I think there is a difference between “irritating” and “stupid.” You might see it differently, but to me, “irritating” implies “irritating TO ME” whereas “stupid” is more of a universal judgement. No “to me” implied, at least not to me.
It is like the difference between “I don’t like this” and “this is terrible.” The first is clearly an opinion and it is clear that the writer is aware of that. The second implies a judgement.
When I saw the topic, Twain and Finn was my immediate thought. So as to incur the minimum amount of wrath possible, I’ll just say this: I was supposed to read that book a few times at various levels of education, and in none of my attempts did I find it particularly readable.
(That’s completely set up as an opinion, right? :p)
I also thought of Huck Finn, but I think the purpose behind the style is worth it. I can’t think of anything else specifically.
Ha! I read Black House recently, and that was a huge obstacle for me to overcome:
Long, long passages written in FIRST PERSON PLURAL, PRESENT TENSE, from a disembodied POV. Ugh!
“We are floating through the shabby nursing home. My, isn’t the carpet ugly? It smells of wee. Repulsed, we drift through the keyhole of the janitor’s supply closet. Oh look! This is where he hides his back-issues of Big Black Jugs and Long-haired Thugs. As we examine them closely, we notice that semen is not the only body fluid sticking the pages together, and so we recoil from them, rushing through a ventilation duct into the recreation room on the other side of the wall. In spite of the odour of old George Mooney’s colostomy bag as he sits playing solitaire, we breathe much easier in here – that closet was one of those places with more slippage than most. The recreation room is a melancholy place, and our already-depressed spirits are brought even lower by the certain knowledge that there’s twenty-four more pages written in the abominable style before the next chapter. We wonder idly if this is an instance of Peter Straub taking the piss out of Stephen King’s prose, or vice-versa. At any rate, old George Mooney has fallen asleep over his cards, so let’s drift outside and see if there’s anything more interesting there. Ah, yes, over by the hedge, we observe an enormous crow, picking through a giant turd left there in the rain by an inconsiderate dog-walker. Our blood runs cold as we hear its uncanny speech: 'Gorg! Gorg! Put the fucking book down. Don’t you know the Crimson King is insulting your intelligence with this tripe?’ Well, he’s got us there, doesn’t he?”
I found it irritating.
I think it is stupid.
“Judgements” are part of who we are, of what we are. This thread asked for a judgement - “what books do you find unreadable, for one reason or another”? I, personally, adjudge the use of dialects to a point where they detract from the simple process of communication to be irritating and stupid. You think differently. C’est la vie.
Gah, *About Schmidt * did the same thing with the dialog, and it drove me up the freaking wall. It was so much work to figure out what the hell was going on, and I just gave up after a chapter or two.
I can understand something like Riddley Walker, (which from the description above sounds more like a really long poem than a prose novel), where messing with language is part of the point. But eschewing punctuation and capitalization without good reason is not only pretentious, but goddamn hostile to the reader, and I don’t need that, thanks.
I was surprised that I couldn’t get through Sock, by Penn Jillette. The style struck me as very affected and grandstanding, and it undermined the tone of the actual plot. Add to that the facts that the main character seems to be a Mary Sue and that Jillette rides his personal hobby horses all over the story, and I just brought it back to the library unread.
I just re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time in 20+ years, and boy, C.S. Lewis was absent the day they taught, “Show, don’t tell.” But I guess it doesn’t qualify because I read it anyway.
What? No one’s put in a plug for James Joyce’s Ulysses ? If not, then let me do so now. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dissin’ modernist writers. I just happen to think that there are better ones out there than Joyce, and some of Joyce’s other works like “Araby” are okay. I really have to wonder what drugs Joyce and his editor were on to let him publish that monstrosity. I’ve heard snooty faluty folks say that Ulysses should be experienced and enjoyed for what it is, rather than trying to figure out what’s going on. Well, I say, hmphff. I frankly have better things to do with my time.
