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

[CrimsonBlaze]

I've got a boring/terrible book to beat all boring/terrible books: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

It is a 58 page mess of boring crap coupled with 164 additional pages as to why this story is "awesome."

I'm f***ing serious...

The story (or what vaguely resembles one) is about a traveling salesman who is fed up with his crappy existence and wakes up one day to find that he's changed into a giant bug (no joke, that's what literally happens) with no explanation as to why or how. There's some drama that goes on with his family that goes no where until the salesbug dies in isolation in his room a short time after his metamorphosis. The End.

I'm not sure why were were assinged to read this book other than to give us a standard of what isn't a good story. So no matter what we read, as long as it's "not Metamorphosis," it's possible to be liked or profitable. Say what you will about the Twilight series (which I hate), at least someone's getting bank for all the idiots that fell for it.

 

[Jadak]

I was bored to tears by Ender's Game when I read it over a decade ago. I found the writing dry.

Curious, I enjoyed Ender's game but share that opinion on some of the sequels. 'Speaker of the Death' specifically is still not completely read due to the poor pace I'm able to force myself through its pages.

 

[Cookiegerard]

His work is just so bad.

There's a lot of quality inconsistency with his works.
Some are truly amazing, some I can completely agree with you on. I really loved The Mound because he managed to create an entire other civilization of sorts. I also have extremely nostalgic memories of The Thing On The Doorstep, but that might just be because of my childhood, although I do think the concept is great for a very different kind of horror than he usually employs. Hm, what else? Shadow Over Innsmouth is great and the character only faints after describing the horrors. And the twist ending is just awesome. Similarily, I loved The Horror In The Museum for its build-up and nice (albeit a bit predictable) ending.
Eh, I can't fault you for having sort of given up on Lovecraft's stuff, having read a lot of his awful stuff myself, but there are a lot of great stories, too. Buried in the rubble, I suppose.

The universe he created is amazing, I just think, based off the short stories I read, that his writing style isn't that great. When you are reading a number of them in a row, and you just keep getting let down after let down because the monster is ALWAYS made indescribable for some reason, it just makes it feel as if you are reading the same thing over and over again. I like his world, but I just don't like his writing style, it feels lazy at times.

 

[ungothicdove]

No one has mentioned The Last of the Mohicans yet from what I can see. I really did not enjoy that book. I was probably around 11 or so when I was trying to read it. I was a pretty avid reader and I liked a lot of different books but that one just did not do it for me.

The film however is one of my favorite movies, top 20 for sure. Probably because they took out all of the boring parts and just had Daniel Day-Lewis run around the woods instead. I also feel somewhat vindicated when a lot of the reviews I read on the movie seemed to indicate that many of the film critics also found the book boring.

 

[AdmiralCheez]

Another vote for both Scarlet Letter, and LotR. But for me, Fellowship was an easy read (aside from the chapter specifically called "The Trees of Lorien," which is exactly what it sounds like). I started it, knowing the warnings of all the dry bits and I still finished that book in two days. What killed the series for me was toward the beginning of Two Towers, at the point where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli first meet the exiled Riders of Rohan. Their conversation was so dry, so incredibly boring, I put the book down. Despite several attempts over the next few weeks, I just couldn't find the momentum to get past that part, and the book has stayed on the shelf ever since.

And now, the one that really surprised me. The fifth Harry Potter book, Order of the Phoenix, I think? I got to the sixth chapter or so, but nothing had really happened to that point. Harry was just being moved around to various places with people, all in secret. They were introducing people and things, but didn't explain them. It was a giant tease, with everyone continuously saying, "We can't talk about the order. It's a secret," or "We'll talk about this later." Well, after a hundred or so pages of that nonsense, I put the book away. Didn't finish the series; didn't care to. You can lead me on with promises of cool stuff that'll be explained later, but if you waste that many pages building it up with nothing else happening, then I get bored and angry, and shelf the book.

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

This thread makes me so very, very sad. Half of the posts I read amounted to "I don't understand the book" or just a lack of reading skills.

Someone here said Bear and the Dragon. It's not my pick for more boring, but you ain't wrong, for sure. For those who haven't read it, in the first bit of the book, a flamboyant russian pimp with a sweet ride gets blasted with a rocket launcher. Somehow, Clancy made this about as dull as finding a rock in a gravel driveway. Given his style, you might think that this was on purpose, but it's intended to be the hook that draws you into the central conspiracy (the pimp had the same car as the intended target and was killed by mistake). I LIKE political affairs and I hated this book.


The most boring book I've ever read was a young adult novel, the title and author of which I cannot recall. The protagonist, a dragon, is one of the few dragons left alive, and indeed the only dragon left in his continent, if I recall correctly. What follows is an amazingly uninteresting tale of how he, as a shapeshifting super-rich mansion dweller, gets on. Events include enslaving a man, awkward sex scenes, and the grumbles that result from a dragon pregnancy. I cannot convey how boring this book was, which is something that should never be said of a book where a man literally eats the girl he just had sex with.

