Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea question

Catcher In The Rye. I hated this book as I have never hated a book. I am addicted to books, so my reaction shocked me.

Just finished Around the World in Eighty Days.
Felt like I was reading it for eighty days. Scimmed whole pages just to get through the thing. And the ending is illogical, Phileas Fogg so punctural, so in tune with the timetables of the world, knowing down to the second when trains leave foreign stations and steamships depart distant ports, but forgets he gains time by moving eastward.

Life is too short. Difficult to read? -- go for it. But "boring"? Put it down and find a better read.

The Idiot, by Dostoevsky. Way over my head and really damn boring. Not sure how I made it all the way through

The Red Badge of Courage was excruciating but mercifully short. Beloved is equally as excruciating but much longer so that 'wins' it for me (I know I should just give it up but somehow I still think it might redeem itself in the last seventy pages or so).

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

20,000 leagues is up there.
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
Moby Dick by Herm Melville.
I didn't like Catcher in the Rye, but I can't say it was boring.
BTW, I'm a librarian, and for those folks complaining about boring textbooks, you don't know the meaning of 'dry' until you read "The 91 principles of cataloging".

Moby Dick....
10 years later, still can't finish it

Heart of Darkness - up until this book I'd never fallen asleep reading a book. The completely inscrutable prose, the circular and tangential rambling killed me.

Catcher in the Rye - was forced to read it 3 times for school and loathed reading it every single time.

I actually enjoyed most of 20,000 leagues under the sea. I will admit I probably skimmed a few of the more detailed passages though.

DUNE

So... I'm voting "Moby Dick", but in fairness it's a pretty tough decision between "Moby Dick" and "Crime and Punishment."

I love books, and I love many of the classics, but somehow these two were unbelievably boring for me. I even tried going through audible so that I could try with professional narration to see if that would alleviate the eye strain and make them more enjoyable. Didn't work. I just finally gave both up as a bad job.

i will name a few books, but it's the AUTHORS i could care less for: WASHINGTON SQUARE/CATCHER IN THE RYE/TO THE LIGHTHOUSE/A FAREWELL TO ARMS/THE SOUND AND THE FURY

and instead of getting into why i hate those, it's mainly the authors of those books that do it for me. Hemmingway and his boring prose, H James and his endlessly drab paragraphs that look like one sentence, CATCHER IN THE RYE just irked me because it was about a spoiled brat you simply wanted to punch and move on with, Woolfe, i tried to like her, but damn her books are on acid! lastly was Faulkner and his writing is painful. i can't stand that damn dialect even if that was how people talked! sorry for being so long winded

I actually really like "War and Peace" but I totally respect other people's opinions. Probaby the most boring book I've read (or tryed to read) was "Frankenstein". "20,000 Leuges Under the Sea" is up there for me too. I felt bad, you know. The whole five chapters I read of the later I was like "I have to like this, it's a classic". WRONG!

The Thousander Club wrote: "Overall I haven't read too many books that were so boring or so dull that they would put me to sleep. Generally speaking I'm very good at directing my attention to what I'm reading with a reasonabl..." In the time of the butterflies, by Julia Alvarez

The Man Without Qualities. Musil. Three endless incomprehensible books that turn out to be a fragment ??? I only made it to the end for a Graduate course a LONG time ago. Don't know if I'd make it today.

Recently, Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: 1934-1952. I really like Ted Hughes and the first two poems so I thought I'd be at home with this but It could never hold my interest for long.

I think poetry generally does it for me more than Prose. Wordsworth in particular is extremely boring, as is most contemporary poetry I've read.

The little prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery bored me.
Despite of its intereting message I would rather read a book with a similar message but that is presented in a more mature and serious version.

Atlas Shrugged. Snore. Boring characters, boring story. I've tried twice to read it and never got any further than about a third of the book.

My rule is, if it doesn't grab me by 100 pages, I give up on it. Life's too short for dull or badly written books.

Oh, and I liked 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it was charming in a naive kind of way. And my all time favourite author is Tolkien. Read Lord of the Rings about 30 or more times.

If a book is well written but the story is slow I can still throughly enjoy it, as long as it has characters that are interesting enough.

Gosh, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I really tried reading it, I truly did, but I couldn't finish. Such a boring book! He goes on and on about nature and reflection upon man kind and this and that and blah blah blah.

Okay, here I go. This is one of the most shameful secrets I have kept so far: I was bored to death by “The Jungle Book”! I know it’s a terrible thing to say; the book is great, Kipling’s style is remarkable but I just could not enjoy reading this book. I tried for weeks. But every time I had to pick it up I was like “No, please”. Honestly, the story did not make me curious about what would happen next; somehow it never hooked me. Finally I gave up, since there were two or three other books in my shelf calling me out and making it harder to concentrate on this one. I mean to give it a second try someday, though.

The Swiss Family Robinson

Atlas Shrugged. Dullest. Book. Ever. It might have made a difference that I read it a very long time ago when I was a lot younger. Maybe that's it. But I doubt it.

The most boring book I ever read was called "How to Read a Book." My ninth grade literature teacher made us read it. Not only was it so boring that I wanted to gouge my eyeballs out, but the authors were incredibly sexist! The only pronouns they used were "he," and they said, "You are obviously a man if you are reading this, so you have not ever stepped foot in a kitchen. Even though you like chocolate mousse, you have never made it because only woman cook." Yes, it was originally written in the 1930's, and that was a sexist time, but it was still super boring.

20000 leagues under the sea... It made me feel like the book was 20000 pages long... :(

There have been a few, some of them classics, some contemporary literary fiction (one day I will try "The Secret Life of Bees" again, I swear it), but "War and Peace" takes the prize for me, even over some other grindingly boring Russian lit, simply because Tolstoy managed to drag the boredom out longer than the rest.

