The biography of Benjamin Franklin....
So bloody boring I literally fell asleep reading it.
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The biography of Benjamin Franklin....
So bloody boring I literally fell asleep reading it.
I prefer to call it difficult, instead of boring. All Joyce's works are like that (IMO).Quote:
Originally Posted by Icarus
The most boring I've read was a book I had to read for my English class- A Seperate Peace. I hated that book! :p
I think I know that one, besides books we are Forced to read like slaves in some kind of prison in which we are poked with sticks made of meat is never good
What?! That's one of my favourite books!Quote:
Originally Posted by Spite
Most boring book--The French Lieutenant's Woman comes to mind. Gross.
What?! That's one of my favourite books!Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumble
À chacun son même, I guess...
[QUOTE=Diceman]What?! That's one of my favourite books!
QUOTE]
I thought like that numerous times while reading this thread. Except when reading about Joyce. I just never liked his books. Sometimes I dislike them so much I´ve started to think that I just do not like Joyce himself. It´s not that I do not like complicated books. I do. But it´s something that his style of writing makes me feel that I did not like.
But I have been mistaken before. I used to think that I did not like Steinbeck.
I vividly remember a part from Grapes of wrath where a turtle crosses the road. I my memory this part takes several pages, an endless, boring chapter. I do not know if that really is the case. I also tried reading The Moon is down, and fell asleep. Now I reread it and it is magic. It´s a great story. Never tried to read Grapes of wrath again, though.
Dickens. Just not my thing, I suppose, as I know some people that really get into his books. But then I'm the one who finds Woolf and Robbe-Grillet endlessly fascinating...
Had a difficult time with Heart of Darkness, but at least that one I appreciated what it was going for even if I didn't necessarily enjoying reading it.
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in my high school english class we have read some pretty bad stuff. This ones that stick out for me as being the worst are...
Heart of Darkness
Old Man and the Sea
Jane Eyre
The Scarlet Letter
but i have to give my teachers some credit, i mean, we are reading To Kill a Mocking Bird now, so they do have some taste
I can't remember who said this but I think it was Jorge Luis Borges, "if a book does not grab you leave it, it was not written for you."
Well same here, but I find Tales of the 2 Cities quite interesting to read.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zooey
Read it again some day, you may be surprised. I hated it in high school, but was surprised at how much I enjoyed it reading it again in college. There's so much there that is easy to miss the first time around.Quote:
Originally Posted by avid reader
Starting Jane Eyre this week for the first time, we'll see how it goes.
Jane Eyre is one of my favorites! I saw some less than favorable reviews of it on this thread, but I think a lot of people don't realize how funny it is at times! Charlotte Bronte has a sneaky sense of humor, and you really have to keep an eye on what she's doing . . . anyway, I hope you like it as much as I did.
I hated reading Great Expectations.
Looking back on it though, I love thinking about it.
fool i agree i hated reading great expectations. I just recently read jane eyre and loved it. I didn't like Wuthering Heights though. and one that i just dont like is Dr. Phil (my mother in law gave it to my husband to read). I love the majority of classics but i didnt in high school. I am very grateful for my senior english teacher making me read Pride and Prejudice for it is now one of my favorite books and Austen my favorite author. Madame Bovary is slow and a little boring but i find her character interesting, along with all her relationships.
Beowolf was boring for me.
id have to say that the worst book ever written is "the virginian" by owen wister and following that closely are "an american tragedy" by theodore dreiser, "the monk" by matthew gregory lewis, "the well of loneliness" by radclyffe hall and "on the road" by jack kerouac.
apart from kerouac the other books were ones i had to read for university and i have to say that i think forced reading tends to make the reader dislike the book and the subsequent weeks of close reading hardly help either. even good books like "to kill a mockingbird" and "the remains of the day" can become terribly dull and annoying when forced to be sat down and read and then talked about in detail. years have passed and ive re-read "t.k.a.m.b" and "t.r.o.t.d" and have to say theyre wonderful books. damn you educational system! but no excuses for kerouac or william burroughs' "naked lunch" those were arty farty pieces of pretentious mental masturbation. :banana:
Boring books ... The Russian classics spring to mind, I think I've only ever been able to finish one Russian book. But then again, I haven't started more than three anyway.
