I read Pamela just so I would have the background to get the jokes in Shamela. I can’t believe I did that. It’s amazing how much time we had on our hands in the days before the internet.
I suppose there’s something to say for having a “completist” attitude, but I’ll refrain from saying it just right now.
The first 2,000 pages or so had me enthralled. The last ~80 pages, though, comprise a damn tedious literary passage. It’s mostly Tolstoy going off on fate versus freewill and other philosophical stuff. After barely being able to put the book down for two weeks, I had to force myself to finish it.
I can’t read Henry James. I know the man was respected by a number of writers I can read and enjoy (James Thurber, for example), but Henry James, I cannot read. (And I’ve read, and enjoyed, a number of other entries in this thread. Not Pamela, though.)
Everything written by Thomas Mann, especially The Magic Mountain. His prose style is unbelievably stilted and boring and completely makes reading his books a chore instead of pleasure.
And if I may trash a translator, Constance Garnett. I love Dostoyevsky, but that frail absolutely is the most gawdawfully tedious translator of his work, ever. Avoid her if at all possible.
In defense of ol’ Marcel: Yeah, as posters note, if you’re reading him for story, fuhgeddaboutit, he takes pages to describe even the simplest action, and if you’re forced to read him with frequent interruptions, it’s just about impossible to get back into the mood (and I, at least, really need to be in a Proustian reverie in order to enjoy his work). But if you can go somewhere by yourself and read free of distractions, you’ll find that his descriptions of human relations, the psychological motives of our social behavior, and the lies we spin to disguise them from ourselves are unequalled by any other author.
The 37 page golf game in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger
Faulkner. My god. Who let that man near a typewriter?
The beginning of Absalom, Absalom makes me want to weep in despair, and that’s the good part.
sob
Julie
Oooh, good call there, gobear! I seem to recall picking up “The Magic Mountain” and reading about two or three pages before tossing it into my roaring fireplace. That was almost twenty years ago and even now I can still recall Mann being an incredibly boring nit.
I’ll agree with Henry James. There’s a hilarious des ription I read once about his asking for directions on the road that seems borne out by his unbelievably tedious writing. The man can make a sentence go on for pages. I thought a Turn of the Screw was bad (how many people can make a ghost story boring?), but the all time winner has to be The Beast in the Jungle. There is no Beast in the Jungle. The point of the book is that Nothing Happens. But with James, it takes so damned long not to happen.
Them’s fightin’ words! I’ve read Frankenstein several times through (especially fun in Leonard Wolf’s Annotated or Essential editions), and I’ve got Robbie Coltrane reading it on audiotape. Of course, De Gustibus non Disputandum Est. I had a professor who loved Henry James, although he had no other signs of brain damage.
Huh? He may be my favorite writer of all time. The Brothers K? Notes from Underground are some of the best writings ever translated to english.
I would say the first part of “The Sound and the Fury” – Benjy’s passage.
Only after having some sort of critical understanding cpuld I really remotely appreciate it.
No no no. I wasn’t calling Dostoevsky boring. I was correcting someone else’s misspelling of his name.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Gah!
Flannery O’Connor. Bah!
The King Tedious of All Time just has to be the John Galt speech. For those who may doubt this, don’t say I didn’t warn you!