What is the most boring book you ever read & why did you read it?
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What is the most boring book you ever read & why did you read it?
What is the most boring book you ever read & why did you read it?
Shopping Cart Returner Shirt $21.68 |
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Klopstock's The Messiah. It's the story of Jesus written as an Homeric epic. It's probably the most boring piece of literature ever written. Just two lines are enough to anesthetize your brain.
I read it just so that I could say I read it.
this or stoner
persuasion was dog shit too, those two are enough austen for a lifetime for me.
read p&p because I wanted to read more female authors so I started with that, huge mistake
gave it another chance with persuasion, now I learned my lesson
Dostoevsky is less interesting than all of these
Filtered
Teenagers with ADHD. This place is so funny, I respect it though, you guys are based.
Final boss of based opinions, I kneel.
Fair enough, I deeply dislike you for it though.
I'd have to go pretty far out of my way to really call a book "boring", most literary books have something interesting to recommend them provided you make an effort to accept them on their own terms. But any book whose sole purpose is to be "transgressive" is pretty close to irredeemable. I still like a lot of books with "transgressive" elements, though.
In terms of just purely how I felt reading it, however, I think the Chinese Classic of Poetry is one of the greatest things ever written but some of the panegyric formulas felt pretty empty to me at times, especially since I was probably trying too hard to read some meaning in them.
I don't think Metamorphosis is bad, I get why people find it fascinating, I was just bored reading it.
It is extremely tedious in its play-by-play on the atomic scale of a character turning around to face something else, but the overall events and message have a lot of substance to think about
Ok, you are forgiven.
Like I said, teenagers. Hence the impatience with anything that isn't right there on the surface. At least they're reading though, I don't wanna discourage them too badly. Plenty of time to come back to things and reassess later on, no need to get everything right the first time around.
The Great Gatsby
It has always been extremely dull in my eyes, none of the characters are appealing, the plot goes nowhere, and the symbolism is so obvious and obtuse, a chimpanzee could notice it. It’s boring as hell, right next to Wuthering Heights.
There is so much better shit that was written in the early 1900’s, don’t even waste your time with The Great Gatsby.
Now watch IQfy‘s butthole get all puckered and seethe like crazy.
I'm halfway through Wuthering Heights right now. It's far from the most boring book I've ever read but it is a letdown. I was expecting some comfy story in the moors with rich descriptions about the landscape and shit. Instead I get a couple of histrionic roasties pining away for le super edgy antihero who has a villanous reputation for no given reason.
That's a serious contender for me too. Another book that is only praised because it was important for its time: one of the first mass-market English language books that had edgy shit in it. Last Of The Mohicans is the same way, terrible repetitive schlock but people pretend to love it because it was the first "serious" attempt at American literature
I never understood the popularity of Gatsby
Blood Meridian. It was shilled here.
Get fricked, ESL
The French Lieutenant's Woman
The Scarlet Letter
The Yellow Wallpaper
Anything by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Iliad. Boring as hell, it didn't even have the trojan horse or any of the fun stuff you associate with the trojan war. The Odyssey was great though
>berlin alexanderplatz
I read in some list as one of the best books ever written.
>100 years of solitude
Same but everyone that reads said it was one of the best.
It would have to be a commercial fiction novel of some kind. I tried to read one of those Donna Leon novels once — incredible boring. Late Robert B Parker is also pretty mind numbing. Salems Lot — boring as hell. I’ve read a lot of the books namechecked in this thread and they are nowhere near as bad as generic commercial fiction.
Most boring book I finished was probably Metamorphosis by Kafka.
>20 page short story
>book
Lemme guess, you listened to it as an audiobook too
No. What a weird thing to say. Why so hostile?
shut the frick up, homosexual!
And I read it (Kafka) because a girlfriend at the time suggested I read it
Collection of Wilde's Plays. Jeez, it was fricking boring. It was somewhat funny I suppose, but I would've been better off watching some Lubitsch or reading one of Shakespeare's Comedies.
Whenever someone mentions a well-known and well-regarded book in these threads I can't help but to think that anon has probably not read more than ten books in his life and it's probably true.
I think people often under-estimate how much life experience can change your perspective on literature. I find this especially true people who love the craft of writing, care a lot about style and technique, and don't want to see kids "ruined" reading poorly written stories.
I don't blame a modern teenager for being bored by the Scarlet Letter. It's not like they don't understand the point, they just have no reason to care about it. Especially if they're being coerced into reading it for class, meaning their mind is naturally inclined to be thinking about sports or camping or videogames or whatever kids to these days (tiktok etc) but they're having to force attention to the book. I never even made it through To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. After sports and music activities, math, history, science homework, and chores, I wasn't in the mood to spend the last 30 minutes before bed reading about racism in Alabama when I could be reading Lord of the Rings or Dragonlance.
Good, well thought out post anon. I wonder if the reverse is also true in a way. I had trouble getting through the first Dragonlance and I think part of it is I was a little bored with how simple it was.
Dragonlance has some weirdness due to its history. It was commissioned as a companion to the RPG and the first book basically reads like a tabletop campaign. Weis and Hickman are not experts at crafting prose and aren't especially clever from a literary perspective. The storytelling is very straightforward. But there's still an emphasis on adventure and combat (which still appeals to me even as an adult, though far more as a teenager). The second and third novels do (mostly) abandon the "novelized tabletop campaign" approach and take a more story-centric approach to a romantic good vs evil fantasy epic.
For example, the second Dragonlance novel puts the most rigid, conservative main character into a scenario where he must face the corrupt, political reality of the knightly order and principles to which he has dedicated his whole life. It's not as complex or original as ASOIAF, but you can actually finish the whole story in a couple of months. It's not as original and well-written as The Black Company, but sometimes I just want some warriors, wizards and beautiful women saving the world from the evil dragon armies.
A Tale of Two Cities. I was told it was about the French Revolution not about people sitting around talking about the French Revolution. Barely any killing.
The Blithedale Romance and The Mill on the Floss. But at this point I am just addicted to George Eliot's writing. I cant fathom how she thinks of the stuff she put in her books. Like the connections of things outside of plot to everything, metaphors and shit. It baffles my moronic homie mind.