The Glass Menagerie. The main character and narrator, Tom, spends the entire book/play going on and on about how boring his life is, and how he can't stand the banality of his existence. This is all that happens. It's an entire book of a guy whining about being bored, while his sister whines about not having a husband. I hate this book with a passion, and it is the worst thing I had to read in high school.
The Glass Menagerie is one of the books I will have to read as part of AS level Eng Lit.
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I'm not sure if I have read any downright boring books, but if the question extends to any literature, then Emily Dickinson takes the cake(also what we are studying right now in Eng Lit); maybe one of her poems has some glimmer of passion in it but everything else feels so sterile, so dull and lifeless, that it is a nightmare to read and to analyze.
Of works people might recognize... likely "Ubik" by Phillip K. Dick. Really a lot of his stuff is so tedious.
However while very interesting in understanding from a socio-economic stand the single most painfully dry, rote, tedious and boring book I have ever read without a doubt has to be "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George.
Here, just listen to an excerpt and see if you can go the whole 15 minutes without falling into a coma. Now multiply that by like 30+ chapters or so, and actually having to do the work of reading instead of just listening.
Instead of exploring the characters, it goes on about murders that are poorly explained, some girl shaving her pubic hair, and her obese step-brother neandering around her side while she goes around places and does stuff.
For the first 70 pages, it was funny. Then nothing happened. And then I think there was a lesbian bit. And then I completely blacked out; I was drooling and flicking through the pages but not actually reading.
And I think one of the Darren Shan books (can't remember which one, though) had so little happenings that I just skipped it. I read the next book with complete ease and understood everything.
I like the fact that this thread essentially boils down to ''this book didn't hold my attention therefore it is the worst piece of shit ever'' followed with a description which twists the book's themes and features to absurdity. I mean, really, do all people here have this hate boner against Great Gatsby? No one could appreciate the incredible struggle that Gatsby went through, the language filled with jokes and metaphors in even most basic descriptions and the overall atmosphere? I have books I struggle with too (Thus Spoke Zarathrustra and Infinite Jest are slowly collecting dust somewhere in the bookshelves, unfinished), but I don't dismiss them for that fact alone.
Of Mice and Men, followed closely by Great Expectations. Both nothing but dull characters doing dull things written in the most heavy handed way possible. Both were required reading in my required high school English courses. I like reading many genres of fiction and nonfiction but the stuff I was forced to read in high school makes me never want to read any form of "classic" "literature" again.
It seems to me that the most boring books to read are the award winning novels the teachers choose for you in school. They're not interesting, or modern, or relevant to kids in any way. Even my old principle agrees with me on that, we're de-motivating kids from learning (especially boys whose reading rate has dropped significantly in the past decade) because our award winning novels we're forced to read are just dry and boring and not appropriate for how we think as kids.
I second this. I was an English major - you'd think I'd be immune to kinda slog-ish books. But no. Moby Dick defeated me. 150 pages in, the only thing I could remember was "Call me Ishmael."
The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy. It's nothing but politics and jargon for about 900 or so pages, then about 50 of 'action,' and then another 50 of something else. I don't remember. It's been a while, but not so long as for me to forget that it sucked. I don't even know how I managed to finish it, but I probably wouldn't be too far off if I said I sleep-read half the book.
I read and enjoyed most of Clancy's novels until Executive Orders came out. I only got around 200 or so pages in and had to quit. There was just far too many repetitive scenes of Jack Ryan moaning about how he had to be the President when he didn't want to intermixed with scenes of generic Middle Eastern terrorist characters twirling their mustaches and cackling about how eeeeeevil their plan was. It just wasnt up to the level of quality I had come to expect from him. That was right around the time Clancy started licensing his name out to other, less talented, authors. So I didn't read anything of his written after that.
I just last year went back and re-read Cardinal of the Kremlin though, and that still held up. So, I'd still recommend many of his earlier novels.
Most anything over 100 years old. Specifically Moby Dick.
Seriously if you see an adaptation of it they skip to like the middle of the book because that's when the "story" starts. Everything before that is world and character building. Which Today would be considered poor writing as a good author could incorporate the world and character growth naturally into the story.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I found Victor to be a weak, pathetic, and completely unlikable lead. The monster is, while awesome, somewhat of a nob. And the prose focuses more on the pretty scenery as opposed to the moral issues of the story.
Oh, another warning sign I want to make: Be careful when reading the translated Beowulf (the one I had anyway, but I do not remember who translated it). Simply put, Beowulf has one name and about 14 different titles that the author likes to randomly switch between. Confusing as hell. And somewhat boring. And confusing. Every ten lines I had to keep checking my count of the number of characters in the scene. It's a headache waiting to happen.
