I thought “Animal Farm” would be entertaining but I found it very dull and disappointing. Any thoughts from the SDMB members?
Being And Nothingness, Sartre.
Can’t decide if it was Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter, neither of which I completed more than a third of the way through. That whole swath of time was just so verbose and turgid.
“A Wrinkle in Time” comes to mind. I was too young to get it, I suppose, and I’ve never been a sci-fi person.
Lord Jim. It took the guy four pages to take off a boot. I gave up halfway through and took an F on it rather than finish the damn thing, and I let the teacher know I was doing it, and why.
Canterbury Tales and The Scarlet Letter.
The OP is about novels, not non-fiction like, say, any chemistry text book I was ever issued?
Heart of Darkness. Conrad.
Dear God, yes, Heart of Darkness. I never got anything below an A in English class except for the two weeks in which we read Heart of Darkness, and I got so bogged down in it that I simply gave up, accepted my D- on the test with pleasure, and waited til the next unit.
I liked most of the fiction I had to read in high school- I did struggle with “The Sun Also Rises” though.
For non-fiction- I think I retained about 2 words of the over 900 pages of Karl Marx’s “Grundrisse” that I had to read for a Marxism course in university. Coma inducing.
I just came in to see how many times one of my favorite novels was mentioned. I’m gratified to see there is only one mention of Moby Dickso far.
Most of the boring books I was forced to read are so forgettable that they are hard to bring to mind. I do remember a trilogy I was forced to read in a college Soviet Literature class. I don’t remember the title; only that it had something to do with Russian forestry practices. By the third book I was only reading the first paragrapgh of each chapter.
I liked quite a few of the books mentioned so far. My vote for most tedious book will go to Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. I remember almost nothing about it, and I’m not sure if it’s because it was so boring that I blocked it out, or because I couldn’t even finish it, or both.
The Bible, closely followed by *The Great Gatsby *and Crime and Punishment
Yes. For example, my answer to the OP would be “a novel with the word ‘Owl’ in the title”, because that (and how boring it was) is precisely all I remember about it.
Another vote for Heart of Darkness. I’ve been assigned it in two different classes and didn’t enjoy it either time.
Middlemarch in college. Ugh.
A Death In Venice - I never got past the beginning.
The only one that comes to mind for me was David Copperfield, and it probably wouldn’t have been so tedious for me if that edition had been annotated so I wouldn’t get stopped dead every other paragraph by an unfamiliar word or phrase. I could probably read it now without problem, except that my mind would probably constantly wander to the South Park version of Great Expectations, which had robot monkeys and such.
Le Morte D’Arthur. It’s possible my teacher just assigned us terrible sections, but I remember literally paragraphs listing what random knights went on what random quests. Dry as a textbook.
The Pearl. Ugh.
Heart of Darkness, too, but I read less of that than I read of The Pearl (I was awesome at Cliffs Notes).