And, while I’m kickin’ Joyce down, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man because it’s the only book I’ve ever known to make one of my sibling’s cry because she couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. :mad:
Oooh, and I want to give a special shoutout to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I got halfway through the text, and when I came to all of that stream-of-consciousness crap, I put it away. I will say, though, that Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is not so bad. I could figure out what was going on in that text, and I’ve got some major problems with his handling of some things, but I’m not going to get into that right now. I imagine if I’d stuck with The Sound and the Fury , I would have figured out what was going on, but I just didn’t really give a shit about any of the characters.
I’m sure other texts will come to mind. Meanwhile, enjoy. 
Feel free to join in on bashing Joyce and Faulkner.
Oh, I forgot to add that I think The Door, by E.B. White (yeah, the *Charlotte’s Web * guy) makes good use of crazy (heheh) language, and in the end is quite readable, or at least re-readable. It has a special place in my heart, because it was the first reading assignment in my first serious literature class, and at the tender age of 12, having been used to typical elementary school fare, I was absolutely knocked on my ass by it.
Larry Mudd, that was brilliant. I, too, found the first part of Black House hard to slog through, but it did indeed get better.
My own contribution to this thread is The Handmaid’sTale by Margaret Atwood. A major offender in the present tense stream of consciousness category that people are rightly decrying.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The book’s nothing more than the crapping of a glorified grad student.
The much-praised The Plot Against America, I do not like authors who use words just show them off like prized items in a collection. I make an exception for Winston Churchill only.
Anything overly-descriptive.
By which, I mean something along the lines of:
"Tim looked at the TVGuide. It was the issue from March 7-12, 1997. It had William Shatner on the cover, and he was wearing a blue suit with silver pinstripes that made him look younger. However, the left lapel needed to be ironed, and he was standing with John Lithgow, whose black sweater was showing that, not only did he need to start using a new dandruff shampoo, but that his neck was becoming increasingly turkey-like.
“Tim put the magazine down, and picked up the remote control. The TV was a Sony, manufactured in 1995. The TV had outlived two pets, his marriage, and his youngest child. There was a permanent nick on the side from where his now ex-wife had been drunk at the New Year’s Eve party (she’d worn the black dress, Halston, but it wasn’t as slimming as she thought it was) and thrown an entire plate of S’mores at Tim while he was trying to think of a way to apologize to her for saying that it wasn’t the dress that did it…her ass really WAS that big.”
In the meantime, I’ve gone completely grey by the time I get done with one chapter.
Superdude 
I’m okay with detailed description sometimes*. It can help draw me into the story, or set a mood. But it’s hard to do well, and the writer has to know what to describe.
Your post reminded me something else that bugs me – I’ve heard it called “to-ing and fro-ing” – excessive description of mundane activity (like walking, driving, eating, dressing, etc.). It adds nothing to the story except padding to get it to novel length.
That snippet from the upcoming “SuperReflections of Very Bored Person,” available wherever fine literature isn’t sold.
Which is what I loved about The Princess Bride, the book – the author actually tells you that he’s cutting out about 14 pages of someone packing their clothes.
I’ve never claimed to be sane, now, have I? 
Draelin’s mother was spot on, btw.
When the film version of The Bourne Identity came out, Mom forced me to reread the book so she didn’t have to. (I remembered precisely three things–he was an assassin, he had amnesia, and the chick’s name was Marie–the movie kept those three things and pretty much nothing else.)
Tristam Shandy. I tried, I really tried, but I could not make myself read more than 25 pages. I can’t stand that endlessly-wandering-around-the-story stream of consciousness style.
On the other hand, I will read anything by Mark Twain. The dialect in Huck Finn is a little annoying at first but the brillance makes up for it, IMHO.
I’ve posted it before, and I’ll post it again: I find Sue Grafton totally unreadable. I don’t understand her popularity, and I think there’s a special circle of hell waiting on her.
I hate Simon Winchester’s writing. I can’t pin down exactly what it is I hate about it, but I found The Professor and the Madman horribly repetetive and couldn’t read more than a couple chapters of The Map that Changed the World. It’s such a shame because I think his topics are terribly interesting, but there’s something about his writing style that makes me nuts.
I didn’t mind the dialects in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all that much after, oh, page 5 or so. It was a good book, but I had trouble getting through it, since it just seemed like poor Huck could never get a break.