"Dune" was another one that was mind numbing to me.

But some people are vastly and happily entertained by reading them. We're all wired a little differently.

Lord of the Rings, there's just no beating the combo of unbearable lenght and soporific prose. Add to that cardboard thin characters with the most uninteresting personalities and an opposition that has no personality whatsoever (Sauron and all his minions having no persona at all, and just being characterized as "evil")...
I've read other boring books, but none, not even by the same author, were as annoyingly boring.

i found 20000 Leagues to be very boring but if you were to read it when i just came out i think it would be marvelous. Many many parts of it were like the discovery channel which would have been great to read prior to TV.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov... Yaaaaaawn!
Don't Try This At Home by someone-whos-name-i-don't-remember-and-don't-bother-to-check
4 Blondes by Candace Bushnell

Edit: I just realized the name of the topic is "What's the most boring book you've ever read?", so I guess my answer would be Lolita because I didn't have patience to read the other two books I've mentioned... I had to give up, they were just too awful.

sense and sensibility by jane austen. Im actually trying to get throu it right now, but it is SO SLOW.

I'm reading Walden Two by B.F Skinner for a class and it is amazingly dull. I know it's meant to be more of a demonstration of what a potential utopia could be like, but the plot is almost non-existent. There's only so much "and everything was perfect" one can read before begging for a little action.

Pride and Prejudice was also pretty boring, but that's more of it just not being my taste. But I'd rather read it every day for the rest of my life than read another paragraph of this.

I didn't read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea until recently, and it was right after reading "All The Light You Cannot See" in which one of the main characters is blind, and reads the Braille version avidly, loving the descriptions of the mollusks and their shells, among other things. Intrigued, I decided to read it even though I'd found the 1954 movie terribly boring. Maybe it was because of that character that loved it, and my gaining a deeper understanding of her character after consuming it--or maybe it was how well the reader narrated, but I was so impressed with all the different fields of science it touched and really enjoyed it!
For boring, I'd have to say that I found slogging through "Charlie Wilson's War" a challenge of boring proportions. I listened to the audio version and my mind kept drifting. I can't tell you how many times I replayed each disk before moving on to the next, trying to keep my attention on it and understand what was going on.

"The Fountainhead". After the first 50 or 80 pages that was it, just a soap opera. The hook that interested me was his interview dialogue with Henry Cameron. It had a lot of energy, and it looked promising. That was it, done. I see another poster above listed "Atlas Shrugged" as their most boring book, I never read it, I doubt that I will ever be able to pick up another Ayn Rand book as long as I live.

This book definitely puts you to sleep!
https://www.amazon.com/Read-Em-Sleep-...

I write science fiction and mysteries, and mostly, that's what I read, because my tastes run to entertainment that actually entertains. I was an English major at Columbia and toyed with the idea of pursuing a Ph.D, before deciding that writing learned articles that no more a hundred or so people would ever read was not how I wanted to spend my life. I've read most of the so-called Great Books, but while many are grist for the creative mill, they don't hold up well on their own, or at the least, no longer conform to modern taste.

The Old Man and the Sea was boring. I liked Dostoyevsky. Nabokov is beautifully lyrical but I found Lolita to be unreadable. We have to keep in mind that throughout history, most people never travelled more than 50 miles from the place of their birth. Strange places, people and actions were considered entertaining, so many books were filled with otherwise pointless exposition. Moby Dick, despite the wonderful bones of a wonderful story, was probably the most boring book I have ever read.

NOT GEEK LOVE

Cryptonomicon. I was told it was a good book but the chapters were too long and could not pay attention or follow the story and the characters. I walked away from the book after a few chapters

Great Expectations

One hundred years of solitude. Still read it to the end, but found it boring

Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós
María by Jorge Isaacs

Moby Dick by Herm Melville. i think, dictionary is more interesting than Moby Dick.

I'm going to go with "The Last Days of Pompeii". I kept waiting for it to get good...and it never did.

Most people here place down popular books that "they" find boring, this book bore my whole class. It's called "Half the Battle by Don Henderson".

Someone mentioned it before but it bears repeating... Atlas Shrugged is my pick.

Forget water-boarding as a means of torture, just make someone read Rand's so-called magnum opus. Putting aside all the nonsense involving the philosophy of "objectivism" the book is a super long, uninspired boring mess. Worse still .... I can never get back the time I wasted reading it :(

*sorry for the errors by the way

I have to read The Farming of Bones (which is what brought me here) for my Caribbean History class. So far I've trudged through the first 14 chapters and have become increasingly bored with every turn of the page.

I understand that this book may have won awards for it's subject matter and it's ethnic significance, but the way it is written and told is not alluring ialluring in the least.

I imagine In would get far more satisfaction out of reading any Dr. Sues book, and this is coming from someone who has gladly read Oscar Wilde and Frankenstein....

Come on...20,000 leagues under the sea dull? (you don't know the meaning of the word. There are some astonishingly dull books out there. (Dull includes "disappointing" as far as I'm concerned. These include Elizabeth Allende and Roberto Bolano. I wanted to enjoy them but couldn't so I got angry and decided that they were DULL) No one is as dangerous as a reader scorned.

The Thousander Club wrote: "Overall I haven't read too many books that were so boring or so dull that they would put me to sleep. Generally speaking I'm very good at directing my attention to what I'm reading with a reasonabl..."

Less Than Zero

I admit there were some slow chapters, but overall I still enjoyed it and consider it a great book.

I'm so worried...everybody keeps saying that Moby Dick is boring and I meant to read it soon, before the movie comes out. Is there anybody there who does not think it will put me to sleep? I guess it's time for me to find out...