Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Absolutely nothing happens in the whole book.
Being the one who nominated it, I just wanted to say that I agree it was very well written, depressing, shattering, etc. It was also just very boring to me, though I did read it quickly. However, like I said, overall I would highly recommend it to anyone and I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is also perhaps one of the most important books ever written, given its history. But it was not written to be an exciting page-turner of a book. It was written to be extremely mundane, grim and depressing. The end of course is shattering, and the book works on every level.
So, I hope saying that it is the most boring book I’ve ever read is not a negative, because in this one instance, being boring was a positive quality. I recognize for you it was a page turner though 
Is Clarissa the book you were thinking of?
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag. God, those all sucked!
I rather liked Red Badge of Courage, Crime and Punishment, Dickens’ novels & Shakespeare’s plays when I read them in school, and Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness which I read must later.
I had this experience a couple of weeks ago–never liked Shakespeare, found reading him interminably boring in high school and never experienced any since then…
…until I sat down for three hours and watched “Hamlet” on my computer. And liked it!
It’s amazing what three things can do to jazz up boring old Shakespeare:
- Modern dress
- Patrick Stewart
- David Tennant in the title role (definitely the #1 draw for me)
The 10th grade me found “The Scarlet Letter” unbearably boring. I wonder if I’d appreciate it more now, but I’ll probably never find out because there are always going to be other books I’ll want to read first…
Isn’t that the book that electrified people in pre-revolutionary Russia? It’s interesting how times and tastes can change so much…
Same here. That’s practically an adventure story!
Agreed, and especially true today. If your average kid seldom reads any more books than what they have to for English class, they’d be better served by being assigned some of the more accessible books out there.
Another vote for The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne needed to just get to the damn point.
Runner-up: The Great Gatsby.
- Sun-drenched Tuscany and Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson in their prime.
A major bore with no redeeming qualities by supposedly one of English’s greatest writers: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Anything by Dickens. Anything.
The most boring book I’ve ever assigned was Dhalgren. It was the novel selected for Academic Decathlon the year they did science fiction. Of all the SF novels ever written, they had to select the most unreadable.
Silas Marner. It might have simply been the delivery of my teacher, who was probably as bored with the material as I was, or it could have been the book was horrible. What I am sure about is, I wanted that book dead. So when I finished the final exam, I picked up my paperback copy, walked up to the teacher’s desk, handed in my exam, and proceeded to tear the book apart, literally, page by page.
He actually looked a little hurt. “Was it that bad?”
“God, yes. Bleargh!”
I was okay with, tolerated, or enjoyed everything else I had to read in high school, but for some reason, I hated Silas Marner.
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?
Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge was just an unrelenting misery fest (of course with Hardy, that doesn’t narrow the field).
DH Lawrence gets no love from me. We had to do his poems as well as his novels, and all I recall is a weird obsession with figs as symbols of female genitalia. The whole transgressive erotica thing is now hopelessly trapped in its time, as is pretty much the fate of all self-consciously transgressive work.
Life’s too short to read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It’s too clever-clever to be actually readable. Having to roll every syllable around in the mouth makes the process impossible. And knowing of Joyce’s odd sexual proclivities just adds to the bad taste left in the mouth.
But I loved Gatsby. Prompted me to read all of Fitzgerald I could get my hands on. Maybe for me it was the foreign Americanness of it that gripped me, and perhaps that is why those who don’t see it through foreign eyes find it dull.
The part I remember most is him going on about all his beautiful shirts. I see that scene is given its due in the new movie.
Another Wuthering Heights vote. Probably the worst book I’ve ever read that I actually got all the way through.
I actually enjoyed Ethan Fromme.
Obviously, everyone has blocked out the memory of the dullest, most impenetrable book ever written: Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse.”
Well, one positive out this shittiest of shittest things you’ve ever read thread is that I’ve seen a fair number I haven’t read and now probably never will.
It would be a lot easier to list the class reading I liked; Pilgrim’s Progress, Red Badge of Courage, and A Death In The Family were the only ones I actually went back to reread.
By far the worst was the Hemingway short story “Big Two Hearted River”. The story goes in excrutiating detail about a fishing trip: descriptions of lures, threading lines, etc. When we read it in high school, everybody asked “what’s this about?” The teacher said it was about the lead character’s memories of war. Huh? I don’t even think the story said the lead character was a veteran, and nothing about a fishing trip relates in any remote way to war. Nothing in the story gives you any clue about the “meaning”. That is why so many kids hate literature classes.
snicker
Clarissa was the one that I was coming in to mention. Gah!