It’s a toss-up for me:
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell: I kept reading, telling myself “it’s won a Pulitzer Prize (or whatever), it has to have some redeeming feature!” But, no, it doesn’t; it is unadulterated crap.
Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne: I absolutely cannot stand that rambling style for pages and pages. I have relatives that talk like this and they do so for hours at a time. It’s almost enough to make one go postal.
OMG Baker, I’d totally forgotten about The Pearl. Read that in 8th grade, the whole class was irritated by it.
On the upside tho, Fleming & John, one of my favorite bands, wrote a song about it called “The Pearl” (go figure) and it was a long time before I found out the connection. Silly me.
So terrible, apparently, that you didn’t even remember the title correctly. 
It’s actually only One Hundred Years of Solitude, though it might indeed have seemed to take a millennium to slog through it.
I generally enjoyed whatever I was assigned in English class, but to this day, the thought of A Separate Peace makes me want to bang my head on the desk until the pain of the memory stops. That was high school. In college, there was Madame Bovary, which I see has already been mentioned.
I actually had a lot of trouble reading Dickens in high school, didn’t read him in college, but a year or two ago I made another try, and quite enjoyed him, including David Copperfield. I’ll mention, though, that I was never, ever assigned any Dickens to read, except A Christmas Carol in grade school. An old roommate of mine loved Daniel Deronda to distraction, but it didn’t do much for me, even though I loved Middlemarch. I voluntarily subjected myself to Mill on the Floss on the strength of Middlemarch, and boy, did I ever regret it.
Moby Dick
Silas Mariner
I have a few.
The Scarlett Letter was a horrible expierence.
There was a book in Sci-Fi class called Alas Babylon that I thought was extremly tedious.
But one of the worst expierences was with The Merchant of Venice. Now in retrospect with this one, it was not the material that was the problem but the way it was presented to me. It wasn’t until years later that I suddenly realized that MoV is a COMEDY! I was dumbstruck when I found out.
There have been about 2 dozen postings since the last mention of Charles Dickens. Well, let’s not let Chuck get away that easily. I’ll agreee with previous posters that anything by Charles Dickens is a good bet to be a boring, tedious, depressing, long-winded turd !!!
With that in mind, it is a daunting task to choose the book that stands out among the rest. But if the ghost of Chuck came back from the dead and put a loaded gun to my head, I would have to tell him that “Great Expectations” earns the “Execrable Excrement Award” hands down.
I had to read that weighty tome for the first book in my 9th grade English class. I was naive enough to think that we would have moved on quickly to another book that might actually be interesting. BUT NO !!! For that first term, there were all kinds of “Great Expectations” projects to do. Writing a term paper; a take-home test of about 20 questions that had to be answered in full with several well-developed paragraphs for each answer; acting out a scene in front of the class; etc.
So, I guess that scarred me for life as far as ever appreciating Charles Dickens. I guess the only good thing I can say about him is that he’s dead and therefore can no longer foist that crap upon the public.
Oh and since it is the “Holiday Season” let me tell all of the Message Board ‘Dopers’
“God bless us everyone”
I din’t really dislike The Scarlet Letter, but that may have been because I read it in 5th grade, and wasn’t reading most of it, just skimming.
I read a book in 8th grade whose title I cannot remember, but everyone who had to read it agreed that it was the worst book in the world. I believe it consisted of telphone conversations, documented exchanges at school, and articles. It was about some guy who wanted to sing along to the Star Spangled Banner and got suspended for it.
Around 150 pages of pure drivel.
Well I LIKE Dickens, Brave New World and Frankenstein:D
However I have to second John Steinbeck… I threatened my teacher with a book burning if she EVER gave me his dreck again.
For me it has to be Flowers for Algernon also known as Charly. I felt that its ultimate message was that a person is only worth anything if they are super smart and very good looking. At the end when Charley lost his intelligence he returned to his old dead end job, his sexy girl friend had dumped him and his rat was dead. I literally screamed and threw the book across the room.
I love both Dhalgren and Heart of Darkness (they’re the same story, as is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), but am willing to say that I think Macbeth is poorly structured and stupid.
Henry IV Part 1. Followed by anything else by Shakespeare.
Wow it took me so long to post that Dickens’ diatribe, someone made another posting before mine. Since that posting was somewhat complimentary, I’m glad mine gave it to Chuck with both barrels.
Scarlett letter. Basically all of Hawthorne. In college, I had to read it again for Am Lit. and write a paper on it. I hate puritans. I hate stories about puritans.
Whenever I’ve had discussions with friends or on message boards regarding books we like or dislike, Scarlett Letter is always in the top 1 or 2 most hated by everyone. Perhaps they keep assigning it so people will know what others are talking about when they say they hate it.
Hmm … I like Huckleberry Finn (though Tom Sawyer is better, IIRC), Tale of Two Cities (but not everything by Dickens, certainly), I Am the Cheese, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. (Disclaimer: Not all of those books were assigned. Some I read on my own.)
However, I’ve never been able to get through Moby Dick, even though it has a good opening sentence. (I like books with sparkly opening sentences. For example, check out Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. But I digress.) I like Hemingway, too, but The Old Man and the Sea? Not so much. But the worst book I think I ever read all the way through was Gulliver’s Travels. The symbolism was a more than a tad heavy-handed.
For any dopers currently in school and reading this thread: the secret for not hating your assigned books is not to read them along with your class. You read them right away, and then follow along (or write notes, or daydream) as the rest of the class reads them. It’s much better that way. It also helps to realize that these weren’t actually written to torment you; most of them were written, first and foremost, to entertain their contemporary audiences. Of course, what appealed to audiences of the time may not appeal to us.
You needed somebody to ruin The Great Gatsby* for you? I read it without my grades on the line, and it still sucked.
Worst book I ever had to read for a class was Frankenstein. Great story idea, but like Innanna says, the woman needed an editor.
Can’t read anything Tolkien wrote, either. Go figure.
Crime and punishment. Uugh.
Aaah the horrid memories!
I had blocked out reading The Heart of Darkness
I had to do a 20 page final for a class on Pride and Prejudice.
I was thankfully spared Dickens 
I am not a Hemmingway fan at all… big pretentious tough guy outdoors… I’d rather read Jack Londen. I liked his stuff as a kid.
I’d really have to agree with I Am the Cheese. The book progresses with a bland plot rife with tedious flashback scenes, only to culimate in the revelation that the entire story is the result of a drugged-out trip through an insane asylum. Christ. I’d rather wash my eyes with bleach than read that beast of a novel again. Not to mention the obligatory 3-week discussion that followed :rolleyes:
House of the Seven Gables
Actually, I loathe nearly all 19th-century American “literature.”