Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I’m so happy to not be the only philistine at this party. LOTR is a really great and epic story mired in some of the most god-awful prose on the planet. I knew after I finished it what inspired the writers of “Bored of the Rings”.
Dickens is another author who was desperately in need of a good editor.
Wha …? Gross fertilization practices of the Chinese? Was I reading a different translation? That sounds pretty interesting … oh, wait, you’re talking about nightsoil.
[trundles off to take a cold shower]
Hawthorne, of course, but also Alexandre Dumas. If he didn’t get paid by the word for what he wrote, he must have been the kind of guy who really liked to hear himself talk. The Three Musketeers is great most of the time (at least so far) but there’s some incredibly superfluous stuff in there. The worst part is that it’s not large, multiple-page chunks dropped in the text, because you can skim those if you’re not interested, but spread throughout, like this:
Frequently thinking “Why did you feel the need to tell me that, Alex?” makes it rather difficult to immerse oneself in the story.
I agree, on both counts. What’s real sad about Dickens is his novels aren’t terribly long to begin with. He’s got about a short-story worth of story in each.
Dangit, all my answers have already been mentioned. On reading the thread title I immediately thought “John Galt speech” in Atlas Shrugged. Les Miserables was mentioned in the OP. In particular the gamin chapter. I liked the Waterloo chapter, which showed the personality of one of the supporting characters. I should have thought much of Proust. And definately Dickens, especially most of David Copperfield.
Stoker was the first writer I thought of too. I love Dracula, but after six or seven pages of description of the storm that accompanies the Demeter’s arrival in England, I get it already. Even “It was a dark and stormy night” would be better than that!
I loved some of those little digressions…
The middle section of “For whom the Bell Tolls”; they’re stuck in a cave, deciding whether to kill the leader of their guerilla gang, and it’s just conversation-without-end for pages and pages.
Fortunately the beginning and end of the book make up for it, but it’s the only bit of Hemingway I’ve read that I ever disliked.
Or pages and pages describing the type of plants surrounding Dracula’s castle.
One passage that’s hard to read is the word-for-word passage from Goldstein’s The Book in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I think Orwell knew this would be a boring passage for most, because while Winston is reading it to Julia, she falls asleep.
I had a class in 18th century novels that had some real snoozers. Pamela comes to mind immediately as one of the more dreadful examples. I mean, when the high point of the class was reading Tristram Shandy you know you’ve got problems.
Miller
Thanks for the coffee screen spray. That sums up Jordan quite nicely…
And in defense of David Copperfield, Dickens was getting paid by the word for that. If I remember correctly it was written as a serial for an English periodical.
I tried to read Saul Bellow once. I reconsidered and stared at the wall for a while. Made the right choice.
I’m about 3/4 of the way through Stephen King’s The Gunslinger and I have to say it is except for the:
running gunfight in Tull
one of the most annoying reads of my life. Mind you I’m not a King fan due to his generally weak prose (when bad writting happens to good stories) but this is just as tedious as the trip through the desert.
Yeah, I am not the only lonely Philistine here not liking LOTR. ( or MOby Dick, Silas Mariner, Three Musketeers) I couldn’t make it past the third chapter. It was all walking, walking, walking with big furry hobbit feet.
Frankly, I wasn’t impressed.
War and Peace sucked so bad that I couldn’t make it past the first page.
I may be dense, but just because it is dreary and tedious does not make it excellent literature. (Sex and violence, however, do.)
Miller You are a Demi-Godl.
If you think that book is tedious, try Wizards and Glass. To me the entire book is tedious. I liked the others better. Don’t give up, as The Drawing of the Three is very good.
IIRC, Dickens was payed by the installment, not the word–as was Dumas.
The Vicomte of Bragelonne and The Count of Monte Cristo were each serialized over almost two years–that’s why they’re each about 1,200 pages in paperback.
“Pamela” (a novel about a virtuous young lady put upon by all sorts of nasties) so revolted another writer, Henry Fielding (author of “Tom Jones”), that he rattled off a farce of that same work titled, “Shamela.”
Limiting it to authors that I like, it would have to be Faulkner. I love his great prose at the emotional highpoints and his overall story archs, but when a minor character starts having a fifty-page flashback and then one of the characters within the flashback starts having a flashback, …
I agree with everything that’s been said about Robert Jordan and Ayn Rand, and I would add another nominee for most tedious: Ratner’s Star, by Don Delillo. I only read the first two-hundred pages of this, it was assigned reading in college, but man was it painful. The story has something to do with a young math genius working at a high-tech research institute (I think) and a bunch of other scientists, indistinguishable because Delillo can’t be bothered with minor details such as characterization. And he breaks off at least once every twenty pages to give us a character’s observations about a toilet bowl or some really not funny jokes about adolescent horniness.
I wasn’t terribly fond of that one either, although I liked the idea behind it. 
I’ll cheerfully admit that “The Golden Bowl” by Henry James is one of the few books in my entire life that I purposefully did not finish reading. I had always seen the camera pan past the book’s spine during Masterpiece Theater’s introductory segment and figured it must be of some merit. Most of the other titles shown seemed to be pretty worthy, so when I found a copy of the book in a thrift shop, I snagged it for further perusal.
About 100 pages into the book I was already tempted to hold it by one corner in pinched fingers and drop it onto the nearest bonfire. I dutifully resumed my reading, keeping in mind admonitions similar to Miller’s sterling assessment that great literature is “supposed to be hard, agonizing, painful and dehumanizing.” Well, I’m not in the least happy to report that reading the “Golden Bowl” was all of these things and much worse. I have never suffered more, even when reading Hawthorne or Voltaire back in high school. About two-thirds of my way through the book, I carefully restrained myself from hurling it across the room with great force (per Dorothy Parker) and instead went to my local used book store and liquidated its rotting hulk for something far more spiritually uplifting, like maybe, a Tom Clancy thriller. Hell, I could get more out of reading a shampoo bottle’s list of contents than I did from anything Henry James wrote.
I’ve yet to meet a single person who is willing to extoll this loon’s writing. Was it “The Emperor’s New Clothes” or something like that which led to this author’s prominence? I would have though him to be a pariah of literature departments everywhere. I also began “A Turn of the Screw” and d@mned if I didn’t go comatose just as quickly. Chloroform has nothing on Henry James, trust me.