What is the most boring book you have ever read?

[kev67]

The book I am currently reading on John Stuart Mill's essays will take some beating, but I do not think that will be the most boring I've ever read. I think that book was James the Brother of Jesus by Robert Eisenman. I read it after it was recommended by Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent in the The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which I started reading at bedtime and did not stop still I had finished.

[EmptySeraph]

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.

[bounty]

I think I am on record in a half dozen places saying close to what im about to say just now and it might surprise folks who've not heard me say it before: moby dick and a catcher in the rye.

id also add anne tyler's the accidental tourist and zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

[PoeticPassions]

I think I am on record in a half dozen places saying close to what im about to say just now and it might surprise folks who've not heard me say it before: moby dick and a catcher in the rye.



I think I will have to second Moby Dick, as blasphemous as that may be for some. Though I read it when I was really young and still have a lot of vivid memories of the novel and the scenes described in it.

Also, there were a number of textbooks or technical books throughout college that would be worthy of being on this list. And even more controversial, perhaps, but I could never get through Heart of Darkness.

[Lendo]

It's not that it was the most boring book i have ever read, but i got disappointed with "We" by Zamiatine.

[bounty]

passions---what made moby dick all the more heinously boring (a little hyperbole there? laughs) is that the story could have sooooo good. I went in thinking it was actually going to be an adventure, but instead it was a treatise on whaling.

[Magnocrat]

Why bore yourself ? why read or listen to what you don't like? What sort of perversity is that? Everything is worth a try and sometimes a retry when your ten years older.

[Lokasenna]

A friend of mine gave up on Moby Dick the other day, for the reasons specified above. I don't agree, though I must admit that the chapters on whaling technique were nowhere near as engaging as the chapters containing actual plot. I think the great thing that makes Moby Dick so exceptional is Melville's astonishing use of language, rather than the plot per se.

I'm sure it isn't the most boring book I've read, but the first one that popped into my head was Defoe's Moll Flanders. That was a real slog to get through, and probably not worth the effort.