What's the most boring book you've ever read?

[Easton Dark]

L'etranger.

Father dies, minutia, then he gets arrested and hung. I had to read it for a class, what could I do.

A book someone got for me because they thought I'd like it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I read the first chapter and stopped because fuck this garbage.

 

[Not Matt]

warm bodies

it was just so god damn formulic and safe and nothing made sense. none of the characters explain their decisions in a way that we might see what the hell is going on inside their head and the ending is just......good graces that was dumb.

Spoiler: get your earplugs in because i am about to spoil the ending

when julie and R (By the way, did anyone else think that was a romeo and juliet referance) have kissed and become zombie-human hybrids, R suggest that since earth is contaminated, all the zombie humans go in to space.....so i might be a prequel to deadspace (doo-dom-dizz)

 

[Soundwave]

I think Ethan Frome was easily the most boring book I'd ever read. It's about a guy, who wants to cheat on his wife with her cousin, but doesn't, and then rides a sled into a tree with said would-be-mistress. Ultimately the guy's wife has to take care of them because they end up crippled as a result of crashing into the tree. Also at one point a dish broke. That was quite literally everything that happened.

 

[Candlejack000]

I'll probably draw heat for this, but I loathe "The Eye of the World." I hated most of the characters, I hated the repetitive storyline, I hated the tangents it went on... I realized I wasn't going to like it about halfway through, but when I start a book I just have to finish it.

While I like the series I understand your dislike of the book. Most of the books are people walking from place to place and every character thinking the other characters are idiots who do not understand the same things they do.

OT: I hated both the Left Behind books and most Stephen King novels in general. I find them extremely boring with no real suspense or emotional weight.

One I just got done reading was a book called Ghosts of Manhattan I kept reading it hoping that the main idea of the book, think post-WWI steam-punk Batman, would get better but it does not. In fact the ending made want to stop reading even though I only had about 50 pages left.

Spoiler

There is a great idea at the beginning where the rich playboy character and the masked gadget vigilante are shown to have different aspects like facial hair and even ending chapters in different places, heck they even think of the other person in their own mind. I got my hopes up thinking that the author was not ripping off Batman completely, but in the end they are the same person.

 

[Pink Gregory]

L'etranger.

Father dies, minutia, then he gets arrested and hung. I had to read it for a class, what could I do.

Much as I like the idea of classes reading Albert Camus, I chose to read it, and I found it fascinating.

OT: Dracula. Bram Stoker ain't a good writer, that's for sure...

 

[adamsaccount]

I bought a copy of ayn rands "atlas shrugged" because it was what bioshock is apparently based on. Didnt realise it was a right wing greed is good type of thing, gonna try and give it a go though, though if anyone in the uk wants it ill post it to you for free as the fuckers thicker than harry potter Vii and the bible combined, and looks pretty out of place next to my collection of kesey, kerouuac, thompson and burroughs.

 

[Hoplon]

Have you ever read a book that you just had to force yourself through, whether it be for school or to see what the big deal behind the book is? If so, what was it?

Mine would have to be The Great Gatsby. I hate, hate, hate that book. It's boring and uninteresting. I didn't care for the characters at all. Thank goodness it was a short book because after a while I couldn't take it anymore.

This might be controversial round these parts but any of the Song of Ice and Fire after A Game of Thrones.

Jesus fucking christ he is a waffling moron obsessed with tits and eating and how to describe them in such mind numbing detail that I actively throw the book out of the window to add in some excitement.

 

[Stasisesque]

warm bodies

it was just so god damn formulic and safe and nothing made sense. none of the characters explain their decisions in a way that we might see what the hell is going on inside their head and the ending is just......good graces that was dumb.

Spoiler: get your earplugs in because i am about to spoil the ending

when julie and R (By the way, did anyone else think that was a romeo and juliet referance) have kissed and become zombie-human hybrids, R suggest that since earth is contaminated, all the zombie humans go in to space.....so i might be a prequel to deadspace (doo-dom-dizz)

Absolutely this.

I caught myself rolling my eyes at all the metaphors he crowbarred in to each chapter. A good, compelling story does not need that many metaphors. Talk about purple prose. It was just a re-telling of Romeo and Juliet to appeal to the current pop culture prominence of zombies. That is all that book was and it was mind-numbingly dull, in addition, as you say, to making fuck all sense. Luckily, the movie actually appears to be a comedic adaptation, which could have actually saved the story.

 

[TheKangaroos]

I struggled through "This Side of Paradise". It's just so bland. I know it's meant to be jam packed with subtle insight into... God knows what, but it wasn't doing it for me. I liked The Great Gatsby. It's too brief for me to generate meaningful, negative feelings for it.

What I'm taking most from this thread is how different my opinions are from a good few of the people posting here. This isn't an attempt to sound high-brow. In fact, I want to defend Twilight as being an alright book. It seems a lot of people approached it with a negative outlook (one poster read it solely so they could justify their criticism of it...) and that strikes me as being self fulfilling as if you read/watch something expecting to hate it, more often enough, being in that head space is going to yeild those results. It's worth saying that I have read a great deal more since Twilight and it suffers by comparison to a lot of other books, but I definitley enjoyed it at the time of reading it and that's surely what matters?

