What is the most BORING book you have ever read?

[amykhar]

We talk about good books, what really BORING books have you suffered through?

Amy

[Dani257]

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I've had books that I wanted to throw in a rage. This one made me want to sleep for a hundred years.

[rich2003dm]

I'm rather compulsive about finishing books that I've started. I can only remember one that was so horribly boring, confusing, and senseless that it overcame my compulsiveness.

Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum."

I tried. I really tried! Halfway through I had to throw the damned thing away.

Rich

[quasar]

Foucault's Pendulum was boring, but it was a lively entertaining interesting read compared to the most boring book ever written....

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I mean come on, 20 pages describing a freaking coffin? Spare me.

Janice

[hypotenuse]

Travel, fix broken leg, have sex. Travel, fix broken leg, have sex ...

Amy

There ya go.

Lynne

[Grouch]

While it has certain merits and I would still classify it among Great Literature, I had a hard time getting through The Ambassadors by Henry James.

[frazzledspice]

As a genre, I hate fantasy SF.

My husband loves the stuff. When we were first dating he gave me a book, "Dwellers of the Mirage", by AE Merritt. I used it to cure attacks of insommnia.

Then I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to please him. I know that this is a favorite of many, but it's very difficult for people who aren't really interested in wizards and hobbits and adventures and quests to maintain their interest in these topics.

[emeleel]

Fraz, I LOVE sci-fi and fantasy, and I haven't been able to make it through any of the LOTR books! I've tried several times, really I have, but I can't seem to make it past page 2.

[Grouch]

Me three!
I tried to work my way through "The Hobbit," but withered out halfway through. Seeing the Ralph Bakshi version of LOTR in the theater and falling asleep--I mean, really falling asleep, with mouth open and chin slicked with drool and the whole nine yards--didn't help, either. I'd read "Sword of Shannara" a year before and all I could think was, "Man, they really ripped off Terry Brooks!"

I know, I know...sacrilege to all you JRR Tolkein fans. My sincerest apologies for finding his work dry. I really do need to give it a second chance.

On the other hand, I can hardly wait for the Peter Jackson version to hit the big screen in December. I hope the rest of the movie lives up to the promise of the previews.

[tipu]

Originally posted by rich2003dm
I'm rather compulsive about finishing books that I've started. I can only remember one that was so horribly boring, confusing, and senseless that it overcame my compulsiveness.

Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum."

Eh yeh, I've the same compulsion, and I grit my teeth midway through this whale and made it thru, and had ground sandpaper in my mouth by that time... dunno, wazzit the Rosicrucians or the Freemasons in there, it just read like Eco was farting around...

Um, I don't think I recall most of the boring books I've gone thru. A Kerouac title comes to mind. Painful to me is the memory of getting thru Christie's Passenger to Frankfurt.


It's a lucky thing that most religions feature a Powerful Being who is merciful and forgiving in at least one of Her/His moods/incarnations, or certain toadstools who have a little trouble appreciating LOTR would be feeling a bit hot under their collars...

[murasaki]

Anna Karenina, at least the parts that weren't about her (which was the majority of the novel).

Grouch - Tolkien is "great" in the way that Hemingway was "great": they were literary pioneers for their time. Their style and skill has since been copied, emulated, and just plain ripped off. I didn't find Tolkien that fantastic either because I read a whole bunch of other good fantasy and sci-fi authors before I read him.

--naomi

WARNING
Okay, folks.
Time to be extremely mature.
My answer, dead rock-solid honest answer coming up.


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The Bible, both Old and New Testaments. I believe the version I've read most is the King James Version.

[hadassahchana[$]]

I don't know if this could be called boring - but I have never been so frustrated in my life by a book as when I read 'The Unconsoled' by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I loved 'Remains Of The Day', and grabbed 'Unconsoled' with the intention of having a wonderful read and then writing a great review.

Wrong.