As an interesting sidenote, one of the books which I consider most boring is alsoone of my favourites: Mann's Zauberberg, specially the first part, but the sense of boredom plays a central part in the plot and in the general symbolism of the novel, which is curious.
This actually reminds me of a book called "How to Survive in a Science-Fiction Universe." I read it for a sci-fi literature class(great class) and it was boring as all hell. The boring is, in a way, the whole point of the story, but it has great symbolism, and actually manages to have some very interesting moments among the absolute, mind-crushing boredom. However, despite a painfully boring read, it is a blast to analyse and talk about.
I tried to read this recently. I just thought it'd get better. But uh, I gave up a few chapters in.
Dickens bores me to tears. And I read Del Toro's The Strain from start to finish. And promptly added the sequel to my DNR list. >_O
EDIT:
You wouldn't think a novel written by Guillermo del Toro about a zombie-vampire plague would be boring, but you'd be wrong. The 'creepy' scenes weren't all the creepy and what should have been horrifying/disgusting was just disgusting. Also, characters with all the personality of a rock. I don't recommend it.
See, as I like reading and read for my enjoyment, once a book bores me I put it down.
So I can say hardest book I've ever had to read for school is a toss up between Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The first I voluntarily read for a book report in 7th or 8th grade (for those of you across the pond 13/14 years old ish) mostly because my teacher told me there was no way I'd be able to ever finish it or write a proper book report on it. Proved them wrong. But I should have waited at least 2 more years to read it just from the usage of bigger words and such(if I'm recalling correctly as it's been almost 20 years since I last read it). And the second I had to read for my senior year of high school (18 for those across the pond) and had a teacher who expected us to immediately understand it without too much explanation on her part. However I have bought that book and read it about 5 or more times since and understand it a little better but still don't understand it well. But it's at least enjoyable at this point.
I read Catch-22 when I was about 15 or 16. Voluntarily. My boss thought I'd love it. And she was right. It was the #1 book on GoodReads.com's Most Abandoned Classics list. While the book has a plot, it's less important than the themes and satire. And it's funny.
I bought a copy of ayn rands "atlas shrugged" because it was what bioshock is apparently based on. Didnt realise it was a right wing greed is good type of thing, gonna try and give it a go though, though if anyone in the uk wants it ill post it to you for free as the fuckers thicker than harry potter Vii and the bible combined, and looks pretty out of place next to my collection of kesey, kerouuac, thompson and burroughs.
i went in here SPECIFICALLY, to find someone to agree with me.
I'm reading it to get a handle on liberalism, and it is pretty persuasive in a certain amount of it's arguments. But whatever Rand is, she was NOT succinct.
I'm actually discovering I may be having trouble separating taste and my own temperament: I try to give things a chance and can respect if it isn't ultimately "for me," but I feel like lately I'm getting impatient.
I'm in the middle of "World According to Garp." I had read Irving's other book "Owen Meany" and loathed it, but I've come to think that I may have been too harsh because what he considers funny does nothing for me. I want to like Garp - I find a lot of themes he touches on to be interesting and surprisingly similar to things I ponder on my own - but his humor leaves me cold, his characters seem selfish, distant, or unnaturally ridiculous (all three apply to Garp), and Irving actually stops the narrative for several pages to tell us a completely different story - Garp's short stories - from beginning to end, destroying any pacing or momentum towards a thematic point that just drives me nuts.
I'd also apply it to the first "Hunger Games." I wasn't in love with the plot to begin with and it didn't completely win me over in the end, though I find I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. It was the writing itself that bothered me - the prose needed a lot of polish, there were not enough details about the Capital or the Districts to keep me invested, especially for the people who lived there, and Katniss went back and forth between solemn exposition and casual banter in the vein of "...well, y'know, right?" like she was trying to speak to me on a personal level instead of narrating her story. And I counted: it took 130 pages for the games to actually start. Between that and the games themselves just being a walking tour of a forest, I started thinking "In Media Res" - starting the story at the beginning of the games and jumping between timelines - would've been more dynamic.
I will say this for keeping my interest - in addition to partially paying off the "fake romance turned real" angle, the book threw me a curveball at the end that, while ungodly stupid, was an eyebrow raiser:
How, exactly, were the dead tributes brought back to life and turned into zombie werewolves? Oddly enough, the thought of their mutated corpses being killed all over again was more horrific to me than their initial deaths.
5. I can't remember the name it was so bad. same young black girl marries a much older rich black man because her grand mother arranged it or some such then he dies and she marries some slightly older, charismatic dude who starts an all black town then he either dies or she leaves him for some other dude who's a free spirit and then they run away or something and they get stuck in a hurricane and he gets rabbies from a raccoon and goes crazy and tries to kill her so she shoots him. yeah WTF.
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