# What was the most boring book you were ever forced to read for a class? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 22, 2013, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373 "2013-04-22T02:35:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2013, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/181 "2013-04-25T20:21:45Z")
> [@Small\_Hen](#): > > . . . every second spent with Ignatius J. Reilly was like being stuck on the back of a long bus ride with a unwashed man who’s discretely masturbating under his hat. Bravo! I am genuinely surprised that **A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man** has been so derided here. I thought it had some of the best writing I’d ever encountered. And, whoever included **Of Mice and Men** , come on, it’s not _bad_ , just, well, simple (and, actually, quite a good choice for high schoolers). ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2013, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/182 "2013-04-25T20:34:48Z")
Sorry, the Board is slow so I missed the edit window. I had wanted to say that I agree: _everything_ I (tried to) read by Dickens was torture. In retrospect, though, I admit he gave me an understanding of why we say things like "“It hurts like the Dickens” or “A Dickens of a mess”. Might as well just say, “A Dickens”! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2013, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/183 "2013-04-25T22:01:24Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > You guys are really making me want to read Silas Marner just because I refuse to believe it could be as boring as you all are saying it is, and oddly enough, I’ve never even heard of it until this thread. > > I always kind of wanted to read Wuthering Heights too. > > Maybe I’m a masochist? I suspect most people aren’t aware of it, but the Steve Martin mvoie **a Simnple Twist of Fate** is basically an updated _Silas Marner_. Martin wrote the screenplay and starred, just as he wrote the screenplay and starred in **Roxanne** , his updated take on Edmund Rostand’s _Cyrano de Bergerac_ ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2013, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/184 "2013-04-25T23:41:29Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I suspect most people aren’t aware of it, but the Steve Martin mvoie **a Simnple Twist of Fate** is basically an updated _Silas Marner_. If you’ve read the book and seen the movie it’s hard to miss. He does modernize the story. He fails to make it less boring. ---
**Author:** ![Small\_Hen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ad7895/32.png) [@Small\_Hen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Small_Hen)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2013, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/185 "2013-04-26T01:39:57Z")
> [@listedmia](#): > > **The Catcher in the Rye** is one of my least favorite books of all time. I can’t say it was boring, so much, because it’s fairly short, but nothing exciting happens and the protagonist is repugnant to me. There’s nothing funny or philosophically deep.However, I know so many people who would still say it’s their favorite book, perhaps because they don’t read very much and it’s the last one they ever finished. I pulled The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf for the first time in close to ten years after reading this post today. It was my favorite book when I was sixteen, and I must have read it a dozen times in the year or two before I put it aside (and yes, I’ve read many other books since). I’m about a third of the way through it now, and, much as I was expecting to do a 180 on my opinion of Holden and his whining, I didn’t. I still really like him. Granted, Catcher in the Rye isn’t exactly action packed, and if character studies aren’t your thing, I get that, but I never understood why people find Holden so loathsome. He never really does anything particularly hurtful to anyone. Sure, sometimes he _thinks_ about how he doesn’t like someone, but whoop de shit. I’m actually surprised by how much I **do** still like him, even now that I’m in my late 20s. Wonderful illustration of a teen spiraling into a PTSD fueled breakdown. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2013, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/186 "2013-04-26T01:42:23Z")
> [@Koldanar](#): > > **Madame Bovary.** AP English, the teacher as well as the class was unfamiliar with the book. After reviewing, the unanimous consensus was it was too boring to assign, ever again. Had to read it in three classes in college. And I mean **read** it; it was far too boring to remember from semester to semester. _thinking_ Well, maybe not entirely boring. I despised Emma and anything that brings out a strong emotion like that must have something to it. _more thinking_ No, much of what I despised about her was how she was an insignificant trifle who thought she was more than that because she put out. While I have always believed that women should be able to define themselves and got over (most of) my insufferable priggishness (no, really, I used to be WORSE) by college, I have always been annoyed by people who seem to define themselves by what they do with their junk. Which I think Emma might’ve done, though I can’t be sure because I slept through it. That’s it! I disliked the book because it made catting around France seem boring, which I think is a crime against humanity. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2013, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/187 "2013-04-26T01:50:23Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Regarding Thomas Hardy: very hard to read. But he was a pretty good poet. Surprised the hell out of me. ---
