I read and enoyed many of these, although I agree that Heart of Darkness is a slog.
My choices:
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Anything by Henry James. I found Turn of the Screw unbearable (only Henry James can make a ghost story boring), but The Beast in the Jungle is worse. The titular Beast is metaphorical – the point of the book is that Nothing Happens. But it takes so damned long to Not Happen.
But the ansolute worst – and I know people love this, and will think me crazy – was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which I had to force myself to read every page of.
By the way, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kins of Britain was not (to me) as reptitive as le Morte d’Arthur. I read it all the way through on my own, not for a course. But then again, I liked *The Canterbury Tales, Animal Farm, * and many of the others listed above, so YMMV.
Miguel Delibes’ first novel, Cinco horas con Mario (Five Hours With Mario); the internal dialogue of a widow sitting alone with her husband’s casket.
The only good thing I can say about that brick is that Delibes appears to have been one of those people who needed to unload a horribly overwrought book before they could start writing good ones. Literary critics loved it, but your average 15yo reckons it’s great for starting fires.
Amen to that. My high school English teacher, in what must have been a fit of sadistic glee, assigned this as extra credit. Well, extra credit that was required if you wanted an A for the quarter. What a slog that was. Yeah, we get it, Billy Budd is like Jesus, wrap up already, Herman! At least he didn’t have Moby Dick on the syllabus.
While I loathed The Scarlet Letter, it was less because it was boring and more because Hawthorne’s writing style sucks ass.
I forgot about reading Pilgrim’s Progress until I saw it mentioned here. Yeah, it belongs on this list.
I, too, like some of the books that have been mentioned (including The Pilgrim’s Progress :)); others were okay, but I can understand why some people got bogged down by them. My own answers would probably be:
High School: Concur with Heart of Darkness (and also Conrad’s “Secret Sharer”). Also had to read the first book of The Forsyte Saga, and I don’t remember enough about it even to know if it was boring.
College: Fiction: Mrs. Dalloway and The Turn of the Screw, though neither one actually ended up being discussed in class.
Nonfiction: The Sacred Canopy, which I had to read for a religion class and which I think the whole class found impenetrable.
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.
There was a book by Gertrude Stein – the name escapes me – that I found completely incomprehensible. But partly through, I realized it was meant to be incomprehensible, so I slogged through it and wrote that the point of the book was to undercut our desire for meaning in a book, a concept that’s interesting in theory but duller than dirt in practice.
The professor was very hurt by my analysis. He tried to show how that somewhere there was a meaning in the book, but when you can’t even determine whether a word was being used as a noun or a verb, it’s hard to make a case.
Another vote for Ethan Frome. I don’t remember one thing about that book, other than how boring it was and how much I hated it. Honorable mentions to Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby.
Moby Dick for me. A whole chapters on comparing the colour white to good things and bad things. A chapter about the painting in the Inn Ishmael happens to be staying in. Chapters and chapters describing various types of whales. I don’t think I have ever read such a verbose book. The central plot only surfaced every two of three chapters and then only for a paragraph or so.
I have read a lot of the other books people have listed in this thread and nothing comes close to Moby Dick in my view. A lot of the books people have listed are actually pretty short e.g. Heart of Darkness, The great Gatsby, The old man and the sea, Animal farm etc. but Moby Dick does not even have that going for it.