What Is/Are The Most Boring Book(s) You Ever Read Cover To Cover?

[Guttersnipe]

I know these books were pretty successful, but for me these two just didn't work: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. The first seemed repetitive and the latter just didn't interest me as much as I thought it would.
I finished these books because I thought they'd eventually pay off. Not for me.

 

[HareBrain]

That's a difficult one, because I don't feel the need to finish a book I'm not enjoying. Apart from course text books, the only one that springs to mind is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which I raced through because I needed to learn what happened, but whose journey turned out to contain nothing interesting (since I'd already read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the book he basically fictionalised).

Oh, and The One Tree by Stephen Donaldson, which contains a long ship voyage it felt like I lived out in real time.

 

[CupofJoe]

I'd go for Stephen Donaldson as well. As a kid I was ill for a few weeks and and someone bought the first three Thomas Covenant books for me. I thought I had an obligation to get through them. Well... that was a week of my life I won't get back.

 

[olive]

I feel shy about posting to these kinds of threads because as a reader, I'm selfish, greedy, constantly demanding and obsessive. Being a reader is like being a life long spoilt rotten child of these people called writers, people you don't know anything about and demand so much from. Surely, they are writing these things so I would read them. I find myself judging writers often severely because I put so much value in them -this doesn't prevent me from loving them- I expect too much from them. In my own world of imagination, it comes naturally that writers are the gods, and it feels like if they cannot create like one, they shouldn't claim that title. Yeah, it is meaningless and childish I know. I'm getting over it, it is one of the reasons I'm here in this forum. It's been working so far.

Unless it is a book I know that I should read (and while the approach is different with them, these are a few), I can't continue reading a book if it doesn't provide a sense of universality, meaning to me about being, existing because I just don't enjoy it. I don't believe in reading for reading. I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I take everything I read in me, I carry it with me, there is a personal, intimate relationship and when it doesn't happen; when it doesn't 'fit' or 'change' or 'make a difference' or the worst; when it goes 'wrong', it doesn't matter who wrote it or how important/good it is, I can't read it. I also get mad at writers. Dead or alive. Yeah, it is a mess. It's a complicated relationship. Maybe this is also the reason why I can't imagine myself writing anything.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. God, what a bore of a book.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Lord of the Rings

 

[Vince W]

A Dance with Dragons. Ugh.

 

[Boaz]

Usually, I want to know reasons... but it's in the title of the thread. The list I could make of books that I never finished because I found them incredibly tedious would be quite long and littered with the names Hardy, Dickens, Bronte, and a hundred fantasy authors.

I think the reason should be why you continued to read all the way to the end when you found the book so boring.

Tolstoy's War and Peace. I read it because it was late 1990 and we were on the eve of the First Gulf War.
Jordan's The Eye of the World. Because I was sick of posting, "I've not read it, but it probably sucks." Now I can post, "It sucks."
Eragon. I read it because a friend recommended it (the first fantasy he'd ever read) and I wanted him to read A Game of Thrones. He did not read it, he watched the show.

@Wyrmlord If it was not for my book club, I would not have finished Seveneves. It read more like Tom Clancy... some intrigue, an uneccessary explanation of the docking systems on a nuclear submarine, a bit of plot, a huge explanation of the command and control systems of the US Air Force, some intrigue, a massive and overly detailed explanation of the firing systems on 1990s soviet tanks... Clancy's subjects are actual, Stephenson's are mostly hypothetical.

 

[.matthew.]

I'll go with Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb. Now don't get me wrong, I think Robin Hobb is a great author and I've loved some of her other series, but that book was such a chore. Nothing really happened without a characters acting completely against character just to move the plot along - moronic decision after idiotic impulse, unforgivable when characters aren't written to have that personality any other time

 

[kythe]

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. I read the unabridged version voluntarily in high school, thinking it would prepare me for college. My takeaway was that it would have been better at half the length.

In retrospect, I could have better prepared myself for college by focusing on reading comprehension and literature analysis. I did not truly "learn" through finding the longest, most tedious book and just working my way through it. Because I approached Moby Dick with the wrong attitude, I missed any symbolism and meaning I could have gained.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. I struggled to get though this one. Godawful archaic non sensical writing style. It took me far less time to read War and Peace( which I loved) then it did this crappy and boring book.

 

[Don]

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. I read the unabridged version voluntarily in high school, thinking it would prepare me for college. My takeaway was that it would have been better at half the length.

In retrospect, I could have better prepared myself for college by focusing on reading comprehension and literature analysis. I did not truly "learn" through finding the longest, most tedious book and just working my way through it. Because I approached Moby Dick with the wrong attitude, I missed any symbolism and meaning I could have gained.

You said it, Moby Dick. It was mandatory for me in high school. It bored me to tears.

 

[Night_Eternal]

The Vanishing, by Bentley Little. Dear gods, not sure how I got all the way through that one without throwing it against the wall. Made me realize that getting published isn't all about talent. Not the only one of his books I've been subjected to, either. There was another I read in full and it sucked just as hard, though I thankfully forgot it's name. I know this thread said 'boring' and not 'worst', but it was both things.

 

[Droflet]

Generally, if I'm bored with the book I don't get anywhere near the end.

 

[farntfar]

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
or possibly his next book, the Woman in White (I think), but I remember absolutely nothing of it other than that I made myself read it to see if he got any better.

 

[Danny McG]

Generally, if I'm bored with the book I don't get anywhere near the end.

I tend to do that more and more nowadays.
I always, if struggling with a dull yarn, stick it out until I've got a good third of the way through in case it picks up.
If it doesn't then DNF for me

 

[Alan Aspie]

This:

Sosiologia ja kielenkäyttö : retoriikka, narratiivi, metafora - Trepo

trepo.tuni.fi

Jari Aro: Sociology and Language - Rhetorics, narratives, metaforas.

Lack of substance was hidden under artificially difficult way to use language.

I wandered how it was so difficult to understand.

Then I took one extremely long and confusing sentence and translated it to common understanding. And found out that you could say it with three words without loosing anything in substance or accuracy. Then I took another another sentence and did the same. Then...

Everything was gibberish without clear thinking. It had been fabricated to look fancy but it was just a rhetoric coulisse without much meaningful substance.

If the writer had understood his own thinking he had been able to tell everything it had in 3-5 pages.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I'd have to agree with Stephen Donaldson. The worlds are amazing, but the characters so utterly depressing that you aren't so much bored as wondering why you are wasting your life reading about people who (most of the time) you don't really care whether they come through it or not.

I can usually tell within the first chapter is the book is written in a style that I find interesting, so if it's not grabbed me by then I turn to another ; there are so many books out there that it really isn't worth spending time with ones that don't interest you.

 

[Astro Pen]

Almost certainly D.H Lawrence. Sons and Lovers.

 

[Tirellan]

The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling - a school set book so I had to finish it. Not a single redeeming feature in it.