What's the most boring book you've ever read?

[Stasisesque]

Candid by Voltaire. What a lame book. The entire premise was supposed to be about a guy who does not care at all and is the epitome of apathy around others. He gets into a relationship, he doesn't care. He goes to jail, he doesn't care. He eats a salad, he doesn't care. Yeah, I don't think I'll ever care about this book.

That... is not at all what Candide is about. It's about, in part, a man who finds the philosophical teachings of Optimism (that this is the best of all worlds, and everything that happens is the best thing that can possibly happen) to be the only way to look at the world and life. He then suffers a series of increasingly devastating events (most of which are hilarious) until he meets a man, Martin, who does not share his views of the world and in fact thinks everything is shit and finally Candide gives up on his optimistic (both the modern usage and the philosophical teachings) ideals.

Are you sure you mean Candide?

Yes. Although that is not how I remember the book being paraphrased to me by the literature teacher who taught me that class.

In that case either your memory is failing you or that teacher was a hack. I'm not so arrogant as to think there's only one interpretation of a text and that mine is the only way it can be read, but to say Candide is about an apathetic man is about as accurate as saying it's about Harry Potter. I have no idea why your teacher would have summarised it as such. I suppose, at a stretch it could be that they were describing one of the other characters, potentially Martin... but to claim that that was the premise of the story is just mind-boggling.

However, does that mean you haven't actually read it? In which case how could you think it's a boring book? If nothing else, it's too short to be boring. Maybe you should try reading it, now you know your teacher was wrong.

 

[Hoplon]

"I had to read it in High School/College and I....."

Makes me stop reading immediately. If you were forced to read a book for a grade, chances are you didn't dig it.

Seems like that is 90% of this thread, fortunately for me I don't remember the books I had to read for English.

 

[JediMB]

Heart of Darkness

It was just so incredibly dull, and it didn't help that it went to great lengths to describe mundane things in the wordiest ways possible. Had to go with an audio book to get through it at all. It was the one low point of my literature course last year, as the rest of the books we read were quite excellent.

 

[JediMB]

I flunked out of a Shakespearean literature class because I couldn't bring myself to read one of those plays every week. It's just so drawn out...

I read Romeo & Juliet, and I was constantly amused by all the dirty wordplay. It seemed you couldn't go a paragraph without a penis reference.

 

[Slenn]

In that case either your memory is failing you or that teacher was a hack.

The former. It was a very long time since I was assigned to read it in class. It would have been 6 years ago, back in highschool. All I kind of remember was that the book didn't quite excite me at all. The teacher was actually quite good, and was an accomplished thespian. So perhaps my memory of her paraphrasing referred to one of the characters, not necessarily the main character, as you said. But thank you for pointing out that.

Like Great Expectations I hardly remember a thing that happened in the book, just that it got so unnecessarily dense in its descriptions that I would get lost. Almost no one in 9th grade liked reading that book, and I didn't like it.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Fellowship of the Ring. The movie does not prepare you for all the extra shit.

What? You didn't like Tom Bombadilililio?

For me it would be Spellfire:
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Spellfire_%28novel%29
It was so tedious to read through. It was like the author wrote down some directionless D&D campaign he made up with his friends when they were 12. If I recall correctly a couple of chapters were just about the party sitting on the side of a mountain killing one dragon after another. Sounds badass but it really wasn't.

I also find Jane Austin books incredibly boring but that might just be because I have a penis.

 

[reblock13]

Death in Venice, forced myself to page 20 and by then I just couldn't take it anymore. It was just description after description and presented so boringly that I started to nod off.

 

[Cheeseman Muncher]

The second Wheel of Time book: The Great Hunt.

Everything after the first two chapters felt like a slog and I ended up giving up not long after. Toss in the fact that the first book felt like it summed up pretty much everything anyway, and it became both dull and pointless.