Other classics I hated were Catcher in the Rye, which was just appallingly annoying and boring to me. Charles Dickens bores me, as well as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. Oh yeah, and this quite new book by Chuck Palahniuk, Choke. It was dreadful.
i think that reading novel are more boring than drama,the same also at being forced to read a book (either novel or drama) at school or college,right?
well,about me,i get bored with Fielding's Joseph Andrews and more or less Dicken's David Copperfield
The Shipping News. I can't remember who it was by, but it was the only book I can remember giving up on. It took me about 3 weeks to get trhough a chapter, a size whch I should have been able to get through in 15 minutes normally.
Oh, and Life of Pi was utter crap. If it WAS a true story, it would have been cool, but it obviously wasn't. Some books can make you believe in fairys, this book couldn't even make me believe there was a boy whos father owned a zoo.
Oh, and catcher in the rye was also a huge let down. It hasn't aged well, it is not timeless. For it to be vaguely interesting you have to have an understanding of the mindset at the time, and other literature around then. As a standalone book, it fails now. In my opinion, of course.
I usually read through any book in no time, but I found Kim by Rudyard Kipling and Robinson Crusoe the most boring I could find! I couldn't even get through half! Ahhh! my brother is killing me for that remark about Robinson Crusoe!! :rage:
I had to read this Tim Winton novel once for school. It was very weird and nonetheless extremely boring
lol, we had to read him aswell, personally i loved him, everyone else hated it (so i think i'm the odd one out)
Howards End, i hated this book, it was so boring and a labour to read, though i had read it for school, which is a bit of a kill joy....
Well, I've been hanging around this forum for many weeks, and I'll make this my first posting.
Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.
Ever since I was a child, I had been drilled repeatedly by my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, and my sister to read this book. I refused simply because I had been forced to watch the movie so many times and the line, "Miss Scarlett I don'ts know nothin' 'bouts birthin' no babies" reverberated through my conscious, making me snicker at the melodrama, but one summer five years ago, I gave it a shot and read all 754 pages of it in paperback--it was a masochistic struggle to get through all of it. I don't know, but I wasn't impressed, not by the critics and not by all the blurbs. As civil war novels go, I found many much better like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, and especially MacKinley Kantor's Andersonville. The whole idea of a Southern Belle rambling around attempting to keep Tara in her hands struck me as downright fairy talish. The dialogue between the slaves and the white folks almost ludicrous and ridiculous. I didn't find the novel convincing, and after I read it, my aunt asked my opinion of it, I said, "I didn't like it." and she quickly went into a rant telling me that "Scarlett was a strong woman" and that was pretty much the reason I didn't like, she claimed.
I attempted to state otherwise, but finally relinquished with "Tommorow's another day," and never said one word about Gone With the Wind since--until now. I hated it!
Oh, I loved Gone with the wind. I guess many other factors that influence us at the time we read a book, help form our opinion of it. I was probably 15 when I read it, and loved it so much that I felt a sense of loss when I finished the last page. I was completely convinced that I will never read a better book in my life. :D I made the ultimate mistake of reading the horrific sequel named "Scarlett" (i forgot the author...) simply because I wanted Rhett and Scarlet to end up together. I didn't care much about the war but was mostly grasped by the romance of Rhett and Scarlet. I guess being a 15 year old teenager hopelessly in love, might have clouded my judgment about the book somewhat. However, I still like to think of that book, and it always brings memories back....sigh.. ;)
As for what I find to be the most boring book, I would probably say "One Hundred Years of Solitute" by Garcia Marquez. It is supposed to be this great book and I have attempted to finish it for the last 8 years, but never came even half way through. I just can't get into the story and don't find the magic or the depth it is supposed to have. Can anyone convince me otherwise, so I can find motivation to make another attempt?
