdy.

 

[the Dept of Science]

Thing is, about 90% of the books on this list are books I feel that I probably should read at some point in my life (or have already). I try and mix up/balance reading for pleasure and reading for personal development/cultural importance. I think that if you ignore either then you are really missing out. The Bible may be one of the least enjoyable things to read ever, on the other hand, even in the small amounts of it that I have read, I feel I have learned an incredible amount about some of the big issues in both history and the present day.

War and Peace
Lord of the Rings
Ulysses
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Complete works of Shakespeare
Atlas Shrugged

 

[Jimson]

In my school we had this Super reader program or something, and our English classes had to use it, well, you would get an A for meeting a certain number of points, and each book gave different amounts of points, needless to say, War and Peace was one of the few books to give you an instant A, needless to say I hate that book.