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

wrightguy0

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Wuthering Heights, stupid and horrible characters making stupid and horrible choices that go against any and all reason, it's 18th century twilight if you must know, except the man the female lead pines over is much more abusive.

women's literature has been dreck for centuries, twilight and 50 shades are nothing new.
 

Mana Fiend

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Guitarmasterx7 said:
Anyways, when I do read I usually get recommendations from people or read things that seem interesting, so my worst list boils down to school curriculum, but to me it probably goes to "To Kill a Mockingbird." Seriously fuck that book. People seem to remember the whole racism court thing as what that book was about, when really that doesn't even get introduced until well over halfway in, and ends chapters before the book is over. The whole first half has so much useless stuff, which is drawn out horribly by the authors tendency to go into an unnecessary amount of detail. (seriously. 3 fucking pages to describe a tree with a hole in it.) Probably not the worst book I've read but definitely the most difficult to stay engaged in.
I absolutely love To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch is a badass, and there are a lot of great moments in it. The film adaptation is also pretty awesome. There are moments which are slow, I'll give you that (I do remember the tree bit), but it's easily my favourite book I studied at school.

Wise Children by Angela Carter. We had to read it at A-Level. I can see why it was chosen for the class - I was the only guy in the English Literature lessons, and it focused entirely around female issues. It's also incredibly anti-men, and the one male who's painted in any good light may well be involved in an incestuous relationship with the main character.
 

ezaviel

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Hmm, probably the first one that comes to mind is War and Peace.
As my father used to say, "War and Peace is a book you read so you can say you have read it, not to enjoy it."
My father was a strange man.

One book that was so boring that I didnt actually finish it? People Might Hear You.

Though some of the books that people found boring kind of make me sad for the state of modern palates. Starship Troopers? LoTR? I just don't get that. Then again, I guess if you read them expecting the movie, you might be disapointed.
 

breadsammich

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I don't know if it's been said already, but OLD MAN and the FRIGGIN' SEA! Well, I guess it would be unfair to call it "boring" . . . It elicited a very intense reaction--ANGER. I was so mad that after all the pointless ranting that Santiago does over God knows how many pages, he returns with NOTHING. GRAARGH! I guess it's supposed to be tragic, but the only tragedy I saw was the time I'll never get back.
 

CJ1145

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SecretNegative said:
The books aren't even intelligent in the slightest, the bad guys are bad through and through, because "lolreasons" and "lolcorrupted", the good guys are fucking saints who wouldn't do a bad thing ever.

Furthermore, Tolkien fucking sabotages his own writing. He establishes that the ring corrupts everyone nearby and has great power, only the Hobbits are only able to resist it, because... uhm... they don't have as big ambitions as the other races, I guess? But then Faramir comes and fucking demolishes that idea by immediatly resisting it's power, I guess, well, fuck that. Then Bombadill comes and does fucking nothing, and is completly out of place.
If you hate the books you hate the books, but I think you missed a point I'd like to clear up. Tolkien wasn't portraying the Hobbits as better. And certainly not because they're Hobbits. He was espousing the virtue of humility. Grandiose people like Galadriel and humans with desires of restoring their kingdom were susceptible to its power because of their ambitions. Hobbits like Sam just wanted to find a nice Hobbit girl and settle down in a nice hole with a pretty garden, and Tolkien was saying "That's the right idea". Faramir was similarly capable of resisting it, at least for a time, because he wasn't looking to be a king or anything, he just wanted to be loved as much as his brother was.

And Tolkien was actually deeply bothered later in life by his decision to make the orcs unanimously evil, as it didn't sit right with his views that the individual was responsible for their morality, not simply what they were born as. He died before he could put anything to writing, but he suggested later in life that the orcs had a society that we never saw, and all that we saw in the books were those that chose to/were coerced to work for Sauron.

Can't help you with Tom Bombadil though. He's weird. He's essentially if one of the Great Old Ones from Cthulhu wandered into Middle Earth, and was secretly a swell guy.

To be more ON TOPIC, my most hated book for being boring is definitely Leviathan by Hobbes. It's interesting in concept but Christ is it dry.
 

The Diabolical Biz

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This has been quite an interesting thread to read. I actually enjoyed a lot of the books that people have listed here (despite having studied some of them), like Catch-22, The Great Gatsby, Emma, Frankenstein, The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Rings, 1984 etc.

There are however a few books that I haven't finished, not even because I disliked them, but because I just never got around to them. The two that immediately spring to mind are 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, and the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervin Peake. I recall actually enjoying them, getting maybe two thirds of the way through the former and halfway through the second book of the latter, however evidently something must have come up - maybe I got a new book that I was more immediately drawn to, or maybe I misplaced them for a while, but when I rejoined them I couldn't recall what exactly was going on and I steadily lost interest from thereon in.