Dear Amra,
I'm a new member and I've read your mail now. I also loved Gone with The Wind" . You probably know they made a contest and now there is a second book "Scarlet" and it's also good. But one of my favourite authors is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think you schould try to read the novel "One Hundred Years of Solitute". I think this is his best novel. But first you can try to read the "Red Monday". It's shorter.
The most boring book of my life is "Ulysses" by James Joyce. I read 1/2 of it but I don't think that I would finish it.
Heart of Darkness - well it wasn't exactly boring, bur very oppressive.. and the description of the rain forests reminded me of spinach in brine, yuck.
Emma - no offence, but i sooooo hate Jane Austen... :rage: I like her wit, but nothing ever happens in her books... it's not only that there's no exterior action... but also the characters are so shallow.. i mean all the 'issues' they discuss are just so ridiculous (Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is the only Austen character i've liked, so far, coz he's grumpy and not as silly as all the others). I s'pose people were like that in Austen's days, but that doesn't mean i wanna read about it :(
anything by james joyce and virginia woolf is boring . i just cannot put up with that terrible style. and also, joseph conrad with his sea stories. a tale of two cities are rather boring, too. actually historic novels are often so .
omg, what a difference! i love historic novels!
Some of these I can fully understand. I have yet to read any Joseph Conrad, but many, many people claim to find James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens very boring.Quote:
Originally Posted by rodanho
I love them all, personally, especially Virginia Woolf, but she wrote with so much empathy and far more passion than the average author, which, I think, could confuse many readers.
Some historical novels, yes, I can see the downside. I have enjoyed most of them, especially several Russian works, but, for example, I could never read Gore Vidal's Creation over again. :(
Laurie Lee - i actually couldn't finish it, which is incredible for me. Also Strange meeting - Susan Hill. It wasn't boring as such but I found it incredibly tedious, with little underlying meaning. The plot was just too . . . simple. I had to study it at school and write a 13 page essay. I did not have fun.
I'm sure many will disagree with me on this, but the most boring book I've ever read was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne. I read this after getting really into H. G. Wells while I was a teenager, and I had heard that many argued over which was the better sci fi writer, Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.
In fairness, most of the book was actually very good, and very suspensful, but when I reached the end, it seemed as though he'd reached his wits' end and just couldn't be bothered to come up with a better ending! I have never, to this day, been more disappointed with a book's ending.
Emma - Jane Austen (I liked P&P a lot but I found Emma quite boring)
A Mid Summer Night's Dream - William Shaky Shocky Shaken Pear.
[QUOTE=mono I have yet to read any Joseph Conrad[/QUOTE]
A treat in store.
This thread is an eye-opener. Here I was expecting a list comprised of Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Beckett &c. (all authors I like, by the way) and instead we get all these writers who consummately practice the soul stirring stuff those writers eschew. Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre? Heart of Darkness? I don't even know where to begin except to say that these books absolutely rocked me.
The only explanation I can come up with is that people are being given this stuff too early and with too little help. I only really enjoyed Shakespeare's comedies until I did Troilus and Cressida (with bloody good teaching) aged nineteen.
I also relate to and sympathise with the person who had that bit of bother with their teacher over Zarathustra. I can't even begin to imagine reading that book and getting anything out of it as a teenager. I read it in my thirties and still struggled. The incident with the teacher reminds me of a time when an equally discombobulated didact gave a group of us callow seventeen year olds a Larkin poem to read and then asked for reactions. Partly just to fill the total silence that followed, I said that it hadn't really 'moved' me. 'That is totally irrelevant', came the furious response.
Non-boring yet educationally worthwhile books for teenagers then? I can only guess and dimly remember really. 1984? Catch-22? I would say Catcher in the Rye, which I loved at age 13 as much as at age 23, but there's always someone who can't stand it. Le Grand Meaulnes? I dunno. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino? Borges? Milan Kundera? Paul Auster? Please please, nobody say Terry Pratchett.
