Jekyll and Hyde & Moby Dick still haunt me in my sleep all these years later
Sounds like an awesome crossover novel.
The Scarlet Letter.
Best I can tell, high school lit class is designed specifically to make young people hate the classics. Maybe teachers don’t want the competition? Or maybe they hate those books from their school days. I don’t know.
A lot of the books mentioned here are great books (The Scarlet Letter excepted) for a reason. Unfortunately, they aren’t good books for beginners. It helps to have a little history, a little life experience, a little context and a little practice at reading before being thrown into the deep end with Mody Dick.
Heart of Darkness - awesome book IMO. I’m so glad I wasn’t forced to read it in school because I would have never picked it up again.
For me it was the self-important pop-psych claptrap,but since I was not forced to read this for any class (I actually read it voluntarily, and at the time, in my teens, I think I thought it was deep; maybe it was the ersatz homosexual relationship that caught my interest, or something) I won’t say anything more.
Roddy
Has anybody mentioned William ('scuse me while I stifle a yawn) Faulkner?
That’s my pick as well.
Both my wife Pepper Mill and I had to read this one. we both hated it. She had to read it twice, for different courses.
It’s awful, but not as bad as Henry James.
I also had to read James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which I found as unbearable as A Separate Peace.
The two movie versions are arguably better.
I got half-way through before throwing the damn thing out the window.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. The only book I failed to finish for a high school class. I just couldn’t do it. Bridge collapses. Everybody dies. Turns out the people’s lives all intertwined in some way. Big f’ing deal. They were all boring characters anyhow.
Put me down as another hater of The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea. Uninteresting storylines plus turgid prose. Curiously, I enjoyed Lord of the Flies and Billy Budd. That probably says something awful about me.
I can’t think of anything I simply failed to finish reading for a class. On the other hand, I can’t remember truly enjoying anything I had to read for class, either. Simply knowing that I had to finish it on time and extract the “correct” meaning of the text was enough to take the fun out of reading for me.
If we’re allowed to cite nonfiction as long as it’s not a textbook, I nominate Distinctionby Bourdieu. That soporific fucker is pretty much what convinced me I had no business being in grad school.
Throw another few points behind The Scarlet Letter, The Red Pony, and The Pearl (I did, however, love Of Mice and Men, The Great Gadsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Old Man and the Sea).
There was a thread recently about it, but I’m also going to pick A Confederacy of Dunces. I’m not sure that boring was quite the word for it - aggressively unpleasant, maybe, but lord was it a slog. I dreaded picking it up, because 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.
My freshman year in college I struggled through a collection of stories and essays called, Personal Integrity. The same for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book on costly grace. Name escapes me. Costly Grace, I think! Those two were just above my head at the time. And felt a lot like brainwashing to this rebellious young thing.
And then slogging on through the Russian authors, save Kafka, and the dry-as-a-bone early American authors.
The usual suspects have been named.
I only finished Heart of Darkness recently after seeing a new film version. I like the plot and premise. For a matter of fact the theme of accidental corruption in pursuit of one’s work is one of my favorites. It’s the darned form of that piece that’s unpalatable.
Oh God, I hate, hated, hated The Pearl. If that wasn’t the worst, most hateful, and boring book, then it was Great Expectations.
The Scarlet Letter.
Just the thought of that one still makes me shudder.
I don’t know how having sex in a carriage could be written to be boring, but Flaubert managed it in Madame Bovary.
I can’t understand the hate for Crime and Punishment. Maybe its the translation but I enjoyed reading it immensely.
Anything by Dickens personally. I can’t the stand the attempt at being humours and sentimental at once. Also poems by E.E. Cummings (sorry, Mr. Cummings, but your name has to be capitalized).
Definitely Atlas Shrugged, especially the long speech. Just don’t read what my user name is!
How Green Was My Valley, assigned because of a lack of cliffnotes and the fact that the movie of it premiered in our very own dying coal town. A slog through the early years of a boy in a coal mining family, in which at one point the description of a boy getting an erection was so boring a bunch of teenagers didn’t giggle.
The most boring university book I had to read from was a collection of works by Aristotle. Not only was it as impenetrable as stereo instructions, it was like stereo instructions by Geoffrey Chaucer, where words all had some kind of archaic idiosyncratic meaning. I dropped that class so fast.