**Author:** ![Sternvogel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc79bd/32.png) [@Sternvogel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sternvogel)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2013, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/188 "2013-04-26T20:12:56Z")
> [@Tethered\_Kite](#): > > And then slogging on through the Russian authors, save Kafka Kafka was born in Prague (then Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia) and wrote in German. Nothing Russian about him. > [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > Also poems by E.E. Cummings (sorry, Mr. Cummings, but your name has to be capitalized). No need to apologize – ol’ Edward Estlin actually used uppercase [more often than not](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capitalization) when writing his signature. > [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > For Whom The Bell Tolls. Only assigned book I ever read that I disliked. I couldn’t get through it, although one reason I resented reading it was that it was assigned for **Spanish** class. Sure, it’s set amid the Spanish Civil War, but we read it in the original English, thus not actually studying the Spanish language for about a month! A special mention for _West Side Story_. After we read _Romeo and Juliet_ in ninth-grade English, the teacher decided to “reward” us for slogging through the sixteenth-century tragedy by assigning the 1957 update “for the fun of it”. Only instead of attending a live performance or watching the Natalie Wood film, we got to read the script! Such dramatic works as _Death of a Salesman_ and _The Glass Menagerie_ work as literature. Musicals? Not so much! ---
**Author:** ![sidhechaos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47c2d/32.png) [@sidhechaos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sidhechaos)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/189 "2013-05-02T23:47:38Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > Something occurs to me. I’ve had to read a fair number of these Gawd awful “classics” mentioned in high school and college. > > And for almost all of them, I don’t think I could give more than a sentence or two description of what the damn thing was about (and for some that might even be pushing it). > > Perhaps some sort of literary PTSD? I literally do not remember any of the books that we were assigned to read in school other than the horrific Dick and Jane type books in the beginning of first year. I was reading before I entered school and therefore found what we were given in school to be trite and silly. I remember in third grade a big battle between my teacher and my mother because I had brought a copy of the hobbit to school to read and the teacher told my mother that I was being pretentious and there was no way I could possibly read that book at that age. My mother opened the book and read a few pages prior to where I had bookmarked and then asked me what I had been reading about at the place I had stopped. I then excitedly told her about dwarves inside barrels floating down a river escaping the elven prison and arriving in the human town. My mother had me stop speaking and proceeded to tell my teacher, " unless my daughter brings playboy into the school you will never again discourage her from attempting to read anything. If you do I will complain to the school board as well as go to the news media you should never suppress a child’s desire to learn." The only book that I remember being assigned in class to read was in the seventh grade when lo and behold our teacher assigned as the hobbit. 🆒 I could not help but starting to laugh. The teacher asked what was so funny and I explain to her what had occurred in third grade. She asked me to stay behind after class and I told her the whole story and she verified that I had read the hobbit, so rather than the hobbit I was assigned to read the following trilogy since I had not known existed. This is the only reading assignment that I can recall from all my time in school. I don’t know if my schools simply did not have a habit of assigning books to read and do reports on and I have blocked it because the books were so terrible or if they simply chose to do other activities. I do remember endless days of having to parse sectional paragraphs :eek:from textbooks that were quoted from other books. It seems like that’s all we ever really did other than vocabulary and spelling but surely that can’t be right. It seems that absolutely all schools have an assigned reading lists I simply cannot remember having ever done it other than when the book was one that I had read before and enjoyed from the seventh grade. I do remember in high school that we had clubs. I elected to join the book club and I remember that I did enjoyed the books that were chosen for us there. They were more contemporary and sometimes more adult oriented than that I would have expected from my school system but despite them not being my beloved science fiction or fantasy I still liked them. This was where I got my introduction into fiction that did not involve science or fantasy. I suspect that the theory of ptsd is probably a sound one and it is sad that the school system does not choose more contemporary interesting work so that students have a love of reading. I think this is the reason why my mother other than for a very brief time in my life never objected to the fact that I like to read science fiction and fantasy type books or as the rest of my family referred to it " word shit".:rolleyes: I believe probably the only books and I have absolutely not been able to read and indeed have gone through a bout of destroying are bodice rippers and Harlequin romances. Considering harlequin’s formatted writing demands I can’t even see how they can be considered books. They are more like reading stupid mad libs.:smack: Of course the school should have seen trouble coming one in first grade when we were required to draw and illustrate our own four page book and a rather than my book being that about how we went to Florida or camping that summer it was about an alien spaceship landing in our yard. Really, what were they expecting after that?