 

[sageoftruth]

Atlas Shrugged.
Its very interesting from a philosophical standpoint (not that it represents my philosophy), but Rand is just a bad writer. The characters are one-dimensional and everything is so obvious and clichee....
Also Lord of the rings....I like the hobbit, but LOTR is just too much.....filler.

I still admire you for finishing Atlas Shrugged. I tried to do that, but Ayn Rand's barely disguised conceit was too much for me. I quit after the part when Ms. Taggart recounts her past growing up as a brilliant, gifted and intellectually superior child. It wasn't hard to see that Ayn Rand was talking about herself.

I completed it, but I gotta admit that I almost completely jumped over that chapter where Galt does his big speech..its literally the whole chapter.
Yeah, as I said, its not my philosophy, but its an interesting one. I read it, the same way I read Marx. Not something I want to see adopted, but still interesting from a theoratical standpoint.

Can you tell me what page it's on? I've still got the book. Maybe I can get something of worth from it if I just jump right into the philosophy lecture at the end.

 

[deathjavu]

Nthing Dante's "Paradiso"... yes, I know it's not technically a separate book but merely part of the whole Commedia... but fuck it anyway. Butt fuck it, in fact (it could do with some loosening up). It's nothing but a bunch of unrecognizable nobodies spouting out ridiculous philosophy and downright laughable scientific fact.

No, Dante, the moon is not made of fucking gas because candles reflect equally from distant mirrors, you scientifically illiterate 13th century moron. No, I didn't make that up, that's literally the argument made in the first couple pages of Paradiso. It was so utterly dumb I had to stop reading for almost a week. As a result, "Inferno" took about 5 days to read, "Purgatorio" a full 7, and "Paradiso" took an entire month because it was so awful.

Also, any of the long form Dickens novels (Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, etc.) It's so obviously padded, and then padded again, and so mind-numbingly repetitive, I have a hard time understanding how they came to be regarded as "classics". Endless, tedious, ham-handedly metaphorical descriptions so long you forget what the author was describing by the end. Dumb, mopey, boring characters who spend ages doing nothing. I would honestly teach those books in a writing class as "how not to write". Also, the cliffhanger bullshit he pulls at the end of each serial section (these were originally magazine serials, recall) is ripped straight from the worst kind of comic book and would never fly in any other author's books, yet somehow literary critics never give him any shit for it.

Basically fuck Charles Dickens. I won't say he was a hack, because the one story where he wasn't forced to endlessly stretch a story to its breaking point (A Christmas Carol) is quite well written. But the demands of the format he worked in warp the stories into bloated monstrosities good only for torturing prisoners and high school students.

While we're on the subject, fuck John Milton's Paradise Lost for roughly the same reasons as Dickens, except he didn't have the excuse of writing for serials. Maybe it was because I was reading it on my phone, but exhaustive, unsubtle metaphorical descriptions really start pissing me off when they're so damn long you forget what it was that was being described. As someone that loved both LOTR and The Silmarillion, it's definitely not my attention span that was to blame.

 

[EvilRoy]

Oh god where do I begin?
Romeo and Juliet: I understand that it's better read as a tragedy than a love story. But the characters aren't making small mistakes and learning from them. They're doing absolutely stupid shit that makes things worse for everyone. Whatever hate-boner the families had for one another, it was dumb, that was likely the point. I guess I just wish I were more invested in the characters so the bigger message would be more effective to me.

Something I found that improved my opinion of R&J was learning a bit of the context for the story. Figuring out that Juliet was 13, but was providing the only real maturity or critical thinking throughout the story really helped my opinion of her, and the fact that Shakespeare seems to have shared your opinion of Romeo made the story in general a lot more bearable.

OT:
I also could not finish the LoTR series. Or really more than half of each book. This was actually something like 12 years ago now (oh god I'm old now) so maybe my patience will have improved with age, but to be frank then and now I find fantasy based on his stuff to be infinitely more engaging than his actual stuff. I do take certain pride in the fact that I passed the point where my father gave up (found his bookmark, the copies I was reading were the same that his dad gave to him), but I will probably never finish.

The other was something I tried to read because I was told it was a good book. Great Expectations. This one I just went 'eh' and tossed to the side after the second-ish plot thread just sort of went away without a conclusion.

 

[Verlander]

Dune, can't get into it at all

 

[deathjavu]

Oh god where do I begin?
Romeo and Juliet: I understand that it's better read as a tragedy than a love story. But the characters aren't making small mistakes and learning from them. They're doing absolutely stupid shit that makes things worse for everyone. Whatever hate-boner the families had for one another, it was dumb, that was likely the point. I guess I just wish I were more invested in the characters so the bigger message would be more effective to me.

Something I found that improved my opinion of R&J was learning a bit of the context for the story. Figuring out that Juliet was 13, but was providing the only real maturity or critical thinking throughout the story really helped my opinion of her, and the fact that Shakespeare seems to have shared your opinion of Romeo made the story in general a lot more bearable.

