Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Finally, Infinite Jest was abysmally dull. There are paragraphs in this book that go on for three pages. One paragraph! With it's 1000+ page count, I just keep the tome around in case I ever need to club an elephant to death.
Noooooo!!!
Okay, maybe.
I forced myself to get through that book, and generally I did like it, but it was a chore. His writing style is a lot of fun.
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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Guns, Germs and Steel by Michael Diamond was very dull, but the subject matter was interesting enough that I was able to power through it and finish. I really enjoyed this book. Diamond's Collapse, on the other hand was more dull with less interesting subject matter. Never finished it.
I really liked Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I haven't read Collapse.
And I think it's Jared Diamond, not Michael Diamond.
--Erik
crime and punishment -
I've tried drunk, i've tried sober - its a no go!
the cleric quintet and sword of truth series - utter tripe!
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The big one: Henry David Thoreau's Walden. 'Nuff said.
Runner-up: The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. Normally, I find Tolkien palatable, but this one was too much. The syntax didn't help, either. (ex: "The Noldor sent a war party of peace to meet the forces of Morgoth. But they were ambushed. And there were Balrogs.")
Runner-up: Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft. Normally, I'm a huge fan, but this one blew up in my face. It was like reading the drug-addled ramblings of an opium-addicted acid-head on meth.
There was one translation of Beowulf that turned my mind into bat guano for a few days. However, other translations I've read were quite good.
The Wheel of TIme, in my book, falls into the "when is this going to f~+!ing end?" category, as does Harry Potter.
And just for the record, I actually like Shakespeare.
I think it'd have to be Crime and Punishment.
Man, that's one of my favourite novels... for real.
I'll have to go with Moby Dick as the most boring "classic" I've read thus far.
I've tried reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco several times, and I've never been able to finish. On the first page there were three words I had to look up (and I think I've got a pretty good vocabulary). One of the words wasn't even in my dictionary, and I had to find one of those thick, encyclopedic ones to find the definition. And this was on the first page.
Wait, I think I claimed above that I'd never finished a boring book, then your post prodded this one out of the mists. I read it during my undergrad degree because I thought it would be cool.
It wasn't.
Although I met some really nice ladies by the OED at the main library.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 32
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Classic - anything, ANYTHING, by Thomas Hardy. If I am ever again forced to read two pages describing exactly what the trees look like today, before some boring bint gets all upset by an equally boring nobleman riding past (on a well-described horse), I'll be forced to spoon out my own eyes.
I also got bored with No Logo, and started skipping chunks of Guns, Germs and Steel.
I expected to get bored in House of Leaves but it was a win!
Classic: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I wanted to see the village carpet bombed multiple times.
Other: Any Wheel of Time book. I never cared for anyone in the first two books, so I never continued the series.
And Eregon felt like it had been done a hundred times before.
Classic - anything, ANYTHING, by Thomas Hardy. If I am ever again forced to read two pages describing exactly what the trees look like today, before some boring bint gets all upset by an equally boring nobleman riding past (on a well-described horse), I'll be forced to spoon out my own eyes.
Again I agree with my twin. Hardy's Return of the Native in a no-holes barred barfarama. 50 pages to describe a heath? Get me the bucket.
classics: the bible and the quran are awful and incoherent. Joyce's Ulysses makes more sense and is more relevant.
Whoa! Don't stand too close to this guy -- he's going to get zapped, big time :P
That has to be the most vicious literary comparison I've ever read.
classics: the bible and the quran are awful and incoherent. Joyce's Ulysses makes more sense and is more relevant.Whoa! Don't stand too close to this guy -- he's going to get zapped, big time :P
That has to be the most vicious literary comparison I've ever read.
vicious?
why?
Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clark - I read it twice and I still don't know what it's about.
Tolstoy is one of my favorite authors. I've read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Illych, and Resurrection (the english translations, anyway). He does have a thing for long drawn-out death scenes. A gut wound that takes two weeks to finish someone off, Tuberculosis, internal bleeding (takes the whole novella for the character to die).
I would rate Resurrection as dreadfully boring, except to compare with his earlier books (also, he wrote this book to finance a cult).
All time: My Antonia by Willa Cather — pure rubbish!
Most recent example: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. It was like godawful Terry Gilliam-inspired fanfic.
I also fall into the camp of people who can appreciate Tolkien at the academic level but would NEVER read any of his works for entertainment.
The Great Gatsby.
I tried to read the Wheel of Time and gave up.
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Director of Sales
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The Great Gatsby.
I tried to read the Wheel of Time and gave up.
I'm re-reading Wheel of Time right now. Which I read in high school and early college and LOVED... at least until the series completely fell apart IMHO.
I knew this would be an exercise in self-torture, but I had no idea how much Jordan's lousy writing would annoy me now that I'm more well-read and notice it. It's painful.
