La Ciencia y su Método by Mario Bunge in college.
It’s not that long, but I could only read about 10 pages before collapsing. They most dedicated of the class managed to go halfway through pure willpower.
Slow, repetitive, uniformative.
<Nevermind>
Another vote for Silas Marner. So dull that I now remember exactly NOTHING about what it was about. Ugh!
And a book that I decided was dull and unreadable solely on its title alone was Jude the Obscure. Now that’s a real grabber of a title!
Regarding Thomas Hardy: very hard to read…that is why the movie version of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” was much better than the book.
Silas Marner: Something about a weird, twitchy single man adopting an orphan girl.
I think.
Another vote for Crime and Punishment. I distinctly remember a hellish Sunday, when I needed to have finished it by the next day. Every few pages that I’d read, I’d count the number of pages remaining.
On the other hand: I had a fantastic AP English class my senior year; we read Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations (among others) and the class discussions were so great that I remember them all fondly. (I think I’d have liked G.E. even without the class).
One Sunday afternoon a few years back PBS was showing a version of “Jude the Obscure” starring Kate Winslet! It was rivetting, and frustrating as hell, wanted to reach through the screen and grab her around the neck and shake her. I cried buckets at the end, it stayed with me for days.
(I loved “Tess”, both book and movie.)
I read every book assigned with glee. I was a voracious reader, until I got to Heart of Darkness. Omigod! For AP English, we were given a stack of boat, * Old Man and The Sea, Crime and Punishment, A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies…* none compared to Conrad. How can such a short book be SO tedious?!
Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze. I was already miserable in the sixth grade and this book was a major cause of my mood. Nothing happened to this kid.
I didn’t find Jude the Obscure boring. I did however give it the prize for most depressing book ever.
Y’all are crazy. Poe? Hemmingway? Fitzgerald? Shakespeare? Dickens? Phenomenal writers, every one, compared to the hack that calls herself George Eliot. I see a few votes for Silas Marner, but I have to go with The Mill on the Floss. Absolute coma-inducing garbage.
I would read Samuel Johnson forward and back before I ever read that road apple again. And I’m not even talking Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson– I’m talking Sam’s dictionary.
For Whom The Bell Tolls. Only assigned book I ever read that I disliked.
But nobody ever assigned me Catcher In The Rye or The Great Gatsby. Choose to find out what the fuss was about for those two. Catcher is unreadable dreck about a hateful boy. Gatsby is beautiful prose about a fellow in love with the idea of being in love with his cousin and even moreso with the man who has a doomed fixation on her.
I loved Heart of Darkness. Loved Moby Dick. Loved anything Faulkner. Did not care for Ulysses, except for wonderful prose in parts.
Yet another vote for Wuthering Heights.
Close runners-up for me would be The Scarlet Letter and Doctor Zhivago. I did make it through those two, boring as I found them, but I never made it through Wuthering Heights. There were far more exciting things to do, like watching grass grow or paint dry.
The Catcher in the Rye is one of my least favorite books of all time. I can’t say it was boring, so much, because it’s fairly short, but nothing exciting happens and the protagonist is repugnant to me. There’s nothing funny or philosophically deep.However, I know so many people who would still say it’s their favorite book, perhaps because they don’t read very much and it’s the last one they ever finished.
I guess I’m lucky. I always loved reading, but did not much care for doing homework, especially anything involving essays. Thus, I got put into the regular English classes in high school and did not have to read anything hard. I never took an English class in my abortive college career. I’ve read a bunch of these books on my own as a teenager and some more as an adult. I liked Tess of the Durbervilles, Of Mice and Men and **Les Miserables ** among others, but I probably would have hated them if I had to read them in a certain timeframe, let alone write papers about them.
eta: Guess I never learned to type very well either.
Another, um, “fan” of Silas Marner here. Silas Marner is The Wicker Man (the remade film version) of literature, but without Nicholas Cage in a bear suit punching out little girls to add any laughs.
You guys are really making me want to read Silas Marner just because I refuse to believe it could be as boring as you all are saying it is, and oddly enough, I’ve never even heard of it until this thread.
I always kind of wanted to read Wuthering Heights too.
Maybe I’m a masochist?
Frankenstein was incredibly boring to me.
And whatever Shakespeare we read was boring too. If that’s how people talked back then, I’m really glad I wasn’t around to hear it.
“The Red Badge of Courage”
Many of the others were just books I didn’t like (“Catcher in the Rye”) or books that I was not in the right place to understand and/or enjoy (high school me wasn’t ready for “The Great Gatsby”). But that one just was awful with no redeeming features that I could find at all.
“Ethan Frome” gets an honorable mention
Definitely The Great Gatsby. And I do mean boring, and not just some other reason for hating it. What other book takes the final climactic scene and puts it entirely off-page, showing only the results and making you have to figure out what happened? And that’s the only time when anything actually happens. I always cite that book as an example of bad literature, one where the symbolism was more important than the plot.
The Old Man and the Sea is boring, sure, but at least there’s an actual climax.
I find it funny that I think Animal Farm was the best and Gatsby the worst, the exact opposite of many Dopers estimations of those books.
I think so. Perhaps we slept through it. It’s a common effect of Faulkner.
The Reivers is the only Faulkner I was required to read, and it is way up my boring list. Despite being a voracious reader, I ended up skipping every other chapter…and my teacher couldn’t tell the difference. When I was done with it, I held it up to her and said, “If I wrote like this, you’d flunk me.” She sighed and admitted that I was probably right.
As for Heart of Darkness, it gave us humorous, overwrought repetitions of “The horror! The horror!” and…well, no that’s about it.