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Hands down the worst read of my life was "Sons and Lovers". Talk about dry literature, this novel was set on late 1800's around a mining community in Great Britain. It was about 500 pages of the worst Oedipus complex known to man and his divided nonchalance in two terribly dull women. Awful Read. A close second would be Jane Eyre...ugh
I loved Sons and Lovers, plus i was reading it on holiday and made friends with a girl who saw me reading it :D
I had no such luxury. :( It did occur to me, though, that if an intelligent woman would have seen me reading it, perhaps she would have assumed I have a great sense of romance. ha!
I am appalled that none of you have included Ayn Rand's "mesterpiece". The lugubrious tome Atlas Shrugged. It is an endless journey wandering through the catacombs of Ayn Rands objectivist mind. An avowed atheist, perhaps Rand was on to something, god would have spared us this pointless dreck. Her redundant rhetoric made my eyes water as I realized that I still had two-hundred pages left to read.
Moby Dick, hands down. I didn't read it as a requirement in any course I took. I read it because I wanted to know what all the hubbub was about and found that it was about a great be giant nothing.
Interesting that so many chose Moby Dick. It is a very unique work of art, to be sure. There's a block of about 200 pages in the middle of the book that is essentially a whaling textbook. This is extremely difficult to get through. However I think the book is brilliant and Melville's prose is still superior to any other English language writer I have read. His sentences, his vocabulary, are quite simply stunning. I can't count how many sentences I read in that book and realized that it would probably take me 20 minutes just to form a sentence this perfectly and lyrically. While reading that book, I was literally consumed by a feeling of disbelief that a single human being could sit down and create this from his mind. Genius. So don't look at the book as boring or exciting. It's a false and childish dichotomy. Look at conquering this book as an intellectual achievement, like working out your brain. Reading and understanding that book is something to be proud of IMO.
As for boring books, off the top of my head.....
I love Camus, The Plague and The Stranger are two of my favorite books of all-time, but I thought The Fall was oddly boring. I may have rushed through it and perhaps a second read would change my mind.
Recently read All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy and I thought it was far weaker than all the other books of his I've read. Probably 3/4 of that book was fairly unexciting.
Huge Kerouac fan, but I thought Big Sur was kind of boring, at least relative to On the Road and Dharma Bums.
Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. All of the main characters annoyed me. Jude was such a shallow person and Sue well say no more. The only character that I like was Jude's great aunt, and she up and died halfway thru.
I have always enjoyed Hardy's books, but not this one.
My favourite of his was The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Most any novel by Henry James. There are exceptions, of course.
And The Jungle, by God. I appreciate it... I respect it, but I will never read it again.
Well, I'm currently reading Moby Dick and I must say it is indeed very boring.
Great Expectations
or
Less Than Zero
I wanted to add something new here, but alas, it has to be Moby Dick. Hands down worst novel ever.
Has To Be, Hands Down, Twilight.
Eclipse, Moon, whatever they are called.
Pathetic
x
Please do not confuse what you consider boring to poorly written.Quote:
Originally Posted by iamnobody
I think it is funny so many mention Moby Dick, because that was the first actual book I've read (I was around eight), so with hindsight, I guess I couldn't have picked it worse (apart from Ulysses of course). I actually liked it, but maybe that was due to the fact that before this, I used to read children books with severely retarded, childish plots..
I don't think I understood much of it though. I remember complaining that it takes more than 200 pages until they finally see that awesome whale! Drove me crazy, I wanted action.
I can't really say what book I've read is most boring, because there are countless books I gave up after a period ranging from one sentence to 95% of the book (whoever thinks that giving up after one sentence is unfair, you shoulda seen that sentence it was the dumbest most boring thing I've ever read. I'd post it but it's German).
I think most classics (especially German) are boring and I hardly ever finish reading them.
Though there are sparks of genius and chapters that I love, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea is excruciatingly boring.