😃 ---
**Author:** ![Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulf_the_Unwashed)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/190 "2013-05-03T03:54:57Z")
> [@Small\_Hen](#): > > I pulled The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf for the first time in close to ten years after reading this post today. It was my favorite book when I was sixteen, and I must have read it a dozen times in the year or two before I put it aside (and yes, I’ve read many other books since). I’m about a third of the way through it now, and, much as I was expecting to do a 180 on my opinion of Holden and his whining, I didn’t. I still really like him. > > Granted, Catcher in the Rye isn’t exactly action packed, and if character studies aren’t your thing, I get that, but I never understood why people find Holden so loathsome. He never really does anything particularly hurtful to anyone. Sure, sometimes he _thinks_ about how he doesn’t like someone, but whoop de shit. I’m actually surprised by how much I **do** still like him, even now that I’m in my late 20s. Wonderful illustration of a teen spiraling into a PTSD fueled breakdown. To add to this post: I’ve read _Catcher in the Rye_ three times. I read it when I was 14, a HS freshman, and I really liked it. No, Holden isn’t exactly a heroic figure, all his talk about phonies is annoying, and the swearing didn’t do anything for me, but it seemed fresh and funny, and there was something appealing about the fuck-you-world attitude that Holden has. Really, really liked it. I reread it when I was 33 and doing some tutoring of a kid who was reading it for class. Didn’t think I’d like it as much, now that I was older and wiser, but I really liked it. Saw a little bit more clearly how he can’t get out of his own way, how he blames everybody around him for failings that are mostly his own damn fault, and it still seemed fresh and funny and somewhat ironic. Really, really liked it. And then I reread it when I was about 47, just because, and I didn;t think it would hold up still, but this time I saw not just a whiny kid who’s convinced the world is against him, but in addition a troubled kid who really has been let down by a lot of the adults in his life and can’t put the pieces together, and it was fresh and funny and had an undercurrent of pathos. Really, really liked it. I figure I’ll reread it “when I’m 64.” I’ll post about it again, when the time comes 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![AngelSoft](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/angelsoft/32/440_2.png) [@AngelSoft](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AngelSoft)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/191 "2013-05-03T04:02:10Z")
Does _Paradise Lost_ count? I know it’s a poem, but it’s as long as a book. We had to read that in my senior year and omfg, I wanted to throw it in a fire. I’ve never read such a boring book. It didn’t help that the sentences just went on and on and ON and I often forgot wtf I was even reading about. ---
**Author:** ![Sahirrnee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sahirrnee/32/13937_2.png) [@Sahirrnee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sahirrnee)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/192 "2013-05-03T05:04:30Z")
That made me remember Dante \* Inferno\* ---
**Author:** ![Cheez\_Whia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d26b3c/32.png) [@Cheez\_Whia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheez_Whia)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/193 "2013-05-03T13:01:39Z")
**The Moonstone** by Wilkie Collins. I only kept reading it because I was waiting for it to get _good_. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/194 "2013-05-03T13:32:47Z")
> [@alfonzos](#): > > _Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze_. I was already miserable in the sixth grade and this book was a major cause of my mood. Nothing happened to this kid. That reminds me: in elementary school we had to read [I, Juan de Pareja](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Juan_de_Pareja), another book where not much happens. The only reason I remember it at all is because I liked how it sounded kind of like “I want a parade”. ---
**Author:** ![Sauron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce7236/32.png) [@Sauron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sauron)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2013, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373/195 "2013-05-03T16:48:51Z")
Three come to mind for me: 1. _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_: As **gigi** said earlier, Tess gets raped early in the book and has a baby as a result. Pretty dramatic, right? The problem was, I had NO IDEA that had happened until the author tells us that Tess is working in the field one day and nonchalantly stops to breast-feed her baby. At that point, I realized I was never going to understand this book, and bought the Cliff’s Notes. 2. _Last of the Mohicans_: Somebody else in this thread said that the only good thing about reading this book was being able to appreciate Mark Twain’s complete disemboweling of this physical manifestation of boring. Spot on. 3. _The Good Earth_: I didn’t care about Chinese peasants at the turn of the 20th century when I was in high school, and I cared even less about them after reading this book. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-most-boring-book-you-were-ever-forced-to-read-for-a-class/656373.md?page=9)