Most boring/difficult books you've ever read.

[Ham_authority95]

The Bible... I used to go to catholic school so I had memorize certain parts... it wasn't inspiring, it was torture...

Pretty much this. I tried to read it a few months ago to see how it has inspired a whole damn religion, but I failed to even get 1/5th of the way through it...

EDIT: Or most books. I CAN read a book in a day or two, but I'm not much of a reader.

 

[Ildecia]

boring: honestly; anything that the school has forced us to read over the past two years. and SINCE it is all shit on a bun, they incessantly tell us its all brilliant literature, although everyone has seemingly come down with a severe case of mass BOREDOM.

Difficult: i can't really say I've had trouble reading literature ever. I understood the olde English tripe from school easily, and even the occasional German work my parents let me read (I can read German, so i think its pretty cool.)

 

[daftnoize]

Lord of the Flies.

T_T

Never will I read that again. But, I did manage to catch up on my sleep while I was reading it.

To me, Lord of the Flies was one of those books that sounded incredibly interesting on paper, but was really boring on execution.

I actually thoroughly enjoyed that one...boring, it was not.
However, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and War and Peace certainly were. Actually, Russian realist fiction in general I find to be terribly boring and difficult. It's all so....grey and bleak.

---

Crime and punishment is superb. I find Tolstoy a better non fiction writer personally. What is art is really rather stunning

 

[What890]

Hemingway's 'The Old Man and The Sea'. The pacing is really slow, meaning it takes forever and a half to get to the good stuff.

 

[CloggedDonkey]

The first half of Grapes of Wrath. It is one of the slowest books in the world, so much that they focus on the grandpa's ball scratching habits at one point. It gets better, but getting to the good point is a bit of a journey... kind of like what the family has to go through. Hm, never noticed that.

 

[notsosavagemessiah]

heart of darkness. It's short but good god is it dense.

 

[daftnoize]

Ayn Rand is a difficult author to read. I still have as of yet to finish Atlas Shrugged. It's good, but difficult.

i am in the middle of the fountainhead and i gotta say its good buttt she need an editor also the way she skips around is very annoying. the philospy behind it is the only thing that is keeping me from putting it down and going off and starting a new book.

besides that-a lot of greek plays we read for humanities are just like stop talking man, and the beginning of the simillrillion is like the friggin bible.

Seriously the philosophy behind it is all messed up in a rather tedious way. Someone with actually intresting stories and GREAT philosophy is Albert Camus. He's easily my fav author

 

[procyonlotor]

Lord of the Flies. Oh my god. I pity the English students who have to endure it and the teachers who do it semester after semester. (though, to be honest, I swear that my English teacher had a crush on Golding)

You're already drowning in symbolism by the third page. So monotonous, so predictable, so terrible.
William Golding, you suck.

That book also happens to be one of the most exquisitely written novels in English literature.

Even in spite of its insistence on allegory.

Hemingway's 'The Old Man and The Sea'. The pacing is really slow, meaning it takes forever and a half to get to the good stuff.

The Old Man and the Sea is good from the very first sentence. And it only gets better.

I suppose for me the most difficult books to read are 19th Century fiction, not necessarily because they are huge novels of ideas, which challenge the intellect and expand the mind, but because of the differences in style and language. Sometimes they just feel so archaic.

 

[dalek sec]

The Pearl by I don't bloody know. There is not enough space in this reply thread to sum up the hate I (and my sister) have for this story when we had to read it during our lit classes.

 

[GloatingSwine]

The most boring book I've ever attempted to read was To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. God that was dull. No wonder the woman walked into a river with a pocket full of rocks.

The most difficult book I've ever read is Gravity's Rainbow, which is basically 800 pages of pure concentrated mindfuck.

 

[CloakedOne]

"A New Home, Who'll Follow?"

Simply awful.

 

[Summerstorm]

Hm... "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

I HATE Nietzsche. Damn arrogant, pretentious prick. Of course some of the observations he writes about have a point, but just HOW he writes about his stuff it is TIRING and insulting.

 

[II2]

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a powerful, but extremely slow... It's almost the literary equivalent of stuck in your spot and being engulfed by an encroaching glacier.

If anyone reading this is interested in Rand [small](because, like me, you played Bioshock and wanted to hear it from the mouth herself)[/small] I would recommend her much shorter Virtue of Selfishness, which is a much more straightforward philosophical dissertation, rather than lengthy allegorical prose. It's a good read.

 

[RandomWords]

Jip, or something like that, had to read it when I was in fourth grade...it suuuuucked

 

[shadyh8er]

The Scarlet Letter. Thank you, Mr. Hawthorne, but I don't want an eleven page description of a woman walking through a door.

Ninja'd! I had my brain turned on for that book too!

 

[OojahHalo]

War and Peace was really quite difficult to read. It is all about Russian politics and romantic subplots. I got through about 80% of it and gave up as it also jumped from character to character for most of the book and I had lost the plot and forgotten who each person was. A great book, but just a bit too complicated for almost anyone to read.

 

[Mr. Mxyzptlk]

most difficult: infinite jest by david foster wallace and ulysses by james joyce..
still very good though, not difficult as in incomprehensible but in open to interpretation etc.
as for boring.. the capital by karl marx... it was absolutely impossible for me to finish that one.. it was just too tedious

 

[Pips]

Middlemarch by George Eliot. Sooooo dull, and it goes on and on and on FOREVER.

 

[LightspeedJack]

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. I doubt many people have heard of it but it made me almost lose the will to live. As far as difficulty is concerned I find most books very difficult to read because I read extremely slowly, reading books for school is a very time consuming activity for me.