It doesn't have a plot, exactly. It doesn't have a setting - well, not really.

The main character keeps changing in his relationships with the other characters - who just change or disappear.

I even read it twice, just to make sure I hadn't gotten stupid all of a sudden.

Still couldn't make it make sense.

Yes, I guess it was boring, because it felt like such a complete waste of time and paper- and to top it off, I never even got a review out of it.

Cindy

[MrsNormanMaine[$]]

Obviously none of you has really tried reading Hegel or Kierkegaard.

MNM

[Grouch]

Originally posted by MrsNormanMaine
Obviously none of you has really tried reading Hegel or Kierkegaard.

MNM

Oh yes I have. "Tried" being the operative word. In order to bring up a below-average grade in my 11th-grade English class (yes, it's true! I almost got a C in English), my teacher assigned me extra credit, which included reading H. and K., plus Ruskin, Diderot, Kant and Rousseau. This teacher was the same one who'd written an unpublished novel called The Scatalogical Implications of Brick-Laying. I sh*t you not!

[ThePirateKing]

Call me an uncultured boor (go ahead, it's fun!) but I cannot stand Melville. I suffered through a reading of Billy Budd in high school--the only required reading I ever truly despised--and took a vow of Melvillian abstinence thereafter.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

I had to really struggle to get through some of the descriptive parts of "Moby Dick." Far, far more than I ever wanted to know about whale hunting. I did like "Bartleby the Scrivener" a lot, though. Maybe I just have a short attention span.

I think I got about twenty pages into Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" before giving up. I didn't even attempt to read the other one.

I couldn't finish "The Education of Henry Adams." I really tried. It was a class assignment, and I was usually pretty compulsive about reading assigned books, but I only made it about half-way through. In the class discussion afterwards, the prof asked for a show of hands of who liked the book. Then he said, aha!, that confirmed his theory that men usually like the book a lot more than women do.

I hate living out gender stereotypes.

That book, by the way, was listed as the best book of the 20th century on the Modern Library's list of top 100 non-fiction books. Go figure.

[murasaki]

Ah Moby Dick! I completely forgot about that one, mostly because I haven't read it and I refuse to read it. I could never stand Melville's horrible short stories forced upon me in high school so I have no desire to subject myself to ten times the number of pages.

I believe in keeping a few books on my bookshelves that I have never read, just because. Moby Dick is one of them.

--naomi

[jenninca]

Madame Bovary. I had to read it for 12th grade AP English. I tried giving myself a goal--if I read 35 pages a day, I would be finished by the deadline. Every time I tried to read it, I fell asleep, and ended up with about 175 pages (of tiny print in my literature anthology) to read on the night before the deadline.

(Actually, most of the stuff we read in AP English was boring.)

Recently, it's been Pride and Prejudice. My boyfriend wanted me to read it so much that he bought me my own copy. A year later, I'm on page 22. Yuck.

Cindy

[Redlass]

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

I tried three different times over a ten-year period to read that book and just couldn't make myself finish it.

More recently, I thoroughly bored with Modesett's The Shadow Sorceress.

By the time I got to the end of the third series of David Eddings, I was pretty bored. They used the same jokes, same travel, same characters/slightly different names.

[KristenNC]

Let me throw in a popular book (like I'm wont to do.)

Whispers by Dean Koontz. UGH. I so badly wanted the protagonist to be slaughtered.

And I'm with file13 on the Bible - at least a few chapters. A few of them are pretty racy, though.

[soxfan[$]]

Originally posted by murasaki
Ah Moby Dick! I completely forgot about that one, mostly because I haven't read it and I refuse to read it.

You didn't miss anything. If I ever had to burn a book, that would be the one.

Ailsa

[mrisch[$]]

Do boring beginnings count? The two on my list are, I'm told, pretty good books, but I could not get through the first 100 pages or so:

1. The Stand (too bad, as I am a big King fan)
2. Jane Eyre