Without a doubt: Silas Marner
I enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, but I managed to read it not just without giggling, but without realizing that the characters were having sex.
Wuthering Heights. Cripes, what a fucking soap opera.
The name seems familiar, that might be it.
You beat me to it. I was an excellent English student, got to top mark in the class and genuinely enjoyed our other assigned reading. This book was a turd though. I could barely even get through the Coles Notes version.
The main problem is in the way the books are taught.
Actually, the FIRST damned problem is that most authors wrote for a damned paycheck, not because they felt the burning need to impart deep inner wisdom. Sometimes some dude wandering down a railroad track is just a shellshocked infantryman, and the author was hot after that $25 he got for selling the story.
[Robert A Heinlein and most of the authors that wrote SIGNIFICANT SCIENCE FICTION <insert echoy vocal effect here> were after that 3 cents per word that John Campbell was paying. You need to pay the bills and eat, and not everybody had a wife with a good job.]
And kids are seriously NOT interested in reading it line by line and trying to figure out what [if any] deep inner meaning was meant by the author [who was in it for the money]
If they made lit courses self guided like the old SRA Reading Comprehension Programs [change from 2 minute cards to something like the way math or history is done, a chapter followed by questions, and glossary of unfamiliar terms. Ereaders would be wicked killer for this, highlight the unfamiliar word and a text box with the definition pops up.] I think it would work much better - the kid could schlub along at their own pace in class, and take stuff home. If they have any actual questions, then they could ask the teacher in class.
Actually, I think that a lot of subjects could benefit by being done interactively on a laptop - etextbook, packaged dictionary so you can highlight and search for the definition, testing module at the end of the chapter that automatically emails itself to the teacher. Puts the teacher into more of a supervisory role and makes it perhaps less boring for the kids, especially if it also can involve film and music clips.
I’m the OP and I am pleased that we have such an interesting discussion here of crap that we all had to slog through at some point or other in our academic careers. In fact many of you have reminded me of crap that I forgot about:
Jude The Obscure (the obscurity is WHY this boring crap is forced on us)
Middlemarch (already mentioned earlier: THANK GOD for Cliff NOTES!)
The American
Pride and Prejudice
Almost anything by Edgar Allen Poe (trust me, I was REALLY DISAPPOINTED when none of those stories read like the Roger Corman movies!)
Speaking of Poe, last year I read some Lovecraft and I must say, I was not particularly impressed with him (specifically “At The Mountains of Madness”) Perhaps “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is better but I just don’t have any desire to go through with it; he must be popular for some reason.
Somebody mentioned Herman Hesse and I am reminded about Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. Years ago (the 80s back when I was in college) one of my “artsy-fartsy” friends took me to one of the local art house movie theaters for my birthday to watch a double feature of these Herman Hesse classics. I wanted to walk out so badly but he was springing for pizza and beer afterward as well so I forced myself to sit through this pretentious and boring crap. He like them; in fact he had mentioned to me that these two films were based on books that were “very popular among college students.” (I so badly wanted to ask WHICH COLLEGE and WHY and WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING but like I said, the pizza and beer were coming and I didn’t want to appear ungrateful).
SO far it seems that “Heart of Darkness” is coming across as the most boring of all! I have never picked it up and now I REALLY have no intention of looking at it; nonetheless we still have time for more discussion. In fact several of you have pointed out that on occasion some of your professors even decided that the assigned novels were boring! Which brings me to another question: WHY in the world are their courses on these so-called “classics” that bore the shit out of most of us!? I once heard that one definition of a classic is a book that everybody praises but nobody ever reads; if that’s true then there must be a good reason for it. As many posters here point out: being forced to slog through these horribly boring classics probably turned a lot of younger people OFF to reading. Very sad indeed. FYI—to those of you here wondering if I meant to include non-fiction here: not necessarily but if somebody wants to put it here, feel free. Otherwise somebody can start another thread for that if one is so inclined.
Oh Jesus, I forgot that piece of crap.
And I had the unfortunate luck to have to read that in college. In a small class. With a professor that wasn’t letting anybody just get by with just a few hours of work a week. And that damn book took up the better part of the semester. And he graded hard. And we analyzed the shit out of it. I musta read that thing 3 or 4 times over before we were done. And, of course besides all the discussions and reports and assignments you had to memorize a good bit of it to do good on the tests and quizes.
Damn, now I’'ll probably have flashbacks tonight and not get any sleep.
Oh, sweet baby Jesus, that’s the book I read as a cure for insomnia. To this day I start yawning when I think of it. Absolute torture.
When I was in high school we read Shakespeare and it was taught in the most boring way imaginable.. We read tragedies, and never got to see them performed even. I hated Shakespeare, and didn’t know then he truly was a great playwright.
Then for whatever reason I watch “Measure for Measure”, on PBS, and was stunned. I didn’t know Shakespeare could be funny! Dirty jokes, illicit sex, cross dressing! This is the play they should use to hook students on Shakespeare, or maybe Twelfth Night. Later on I learned the beauty of the histories and tragedies as well, but I almost didn’t.
Isn’t Pamela the one where the heroine is raped by the bad guy and then goes into a decline and dies of shame?
