I think Heart of Darkness edges out Portrait of an Artist narrowly.
I’ll toss in an unnamed addition though. The King Must Die was by all accounts - read by me yet I retain zero recollection about the book at all. I remember the act of reading it but I remember nothing from the experience, or even what the plot was. I know that it’s a Theseus story but I don’t know if what I remember is from what I already knew or added from the book.
This is in stark contrast to reading HoD and remembering the withering agony and glances up at the clock and checking of how many pages are left - which is seared into my brain.
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
Once getting pass the ribald humor of the title, I read that essentially the book is about the whole town playing a prank on a man to demonstrate how the man is an ass for falling for it.
Though I didn’t find it boring, per se, one teacher had assigned us to read Ulysses in three weeks. I just skipped over large chunks.
Another one: Fun with Dick and Jane. No plot to speak of, no character development. The characters would have to reach to be two-dimensional. Probably sexist and racist. At least it was short…
That’s funny. And the same thing happened to me. Taking a higher level English class and a new to teaching teacher assigned one of the “classics” (I forget which one). And we spend six weeks doing all the things you can do to a book for an English class. About half way through it everybody was tired of this crap, including the teacher. We finished up her lesson plan as planned but at the end she too was like “gawd, what a piece of crap”
And like lot’s of other folks here, there was one “classic” that I just had to say screw it, I can’t take this anymore. ATM I can’t recall which one though (pretty sure it has been mentioned though). And thats saying something because I took my grades and assignments very seriously.
Billy Budd the movie ain’t half bad though (besides being depressing as hell ending wise IIRC).
I don’t remember the name of the book but it SUCKED and I wrote the book report saying how much it sucked. It was about some kids who were abandoned in a car in a mall parking lot by their mother so they set off on foot to find their grandmother. I remember something like 2.5 pages describing how they ate ice cream cones.
In every thread like this Ethan Frome catches a beating, I’d like to stand up for the book. It is slowly paced, the end does seem anticlimactic. Still, deep affection completely uncommunicated really spoke to me as a shy nerdy teenager. Like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that’s what love was to me and it was far more realistic than all the movies, tv shows and video games we all were bombarded with as teens.
Great Expectations started strong, but during the middle it became clear Dickens was getting paid by the word and I was tired of being strung along for his meal ticket.
Mine would be Giants In The Earth. Boring, boring, boring. There were only two of us that had to read it because we were so far ahead of everyone else in the class.
I recently reread it and found it slightly less boring now that I am adult. Still boring in the main, and I cannot imagine what anyone thinks a 16 year old is going to get out of this book about posing and crushed hopes, other than, “it was pretty short.”
My essay contained the line “The crime is that this is considered a great novel, and the punishment is that high school students have to read it.” Got marked down for that one.
I liked a lot of these books. And even the ones I hated (Lord of the Flies I’m looking at you) were not boring.
Most boring for me was definitely Dombey and Son by Dickens. You might think other Dickens novels are boring, but then consider that Dombey and Son is one of Dicken’s “lesser” works. Not as good as Oliver Twist or Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield. More boring!
My high school English teacher assigned it to us, she said, specifically because there were no Cliff Notes available for it like there were for all the other Dickens novels.