 

[Dirge Eterna]

Starship Troopers.
Man, I never expected to find a case where the movie was way better than the book.
It's just a lot of talking, politics and boring patrols. There's not even a single battle against the arachnids!

I am the opposite I love the book and have re read it a dozen times at least. I dislike the movie to tears, the only parts I will watch are the battle scenes but I have to not think about the charterers as being from the book more as just a random sci-fi flick.

I have a few the most recent is Battlefied Earth. A friend gave it to me as a gift because they know I love sci-fi. I have struggled 4 or 5 times to get into it. I don't know if part of it is because Hubbard spawned scientology and I hate the book because of that or if the book is really just not interesting. There is a couple of Warhammer 40k books I have bought and put down in disappointment, mostly the Eldar themed ones but the Inquisition Wars series was the first series that I stopped midway through and couldn't force myself to read anymore of, it was like going down a helix slide into deeper and deeper crap. I donated it to the library, maybe someone else will like it.

 

[Dirge Eterna]

I struggled through "This Side of Paradise". It's just so bland. I know it's meant to be jam packed with subtle insight into... God knows what, but it wasn't doing it for me. I liked The Great Gatsby. It's too brief for me to generate meaningful, negative feelings for it.

What I'm taking most from this thread is how different my opinions are from a good few of the people posting here. This isn't an attempt to sound high-brow. In fact, I want to defend Twilight as being an alright book. It seems a lot of people approached it with a negative outlook (one poster read it solely so they could justify their criticism of it...) and that strikes me as being self fulfilling as if you read/watch something expecting to hate it, more often enough, being in that head space is going to yeild those results. It's worth saying that I have read a great deal more since Twilight and it suffers by comparison to a lot of other books, but I definitley enjoyed it at the time of reading it and that's surely what matters?

I liked Gatsby but I looked at it from the dark undertones more than others I think. I knew something bad was going to happen before I read more than a few pages in.

 

[GabeZhul]

I can't really name one, at least one that you guys would know anything about (I had to read Hungarian realist literature in school, you see...).

For me entertainment is king, so if a book doesn't entertain me I drop it without the slightest bit of guilt. Thanks to that I really cannot name a book that bored me and wasn't compulsory reading, but those are all boring, so naming one of those would be cheating.

 

[blackdwarf]

'Nooit meer slapen' by Dutch writer, W.F. Hermans, who is supposedly one of THE Dutch writers and this book was apparently his best work. The title roughly translates to "Never sleeping again" and focuses on a Geology student who has to do research in Lapland to gain his degree. The problem with the book is that it is a chore to read. The characters are really not that interesting and the dialogue is boring. The first 150 pages felt irrelevant to the story. the thing is that everything makes sense after you have finished the book, meaning that on a second read through, the book will probably be a lot more enjoyable to read, because then you know why all these events are important to the story.

 

[Drummodino]

A lot of the books cited here are from a different era and different styles of writing. Mine is a fairly modern novel; The Story of Danny Dunn by Bryce Courtney. I like Courtney, I Love The Power of One and Tandia and I also enjoyed The Potato Factory Trilogy. However OH MY GOD this book was soooooooooooooooooooo boring! I read about half of it saying to myself "it has to get good sometime!". However it didn't and I gave up.

 

[otakon17]

Catcher in the Rye hands down. The protagonist was so without charm, charisma or any redeeming features I couldn't stand to read through his perspective past the hotel. How did this novel get so popular again?

 

[tehroc]

I didn't read this in high school, but I decided to give it a go to see what makes it such a literary classic. I'm currently somewhere in the middle of book two of Tale Of Two Cities, so far it's such a chore to read through. I don't know why Dickens felt it was necessary to repeat things four times.

 

[MrBaskerville]

I've been fairly fortunate with the books i've read, most of them have been quite good (i know how to pick them, for now), but there was one: Cities in Flight, by some well renowned sci-fi author guy. It was way too technical and had next to no character development, just a lot of descriptions of biology and technical aspects of everything. It was quite boring, i don't read sc-fi to learn how a gravitational engine works or whatever...

In school i remember reading some story by Steen Steensen Blicher a social realistic story called "Hose Kræmmeren" (Which is a guy who sells socks in the 1800s) It wasn't nearly as exciting as it sounds and unfortunately the 3 hour long movie was even worse...

I honestly don't get the hate for Gatsby, i read it recently and loved it and it's even a quick read (note like Cities in flight which is a billion pages of nothing...).

 

[mrjoe94]

Life of Pi. I can't even explain what happens except that there was a tiger. And he was on a boat...

I didn't even get that far when I read it. I watched the movie last year and thought "Well........no wonder why I didn't finish this POS". If it wasn't for the sometimes-brilliant imagery i'd call it one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

 

[Milanezi]

First and foremost, if it's boring i don't even get to the end of it, time is precious and I'd rather try something else:

Lord of the Rings, I tried reading it twice, the second time I got to the end of Fellowship of the Ring and began The Two Towers, and then I quit. I also ALMOST left the theater during the third movie, I couldn't get through The Hobbit at all.

Some of Anne Rice's "latest" (well, it's been a while) vamp books were pretty boring, but I surprisingly managed to get to the end.

No other books come to mind right now...