Why are people complaining about Les Miserables? If you read the novel for pleasure, it’s not as if anybody forced you to read the unabridged version. (Assigned texts in a school course are a different story entirely.) When in a bookstore at the age of 12 or so, eager to read the book after having sung with the school chorus some of the songs from the musical, I had to choose between buying the unabridged version or the abridged version. I read the introduction to the abridged version, which explained what was deleted and the rationale for the deletion, and I decided my interests would be better served by reading the abridged version. Based on some of the responses to this thread, I can’t say I regret my decision.
Abridged version? Abridged version? No real reader worth his salt would ever stoop to reading an abridged version. It’d be like racing the Tour d’France on a moped. This is literature, dammit! It’s supposed to be hard, agonizing, painful and dehumanizing. If you finish a book and you don’t feel like you’ve just run ten miles in a Georgia summer with a backpack full of cinderblocks, then you might as well not have read a damned thing! I blame Harry Potter, teaching children about the “joy of reading.” Little bastard. Try reading Silas Marner, then come back and tell me about the joy of reading!
If I wanted abridged literature, I’d subscribe to Reader’s Digest!
Ooh! Wait! I know the answer!
PROUST!
187,402,583 pages (I looked it up), of lying in bed and staring into space, broken into exactly 9 sentences. I would rather be rimmed by a wolverine than get through THAT again.
Les Mis abridged is the only abridged book I own…
However, my vote goes to the first 153 pages of “The Idiot” (who apparently was me for not quitting 150 pages earlier.) by Dustyovski (SP?)
Dostoevsky
Thanks.
I thought the Hugo’s “Hunchback” suffered the same problem, but not to the extent of Les Mis.
Oh, does Robert Jordan count as “literature” (I mean they are books and all, and I’m sure he considers them “epic”)… if so, there’s your king.
Dear Lord, yes! I attempted to read The Portrait of a Lady for my American literature class last semester. I actually got within 4 or 5 chapters of finishing it, but after we stopped discussing it in class I couldn’t bring myself to keep reading. That’s the only book I’ve ever read more than 75% of without finishing or caring about finishing it. There wasn’t a section in it that was anything but dull and lifeless.
About half of the Lord of Rings triology
(ducking for cover)
Billy Budd – had to read this back in high school. I think I woke from the coma a few years later. Ah well, at least it wasn’t as looooooong as some of the other titles here.
Oh, I’m not really complaining – Les Miserables is one of my favorite books, lengthy digressions and all. Still and all, there are a couple of bits that try my patience… 
Another dull bit in an otherwise spectacular work: in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s own persona, after making a false start on the insipid but entertaining Tale of Sir Thopas, tells a LONG prose moral tale called Melibee, which consists of a great deal of expounding on the virtues of patience. This almost never gets taught in Chaucer classes – I read an article in the Chaucer Review on this very phenomenon – but I had a prof as an undergrad who made us read the entire thing. I think it melted my brain.
(Of course, the argument over why Chaucer had his self-representation tell that particular story is fun. But the story itself is mind-numbing.)
Think yourself lucky the appendices were appendices and not info dump conversations used to break up nail biting tension 
I love great writing. But I have never read a book of fiction that did not begin to bore me near the end. This includes the most engaging novel that I have ever read…
Okla Hanali by R A Lafferty
How did we get this far without anyone mentioning the attorney’s speech at Bigger’s trial toward the end of Native Son? “I can’t believe I read the whooooole thing…”
No, he doesn’t count. You have to have a plot before you can digress from it.
I just suffered through “The Custom House”–the intro to The Scarlet Letter. I can see why it was sometimes cut from the book.
I was astonished when my professor told me it was supposed to be humorous.
I haven’t read Foucault’s Pendulum, but the first hundred or so pages of The Name of the Rose were pretty godawful. After I finished the book I read the notes at the end, how it was supposed to be a pain in the ass like climbing a fucking mountain. And while that made a certain amount of sense, snarl snarl boring.
Faulkner.
Re abridged versions:
I grew up in a house where reading was not discouraged, but we just didn’t buy books, and I made my trips to the library by myself. My mother’s one concession was a large supply of, yes you guessed it, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read a lot of those as a kid, and they introduced me to some of my favorites: The Good Earth and Pyle’s Robin Hood come first to mind, along with many lesser known books. I didn’t realize at first what “condensed” meant, but once I realized that there was more to these marvelous stories, I went out and devoured them all whole. Kind of like seeing a movie and then reading the book to find out all the details.
I fully support reading unabridged books,* and I wouldn’t want to see someone rely on condensed versions completely. But for an introduction to great literature for someone with limited options, they’re not so bad.
*I don’t even like listening to audio books, abridged or not, because it doesn’t seem like the full experience to me. Gotta have that book in my hands . . .