It's a lot like when I went back and watched ET as an adult. You just can't go home again.
And I think it's Jared Diamond, not Michael Diamond.
--Erik
D'oh.
I absolutely HATED Frankenstein. Hated it. Mostly because it was awful.I understand this makes me a bad person, but I felt I needed to share.
No fair. You beat me to the punch with my first pick.
Ulysses and Wuthering Heights... many books you guys have named make my 'most boring' list.
Most boring "classic" - 1001 Arabian friggin Nights. I forced myself to finish but my GAWD, I had no problem falling asleep each fuggin night.
Most boring "recent" - Plains of Passage by Jean Auel. I just really didn't need the detail of every tree, blade of grass & every flippin' mountain range. Just tell me they saw some beautiful scenery & it would have cut the book in 1/2 AT LEAST!
Tale of the Comet.
I have owned this novel, based on the classic second edition boxed adventure set for almost 10 years. I have yet to get all the way through it... However if you happen to be an insomniac in seeking a way to get to sleep i do advise purchasing of this book... It is that bad.
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Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6
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Most boring "classic" - 1001 Arabian friggin Nights. I forced myself to finish but my GAWD, I had no problem falling asleep each fuggin night.
Hmm. I have to admit, getting through Grave's Greek Myths was pretty amazingly dull. I had to approach it like homework.
Anything by Jane Austen or Emily Bronte puts me to sleep within seconds, with Wuthering Heights being the worst offender. Social etiquette and marriage arrangements are probably at the bottom of my list of Human Knowledge To Be Acquired.
Hah, I on the other hand love descripitions of complicated society norms and thus love Austen (and many Japanese authors as well).
There are many books and series I have given up after 20 pages because they were so boooring (hello, Mr. Proust). But there is one book I am trying to read through, with approximately two chapters per year (I am almost halfway through)...Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Now, I love Arthuriana and happily devoured Chretien de Troyes and even Geoffrey of Monmouth but Malory is just so damn boring (even while being one of the key texts and such). It's all descriptions of which knight fought against which knight after which he teamed up with another knight to fight fourth knight...like reading worst parts of the Bible.
Bible is actually rather enjoyable book, you just shouldn't read it like normal book from cover to cover because at end of Exodus wen you get to those nametable and cleanliness laws it becomes sheer punishment...but once you get past those, it turns out to be rather good again. Forget Moses, jump right to Job or Ester or Amos or other more enjoyable parts.
Wow, what a hard thread to read. I'm seeing so many of my favorites pulled down. Fortunately, a lot of crap has been mentioned as well.
For me, Steinbeck and Faulkner hurt. Really hurt. Thank God you only go through high school once.
I managed a bookstore for a couple of years and found myself reading a lot of the "great contemporary authors of fiction". Blech. They all ran together in my head, and now they are all becoming movies. I was able to avoid the Da Vinci code, however.
I really liked Moby Dick. It has some very boring sequences, but also some very well done atmospheric descriptions and great characters. I reread it as inspiration for a naval campaign we played a year ago.
I dont disagree with you on this, but my main gripe with the book was that too much of it read like a technical guide to whaling, that, and the chapter "the whiteness of the whale" turned me off, 50 pages to describe how white the whale is? i mean, C'mon!
Okay, the title says "ever", so I'd have to say when I tried reading "Spellfire" by Ed Greenwood in middle school many years ago, I couldn't take it. I haven't picked it up since, but I doubt I'd like it much today. Nothing but respect for Greenwood and the Forgotten Realms, but Spellfire was painful.
Some runners up: Lord of the Rings, Remembrance of Things Past (nice writing but could we actually get somewhere?), essays of Plato...I'm sure there are many more but these just come to mind.
Things to forget:
- LOTR. I read this in high school after loving The Hobbit a few years before, but after about a dozen tries, I got to where the ring is destroyed and saw there was another 150 or so pages and just dropped it.
- Wheel of Time. I got on this bandwagon when it started up and I was in high school. Now that I've doubled in age and the series will never be properly finished (RIP Mr. Jordan), I'm contemplating just getting rid of my hardcover series. I liked the first six books, but there was a great decline of quality after that - and most say after three they saw the decline.
I did like the Cleric Quintet, but took it for what it was - pulp fantasy. I didn't try to get anything else other than pure entertainment out of it, and it succeeded in that. It was just corny and fun.
It's weird how one person's meat is the other's poison when it comes to lit.
For instance I loved War and Peace, couldn't stand Crime and Punishment. I never even finished it...it was like talking to a slow depressing drunk.
Moby Dick was more weird than boring for me. All the sly homosexual references, the long discussions of odd stories and whale 'biology'. I did like some of the dialogue though it was weird...I wondered if people ever actually talked like that.