OT:
I also could not finish the LoTR series. Or really more than half of each book. This was actually something like 12 years ago now (oh god I'm old now) so maybe my patience will have improved with age, but to be frank then and now I find fantasy based on his stuff to be infinitely more engaging than his actual stuff. I do take certain pride in the fact that I passed the point where my father gave up (found his bookmark, the copies I was reading were the same that his dad gave to him), but I will probably never finish.

The other was something I tried to read because I was told it was a good book. Great Expectations. This one I just went 'eh' and tossed to the side after the second-ish plot thread just sort of went away without a conclusion.

Everyone knows that the main characters (R&J, especially R) were supposed to be idiots, right? The moral of the story is essentially that impatient teenage romance is dumb.

But somehow everyone latched onto it as a "great love story" in an ironic twist that probably causes Shakespeare several revolutions/second.

Also, don't hold out for Great Expectations getting any better. It doesn't. You never even really get the satisfaction of what's-her-*****-face getting her comeuppance.

 

[Pikey Mikey]

The Giver and 1984, both those books were equally shit, in my opinion (you don't have to agree).
They were just so slow and boring.
The Giver's problem was that everything was detailed in an essay, just the main character going to a house took two pages, and all he did was: go out, get on the bike, ride over there, go in.
1984 was just idiotic, to sum it up (how I see it), the main character wants to rebel, and he does that by having sex with a teenage girl (or early twenties, whatever) in a meadow... The fuck does that do on a large scale!?

 

[AndrlCh]

I've read a lot of boring books, considering I was an English major with a Lit. emphasis, but the one book that I could never force myself to read past the first ten, grueling, soul sucking pages was The Poisonwood Bible. It has used as a spacer between my couch and the wall for the past seven years while all my other books are kept dusted and well maintained on my bookshelves.
Most boring that I've finished would probably be The Sun Also Rises. I've just never been able to quite enjoy Hemingway's writing style.

I read that once long ago. Can't remember much about it, but what made it so bad that you quit after 10 pages? I guess it was kind of a downer and the father deserved worse than he got.

From what I can remember, it had a lot to do with the writing style; the short, simplistic sentences didn't appeal to me, almost like it was trying to create a false density. Although, another factor may have been that it was part of my summer reading list for AP English, and I eventually got to the point where if the book didn't catch my attention in the first 10 or so pages I would drop it and just look up summaries. Now that I'm older and more well read, I may give it another chance; though, 500+ pages is a bit of a tall order to get through in a reasonable time nowadays.

 

[Envy Omicron]

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it arleady, but I'm gonna go with the Bible. Goddamn (irony) did that book disappoint. There are entire sections dedicated to detailing family lineages in the most monotonous way possible, there are plotholes and inconsistencies in nearly every three verses (hyperbole), there are no relatable characters, and to use a quote from Yahtzee: "It's paced like an ant pushing a brick across a desert". I couldn't even finish Genesis, but believe me, I TRIED, I really did. The biggest problem with it is that it focused way, way more on telling than it did on showing, and it was written like a collection of plot summaries to much more interesting stories that just keep going, and going, and going.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Hmm, a toss-up between Tolstoy's War & Peace and Dostojevski's Crime & Punishment.

Don't get me wrong, they are great books and rightfully belong amongst the best classic literature has to offer, but they're so damn hard to read. Though ost Russian literature of the time was like that.

 

[Wolf In A Bear Suit]

I found the concept and intelligence that went into 1984 to be very interesting but as a story I couldn't stomach it. Couldn't care less and the ending made me feel as if I had wasted my time.
Twilight was just awful in every sense of the word, no idea why I finished it. This was before reading twilight was something to be insulted over you see. In hindsight I see why now.

 

[Cliff_m85]

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it arleady, but I'm gonna go with the Bible. Goddamn (irony) did that book disappoint. There are entire sections dedicated to detailing family lineages in the most monotonous way possible, there are plotholes and inconsistencies in nearly every three verses (hyperbole), there are no relatable characters, and to use a quote from Yahtzee: "It's paced like an ant pushing a brick across a desert". I couldn't even finish Genesis, but believe me, I TRIED, I really did. The biggest problem with it is that it focused way, way more on telling than it did on showing, and it was written like a collection of plot summaries to much more interesting stories that just keep going, and going, and going.

Sorry, but how can you critique future portions of the text if you couldn't finish Genesis.... which is the very first book of the text?

 

[Lightknight]

Moby Dick.

Keep in mind, my favorite book of all time is probably The Scarlet Pimpernel. So I'm no stranger or enemy to the classics. The first two chapters of Moby Dick are probably some of the best and most captivating writing I've ever seen. But somewhere around the chapter that debates on what exactly constitutes the skin of a whale (the thin film surrounding the blubber or the blubber too), I found myself bored enough to stop reading for a few weeks which I have almost never done any other time.

I also found the Grapes of Wrath to be mind numbing. I'm never sure why people liked it at all.