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

-snip-

First off, I love The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Rings. Maybe some people didn't like the fact that they were assigned to read The Great Gatsby or that Lord of the Rings was too much for the average reader.

Either way, they're both great and their interest is purely subjective.

In the case of Metamorphosis, I've just read better. Hell, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice were better stories and I don't like either of the two.

 

[Story]

You know it's funny, the books I can actually remember reading, especially the ones for school, I liked.
The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights (it's actually my favorite book, enough anyway to make my senior report out of it), Jane Eyre (ditto for this), The Scarlet Letter, 1984, The Catcher in the Rye, Dracula and pretty much everything from Charles Dickens (I love his works). All of those books I remember liking a lot, and so I remembered them. I couldn't for the life of me think of a book I thought was boring. Even Twilight/Eragon weren't very boring, just badly written.

Now after skimming through this thread, I was reminded of three books that bored me to tears and yet I was forced to read them for school.

Crime and Punishment
Moby Dick
Atlas Shrugged

Urgh, thanks for reminding me guys.

 

[The Floating Nose]

Phèdre ! We had to read this book in school and i couldn't go through it, it was so fucking boring and uninteresting but the teacher would always say: "but it's a classic". You know what ? Maybe it was back in the 17th century but today it's as interesting as watching paint dry.

 

[Ekit]

The Cather in the Rye. The absolute worst pile of shit I've ever read. NOTHING HAPPENS! You just follow a boring, unlikable whiner walking around doing nothing.

Never understood why that book was so revered, if someone has an explanation I would love to hear it.

 

[McMullen]

Life of Pi. I can't even explain what happens except that there was a tiger. And he was on a boat...

Sounds like the movie trailer was the most perfect adaptation of a book ever then.

Jane Eyre did damage to my appreciation for literature that would not be undone for several years. Mission accomplished, high school English!

 

[Billy D Williams]

To Kill a Mockingbird.

How can you not like To Kill a Mockingbird?!?!?!

Then again my 2 picks are There Eyes Were Watching God (not sure if that's a 'classic') and Catcher in the Rye. I REALLY fucking wanted to like Catcher in the Rye, but I couldn't get past page 100. It might be fucking brilliant in the 2nd half, at this point I can't bother trying it again because if you can't draw me in within an hour of reading (in my opinion) you have failed as a author.

 

[Lynx]

Catcher in the Rye. The entire time I was reading it I kept thinking "aaaany second now..." , and then it was finished and I was disappointed. Sort of like a night of dull, pointless sex where neither party gets to finish, then you put your clothes on and go "meh."

I hope I can re-read it in a few years and appreciate it more.

 

[Rai^3]

I know I'll piss off a lot of people when I say this, but Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain. Absolutely sterile of personality, doesn't even bother trying to engage the reader.

Wait, shit, I can think of one line that made me giggle a little bit, but only because it was so unexpected. "I think... that it doesn't like being poked at."

Ender's Game was far from terrible, but I felt like I had to force myself to finish it (and I'm glad I did, the ending was beautiful), but that may have been my own high expectations. Speaker for the Dead was a 'gasm, though.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

The Cather in the Rye by far is the most boring book that I have ever read mostly because of the main character.

 

[IndieGinge]

The Plague by Camus, anything by Jane Austen (I have a particularly strong dislike of Pride and Prejudice). These are books designed to make people dislike literature.

We'll just have to agree to disagree about The Plague. But anyways...I'd say The Poisonwood Bible. I enjoyed Adah's POV chapters, but I found the main perspectives to just be...well, overly familiar and uninteresting. Mostly this is because the characters are all supposed to represent different American/Western reactions to life in Africa, so they are in fact, derived from certain archetypes from real life, but I understood what the author was mostly trying to say like, a hundred pages in, and it's a 400-500 page novel. Maybe my memory's tainted because I read it along a class of underachievers who I had to TA for in High School, but I really didn't care for what was going on, even though lots of shit happened.