You know who else is weird btw? D.H. Lawrence. It's amazing to me that his books were scandalous. I had trouble actually finishing Women in Love, and Lady Chatterly's Lover was tiresome and preachy.
I loved La Morte D'Arthur and Lord of the Rings, but I have to admit that I read them when I was a) on a long trip with my hated Stepmother--anything was a delicious escape. I might be biased. b) feverish and sick. i should reread the books and see if they're still enjoyable.
The Great Gatsby.
I tried to read the Wheel of Time and gave up.
Those were going to be my answers exactly. I put down the first volume of Wheel of Time with only 70 pages left and never picked it up again.
All this talk about the Cleric Quintet but none of RA Salvatore's other books?
Moby Dick. In high school, and the teacher was a member of the Melville Society and published a scholarly article on it. You think if anyone could sell a book, he could.
Moby Dick is only loosely fiction. The plot is just a frame for a long and extremely tedious ethnography about whaling and a few short stories Melville wrote previously. The man could even suck all the joy out of a bunch of drunk sailors putting on a whale's foreskin and dancing around. If he wrote a century later, Melville would have probably been an awesome anthropologist. Instead he ended up a painful writer.
Honorable mention:
My Antonia. I loathe the whole genre of domestic frontier life fiction because of Willa Cather. In fact, I really don't like the daily life, domestic, ordinary people doing mostly ordinary things sort of fiction at all. If I want to read about ordinary events, or challenging social mores, there are whole shelves of non-fiction that do the job better.
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I really liked Moby Dick. It has some very boring sequences, but also some very well done atmospheric descriptions and great characters. I reread it as inspiration for a naval campaign we played a year ago.
I dont disagree with you on this, but my main gripe with the book was that too much of it read like a technical guide to whaling, that, and the chapter "the whiteness of the whale" turned me off, 50 pages to describe how white the whale is? i mean, C'mon!
Your right about that. Moby Dick rewrite no. 1:
"Hey, dude, that whale is really white."
"Yep."
Those were going to be my answers exactly. I put down the first volume of Wheel of Time with only 70 pages left and never picked it up again.
I think I dropped Wheel of Time around the same pagecount too. My impression was "Eddings characters in Shire", and I never looked back...
There was another long fantasy series, I think by Tad Williams? Which also got dropped quickly, because I couldn't find a single original thought in those pages...
I have read some Salvatore books and while I have managed to finish all of them I think I am done with Salvatore.
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Criticisms of Twain, Shakespeare and Tolkien hurt my heart.
Ulysses was terrible as was Portrait of the Artist, but anything by Thomas Hardy took boredom to the next level. All his books are the same, so it's hard to pick one out of the crowd, but if I had to I'd say Jude the Obscure was my least favorite.
And in the modern fantasy genre I'd have to Say the Wheel of Time series. Any book after about the third one will do. Bunch of bickering women who never do anything but retell what's already happened and argue over weak male characters. Ugh. Someone told me the last couple actually started to move the story again, but the thought of trying to wade back through the goat-chokers in the middle of the series throws me into convulsions.
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Classic - anything, ANYTHING, by Thomas Hardy. If I am ever again forced to read two pages describing exactly what the trees look like today, before some boring bint gets all upset by an equally boring nobleman riding past (on a well-described horse), I'll be forced to spoon out my own eyes.
Damn. I posted before I saw this. Was that the one with the girl in the garden eating strawberries? We had to read 4 or 5 of his books in high school and they all started to run together after awhile. There's a chunk of my life I'll never get back.
Okay, the title says "ever", so I'd have to say when I tried reading "Spellfire" by Ed Greenwood in middle school many years ago, I couldn't take it. I haven't picked it up since, but I doubt I'd like it much today. Nothing but respect for Greenwood and the Forgotten Realms, but Spellfire was painful.
I'm glad that I am not alone in this.
It was the first WoTC novel that I ever read, and the last. After reading it I threw it in the bin.That book was a load of cack.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I am not sure if it is considered a classic, but it is the only book ever that I could not force myself to finish because of boredom.
Read the first page of Great Expectations and felt my eyelids droop. "Sword of Shannara" I actually, against my better judgement, read to the end despite hating it, and being outraged at how awful it was...
I generally try to avoid classics. I read 10 pages of Moby Dick and never picked it up again.
'The Importance of being Earnest", a play by some English guy who's name eludes me was terrible. I HATED it.
The Comedy of Errors, Shakespear. The rest of our group loves it except for me and one other person. I can't stand it.
The first four Harry Potter books and, to a lesser extent the last three. They're utterly predictable, I hate the main character and don't care for Rowling's writing style. The fifth book made a pretty good movie though. For the most part I find myself wondering "What the f~+~ is the point?" when I read a Harry Potter book.
I absolutely HATED Frankenstein. Hated it.
Mostly because it was awful.
I understand this makes me a bad person, but I felt I needed to share.