My own list of stinkers:
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - trying way too hard
Mao II by Don DeLillo - read almost anything by De Lillo rather than this. Libra, White Noise, Players are all great, but this is just a dull pointless trudge and worse, it's a book about a writer
The Vivisector by Patrick White - a book about a writer disguised as a book about a painter
London Fields by Martin Amis - portentous bilge from start to finish, promises lots of 'meaning' about nuclear bombs and the way we live now, ends up just vaguely, lazily, using a woman as a symbol for all the evil of the world. The central characters are all cheap, easy, badly observed cariacatures. I need words I'm not allowed here to fully express my loathing for this book, but 'boring' is definitely a step in the right direction
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - his style is terrible and the whole book's just a bad rip off of Marquez's excellent and genuinely original 100 Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of the Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - everybody has off years
But in with a bullet at number 1:
Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit
Whoa whoa, let's slow down here blp. Maybe everybody's got a different understanding of boring, but you're going to throw Midnight's Children on that list and keep Heart of Darkness off it? HoD is hands down my favorite book, and it's one of two books I've ever reread, and I wrote my undergrad thesis on it, but it's easy to admit that it's a boring read to an average reader. It's so much about atmosphere and almost nothing interesting happens. I've tried to explain to people what I love about it, and all the reasons I come up with are largely about personal perspective and suggest to me that it's an exception to the rule to enjoy reading it.
And MC boring? The only reason I could see someone saying that is because it's long. It's got superpowers! And if that's not enough, it's got tons of variety and is incredibly insightful in its exploration of India's history and independence. As far as being a ripoff of 100 Years, then everything magical realism is a ripoff of 100 Years. The stories are different, the conflicts are different, the narrative style is different, the intention is different, and the structure is different. The similiraties are either coincidental or common to all magical realist works--multi-generational, metaphor for nation, supernatural elements combined with natural.
If you want to see a real ripoff, compare Midnight's Children to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. The structures are exactly the same (book and chapter modes, narrative point-of-view and construction), the plot is remarkably similar (grandparents relocate, contrast between life of parents and children living in new land, protagonists have hybrid identities, protagonists not accepted by community, protagonists run away from home and develop independent identities), and the metaphor for the nation is exactly the same (single character with unique characteristic becomes picture of national experience during tumultuous time in history). I hated Middlesex because it was so deeply derivative.
I don't mean to pick a fight, or if I do, I don't mean to pick an ill-spirited fight.
No ill spirit taken.
Come to think of it, some of what you say about MC and Middlesex could also be said to be similar to Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, which also predates MC.
I read MC a long time ago, so it's maybe unfair of me to include it. But my memory of reading it is so unpleasurable, I have no desire to try again. And I don't think it was because I failed to understand it.
Heart of Darkness is, quite apart from all its other merits, incredibly beautifully written. Same is true of a number of the other books people have been listing here, especially Jane Eyre, but also To the Lighthouse and Ulysses. But you're right. Maybe my understanding of boring is different from a lot of other people's if narrative paciness is not my only criteria for not being boring. Ugh, what a convoluted sentence.
Unfortunately, blp, I also found Jane Eyre to be awfully boring, mostly because I simply thought the protagonist herself was uninteresting.
What's considered "boring" is completely subjective. You should see me try to convince someone that baseball is the most wonderful sport in the world... ;)
Well of course it's subjective. This is about the most overtly subjective thread I've ever seen here and I kind of love it for that. I'm not trying to convince anyone to like the same books as me. Just a bit flabbergasted.
But also, though I'm not a teacher, I think it raises interesting questions about teaching. I think my best experiences of being taught have involved being pushed somewhat reluctantly to understand and enjoy things I wasn't favourable towards. I think it's a shame if some readers here read great books and didn't have the capacity to do anything but give up with a yawn or, worse, were actually taught them at school, but in such a way as to kill rather than awaken interest. No idea what the solution to that one is. As I say, I myself am not trying to convince anyone - because I wouldn't know how.
Yeah I know what you mean, it does seem a bit of a let down after such an incredible journey, but I just found it fascinating that such a book was written so long ago. Both Jules Verne and H.G Wells were so ahead of their time. I think I probably found 20,000 LUTS ok because i read it not looking for a good, enjoyable novel but just to be amazed by the content.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazel-Ra