I couldn’t get into it. Everybody just starts acting so illogically so quickly and so determinedly that I didn’t care in the least what happened to them. Any attempt at deeper meaning fell flat for me as a result. Maybe I’d have felt differently if even one of the characters remotely resembled a real person.
Nope. I checked and was mistaken.
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding. We were told that it’s the first true novel in the English language, and that Fielding knew he was doing something new. Knew it so well that every. other. chapter. was a discourse on how this was a new thing and wasn’t it nifty?
The only book I was assigned to read that I actually quit reading halfway through (and that was even though I started skipping the damned essay chapters) and went with the Cliff Notes.
On a side note, you know why literature classes are mostly wasted on the young? Because we don’t want to analyze the damn thing, we just want to get on with the story! Hell, I still feel that way. I am incredibly dubious that, for instance, Shakespeare meant to use the idea of a garden as a roving “motif” to represent Denmark, Hamlet’s family, and Ophelia’s madness in *Hamlet *(not that I recall if it represented any or all of these), and I have some sincere doubt that Saul Bellow was using the color green to symbolize much of anything in Henderson the Rain King (another boring book, but not to the excremental abyssal depths of Tom Jones). I’d start in on Confederacy of Dunces, too, but I’ve mercifully blocked the whole thing out of my memory except for the tag that says, “Do not read this again, even if they shove bamboo needles under your fingernails. That’d be less painful!”
That’s what the bat-signal is for.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And Faulkner. I don’t remember which book it was, just ack.
End of the book of One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich:
After slogging through an extremely uneventful, bore-you-tears story of just one single day in this guy’s life, the book ends by saying something like, “This was a good day for Ivan. There were [some ungodly number in the thousands] of days like this in his prison sentence.” I forget the wording exactly but that was the gist of it. That the day we read, which was a really boring, pretty terrible day, was one of his good ones, and there were thousands like it while he was in the gulag. It has stuck with me all these years later, and really made the boredom of the book meaningful.
Note that I mentioned that I hated, hated, hated that book, but that being boring was not one of its downfalls. It was quite far from boring (to me).
I hated Tom Jones so much. To make matters worse, the professor was a complete nut. For our midterm exam he gave us excerpts from the text with random words blacked out, and we had to fill in the blanks with the exact word from the text. Easily the worst literature class ever.
Shakespeare wasn’t written to be read, it was written to be played in front of an audience as more or less the popular entertainment of the day [as mrAru just pointed out think of Romeo and Juliette as Survivor:Verona, instead of being voted off you died instead 
]
I think there’s a distinction between hating a book and finding it boring.
I hated any number of works I had to read in HS. (In college I managed to work my bonehead English courses such as to avoid having to read any more Great Works of Literature.) I honestly cannot think that there’s a single work among those I had to read for HS English that I enjoyed, though Catcher in the Rye came closest.
I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Dennisovich in one night - I stayed up all night for it. (It was required for Russian History.) I thought it was a wonderful, beautiful, lyrical, depressing, shattering work. To this day I will recommend it as one of the most affecting books I’d ever read. I also read The Old Man and the Sea, for my own reasons, and enjoyed it.
I will admit that there are parts of Moby Dick that slog. (For me it was the way that Melville could take the most dramatic moments and infuse them with such verbiage and imagery that the drama got lost somewhere on the way to the reader. The scene when Ahab destroys the sextant should have been utterly shocking, and instead it was just, “Will you get on with it already and let the pieces scatter on the deck?”) In spite of that, there was sufficient pathos in the story that it still could get through Melville’s prose. I found Billy Budd more of a slog, but even there, it wasn’t the driest I ever had to read.
Wuthering Heights did nothing for me, nor did The Scarlet Letter, nor The House of Seven Gables. The Last of the Mohicans is redeemed only by the vituperation that Samuel Clemens rained down on it. (And worth reading just to be better able to appreciate it when Mark Twain takes aim at James Fenimore Cooper.)
I can’t speak to many of the other nominees in this thread. I have never read Heart of Darkness, for example, and nothing I’ve seen ever left me with a desire to remedy that lack. I’m fairly certain I had to read Jane Eyre, but I remember nothing of it.
My choices for most boring would be either Great Expectations, or The Stranger. I had the grand fun of having to do The Stranger in both English and French. It didn’t get any better in the original language. (And I liked Waiting for Godot.)
Neither of them, however, can compare to Silas Marner, which I tried to read when I was complaining about how boring Great Expectations was. My mother told me I should be glad I didn’t have to read George Elliot, and then dared me to try to finish Silas Marner. Needless to say, I conceded her point, and put her copy of Silas Marner back in the basement where it was hoped that it would kill silverfish by being too turgid even for them.
Tess of the D’ubervilles. The worst novel ever extruded. And I include The Eye Of Argon. I’m half-convinced Hardy wrote it simply to torture people.
Also, not nearly as bad, but Catcher in the Rye sent me into a coma. A boring, whiney-little-turd of a protagonist meanders through a series of largely boring plot starters and the plot never starts. And really, the punk’s only real problems are all “first world problems”. It’s like reading some emo teen’s blog about why his parents and society JUST DON’T GET HIM, MAN. Only less interesting.