No. It does not make you a 'bad' person. What would that make me, then, I ask you?! Good?! NO!
I, am the Evil one, and I hated it too! Even when listening to La Javanaise, it was unbearable!!1!
>:-D
"Sword of Shannara" I actually, against my better judgement, read to the end despite hating it, and being outraged at how awful it was...
Oh, yeah, I absolutely agree. I read it after the Dragon magazine special issue (with a great Tony Diterlizzi illustration) and it was just lousy. People say Eragon plagiarized Lord of the Rings, but Sword of Shannara is probably just as bad.
I started reading The Iliad in 1989 - I'm on like page 15... it is soooo boring.
Arctaris - "some English guy"? Only Oscar Wilde, one of the 19th century's greatest wits! And he was Irish ;)
Trust me, the vast majority of plays are better acted than read. Comedy of Errors can be a real hoot when seen live.
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I generally try to avoid classics. I read 10 pages of Moby Dick and never picked it up again.
'The Importance of being Earnest", a play by some English guy who's name eludes me was terrible. I HATED it.
The Comedy of Errors, Shakespear. The rest of our group loves it except for me and one other person. I can't stand it.
The first four Harry Potter books and, to a lesser extent the last three. They're utterly predictable, I hate the main character and don't care for Rowling's writing style. The fifth book made a pretty good movie though. For the most part I find myself wondering "What the f#&@ is the point?" when I read a Harry Potter book.
Beside the comment about Oscar Wilde... Apart from Harry Potter and Moby Dick, most of those are plays, not books to be read. As such, you are supposed to watch them being performed. Shakespeare, for example, can be absolutely brilliant when done right. I saw Henry the VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 on successive weeks, and it was rivetting (though the comedies are tougher, as humour has changed - there is always some annoying fool/jester character and the wordplay, puns and jokes just don't make sense anymore - but again, with the right production, can be a lot of fun). The Comedy of Errors is one of his more accessible plays, though, and I enjoyed it when I saw it.
This will probably get me hunted down by creative writing students from small liberal arts colleges around the country, but I've never been able to stand Hemingway.
I started reading The Iliad in 1989 - I'm on like page 15... it is soooo boring.
Eight, sir; seven sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun.
Most boring classic would have to be Heart of Darkness. It took me three tries to read it for uni and it's only a skinny little book.
Most boring contemporary book... I think... Lord of the Rings. Read it as a 12 year old to impress my parents, tried again four times since and never got past the Council of Elrond.
And I think it's Jared Diamond, not Michael Diamond.
--Erik
Mike D, rockin awn an awn, Mike D, till the break a dawn!
Yeah, somehow I don't think the authors of Guns, Germs and Steel and You Gotta Fight For Your Right to Party are one and the same. Though that would be awesome.
When I first read Lord of the Rings at age of...15? I loved it. After that I have tried to reread it two, three times and manage to get to Moria until I am bored.
Funnily enough, I rather like Hobbit and Silmarillion.
I tried to read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner once after recommendations of several worthy people but gave that up...I was not bored, quite the opposite, individual chapters were pretty powerful but since the whole thing is told in first person narration by at least dozen narrators, the whole thing became an unreadable mess...maybe if I read it five times and made notes who was who and what were they doing I could make sense of it...but didn't feel like it was worth the trouble.
When I first read Lord of the Rings I loved it. After that I have tried to reread it two, three times and manage to get to Moria until I am bored.
Yeah, I remember it being a LOT cooler when I was 10; I tried to re-read them when the movies came out and just couldn't do it. There was not a gram of interest in my entire being about another whiny hobbit. I still enjoy "The Hobbit," though; go figure.
But, to touch on others mentioned, Walden hooked me immediately. That dude Thoreau knew what he was about. And whoever knocked Natty Bumppo: you must not be from upstate NY! And--I'm not kidding on this one--I get a huge kick out of "Moby Dick" as well; I've read that one like three times--love the parts where he's basically just rambling to string the reader along, then checks on you in a few pages to see if you fell for it, and then throws in some awesome literary magic to dazzle you back into compliance. Masterful stuff, that. I also thought "Heart of Darkness" was incredibly cool. (I hated all of them in high school, btw, but loved them like 15 years later; go figure. Thomas Hardy still tilts the bore-o-meter with me, though. Excrutiatingly.)
Whoever said "Da Vinci Code"--I feel your angst. I suspect that only people who have never read any espionage or police procedural books ever could possibly enjoy that one. Kinda like "The Firm," which I was only BARELY able to finish. That rubbish was almost as bad as anything by Dickens (also mentioned previously), who is most certainly one of my top 10 least favorites.
Last night I finished Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential." Thought it would be awful, with that clipped, verb-less diction, but it hooked me right in the gut: that just might be the LEAST boring book I've ever read.