Something like that actually happened to me a while back, when I was reading 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. I stopped reading it and couldn't get back into it, however one summer when I had a lot of time and not a lot of things to do, I picked it up again, got right into it from the get-go and finished it in a few days. It's actually one of my favourite books now (purely by merit of having an incredible story).

One thing I find - and I realise that I'm rambling on a little here - is that I enjoyed these books far more in hindsight, when I look back and reflect upon them. That's why I nearly always try to finish books even if I'm stuck in a fairly boring part, as often the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To take a more recent example, over the summer I read the book 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. That book was looooong (like 1000 pages or so) and a lot of it felt slightly esoteric (which I suppose is in keeping with the plot of the novel) and deliberately mystifying, which could have led to it feeling lazy with a kind of manufactured intellect (which is slightly how I felt about The Road), however once you reached the end of the novel, and its deeply satisfying conclusion (which I won't spoil) it felt like a lot of the strands (though not all) were drawn together and one (or at least I) was left feeling like it had all been worthwhile. Obviously this is very personal to me, and I'm sure there are some people out there who both read it and hated it but I guess that kind of sums up my ethos with that kind of literature.

That's not to say that there is nothing that I've disliked or found boring, which I guess is kind of the point of the thread, but I guess what I'm saying is that even when I've found a book dull and uninteresting I've still usually managed to take something from it that made it worthwhile.
 

Branindain

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JomBob said:
When I was in secondary school my mother told me that I should read a greater variety of books than my usual fantasy and science fiction. So I picked up Gone With The Wind. If I ever read Mein Kampf then Gone With The Wind might get demoted to being the second most racist thing I've ever read. None of the characters were sympathetic; the nicest one, Scarlet's original crush, joins the Klu Klux Klan and its like the author doesn't notice that this takes away his nice guy status.
I actually read Mein Kampf a few years back, when I found it in the library and morbid curiosity took over. It's a strange experience because it's mostly quite normal and reasonable but punctuated by bursts of hate-filled ranting. Kind of like a regular guy wrote a book while a raving lunatic hid behind his desk and sabotaged his work every time he took a coffee break.

Anyway, in response to the original post, The Chocolate Wars was pretty bad but I'd give it to Wuthering Heights. I could barely get started.
 

flakmagnet

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To kill a mockingbird. I had to read it for English class. At the time I had no frame of reference for any of the themes in the book, and I was bored to tears by it. I was sneaking in other books under the dust jacket of that one. And then I found out the other class in our year was studying lord of the flies. I was so jealous.
 

BlumiereBleck

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Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Good god! What a boring book. I did like the social criticism, like with the Summoner, nicely put Mr. Chaucer. But you could spice up the story a bit more.
 

Penguin_Factory

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The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is the most boring novel I've ever read. The book is padded to an even more ludicrous degree than most epic fantasy, and almost nothing happens. Massive stretches of this novel- literally hundreds of pages- could be excised without affecting the story.
 

Glongpre

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antigodoflife said:
Glongpre said:
Life of Pi. I can't even explain what happens except that there was a tiger. And he was on a boat...
It wasn't a tiger... but there was definitely a boat. 1 out of 2 ain't bad though.
No? Am I going blind?

No but seriously, there is a tiger.
 

wintercoat

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I'm going to go with The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It took me three tries to get through it. I just found it to be a boring slog through a generic fantasy world. And the reveal about the sword at the end is just the most ridiculous tripe ever. I liked the two sequels, though. They were pretty good.
 

Wereduck

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It's too painful to read through 11 pages of crappy book citations but just in case somehow nobody's mentioned it yet:

War - and - Peace

The Lord of the Rings was heavily padded but still entertaining.
I thoroughly enjoyed Moby Dick and, although it isn't a proper book, read and enjoyed an english translation of Wagner's Ring cycle too.
In contrast, War and Peace was fucking endless and aside from being a smug, self-justifying wank-job, completely pointless.
 

RedDeadFred

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May 13, 2009
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Owyn_Merrilin said:
RedDeadFred said:
The Wheel of Time books. I read 5 of them before finally stopping. There's so many characters and they mostly do nothing except talk. That would be fine if the dialogue was top notch but it's mediocre for the most part.
Just checking, you read the first five, and not, like, 6-10, right? :p

The first five are action packed and pretty fast paced, as are the last four, but even the most rabid fan of the series complains about how much it slowed down in the middle, especially books 9 and 10.
I dunno, it was such a long time ago. Maybe I just couldn't appreciate parts of the books. However, once everyone was split up, it felt to me like it slowed down a ton. I may have enjoyed the first two or three but they definitely didn't leave a lasting impression.
 

Mr C

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I don't want to mention anything I've read for work or study. For leisure, the honour goes to Interview with a Vampire. It's the only book I've started and not finished, it's so boring.