Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea question

I actually quite liked Voyage. Right now I am working my way through FB's 100 novels everyone should read. Both James' The Ambassadors and Tolkein's Lord of the Rings are on there, and I find both excruciatingly dull and impossible to finish.

There are many, far too many, but recently I was bored to death by Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, maybe because I'm originally from close to there and was expecting something else, who knows..
Another nightmare was Frankenstein: I'll never understand what people see in it, same as in The Silmarillion, which to me was like reading the Old Testament with changed names: equally boring!

"Interview with the Vampire" .... nothing as half as boring!

I can't remember all the boring books I've read but I would say in the past 2 years

- "20,000 Leagues" (I googled the aquatic scenes, so I did learn a lot about fish!)

- "Twilight"(...horrible just horrible...)

- "The Beautiful and the Damned" (what the hell is it really about?)

- "100 years of Solitude" (don't shoot me on this one)

- And a little early 1900's Sci-Fi number called "The Afterglow"

Ulysses, by James Joyce. [Yawn.]

Don Quixote. I used to keep it bedside to help me fall asleep. I probably read the same two paragraphs every night for a week. Every night I'd fall asleep and start the chapter over again the next night to make sure I didn't miss anything...

I finally gave up and decided Book I would have to suffice.

I remember taking a class on this in college. Keeping in mind the time that Verne wrote, his books were published as successive magazine chapters. Coupled with is interest in oceanography, he would often include long descriptions of fish, etc. as he wrote. When in book form, it seems to be a slogging interruption. I found that skipping these sections (as they really do nothing to advance the narrative) make the book very readable.

I am refering to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" of course

I totally agree. All those "biology classes" throughout the book... best narcotic ever!

I'm a longtime Jules Verne fan, but since you mention him, I've got to say The Mighty Orinoco would make my list of most-boring. Annoying translation and predictable (boring) plot.

Richard Bach - One, W.P. Young - The Shack, Ben Hope series by Scott Mariani, a bunch of serbian 'writers' etc.

midnight's children by salman rushdie. I had to read that for a literary course at my uni. It bored me to tears. Unbelievably tedious and pretentious. I ended up reading a 29 page summary that also bored me as fuck, go figure.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky

no ? = Twilight

Most Boring I ever read was Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin.
I have read some 3000 fiction books but only a few really boring or badly written. Also I did not like The Hobbit, as I was forced to read it in school. I have never read anything by Tolkien after that, nor seen the movies. If they wanted to force me to read they should have given me a Louis L'amour and I would have come back a few hours later to ask for the next one.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon was the most boring book ever. It took me about 6 months to finish a 400 page book. (Don't worry, it's far from the only book I read in those 6 months.)

The most boring book I've ever read, apart from my anatomy and physiology text books, was Shelley's Frankenstein. I have not been able to get past the second chapter.

love in the time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and the beautiful and damned by f. Scott FitzGerald

Twenty Thousand Leagues was published in 1870. The adventures of the Nautilus were exciting for the many people who never strayed more than a few miles from their birthplace. The mysteries of the sea were enchanting to those whose imaginations weren't sculpted by 21st century computer generated graphics. For the modern day River Monsters or Gold Rush viewer, the story is boring, and understandably so. But it was an epic tale of adventure for those who couldn't get a taste for adventure as conveniently as we can today.

Der dritte Sohn (first half of Homeland, German edition). It was in no way mediocre, much worse.

I thought I was the only one who found Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea very boring. I was not able to go beyond 50% of the book.

Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" were both books thaat, for whatever reason, simply did not engage my interest. Greg Egan's "Diaspora" had parts that were interesting mixed in with long winded, didatic passages that caused my eyes to glaze over

Moby Dick. Part of my soul died reading that book.

"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. Had to read it for a book group. Couldn't believe how bad it was. As bad a book as I've ever read. It is not a novel, it is a sermon of self-righteous drivel with endless repetition, and some of the worst dialogue you'll ever encounter. Historically simplistic, philosophically worthless.

"The Old Man and the Sea" (I've read plenty of books of the 1,000 page variety, but could not get through this Hemingway snooze fest)
"Pride and Prejudice" (all the pontification, introspection, contemplation, reflection . . . enough already)
"The Screwtape Letters" (waaay too preachy)

20,000 was written during a time when people couldn't turn on discovery or the nature channel. Overall, I liked the book but I have to agree that there are some incredibly dull sections. Moby Dick suffers a bit from the same problem (another book I liked very much). For Whom the Bell Tolls describes every friggin blade of grass but the ending makes it all worth it. The Voyage of the Beagle reads like molasses, though definitely worth the effort.

The most boring book I ever read? I'm currently reading Atlas Shrugged... as in I've been trying to read it for about a year. I don't like any of the characters and I don't care where the story is going. Though, as soon as I finish it, I'm sure it'll be no more boring than the ones I mentioned above.

Boring, obviously, is not enough to get me to stop reading something.

Most of these books were on my read/to read list and I enjoyed them.
However if you wish to find a truly boring book, I suggest that you attempt "Oblomov" a Russian novel about a protagonist who stays in bed all day and the book is about one day. Imagine ONE BOOK and a reasonably long one just about a man sleeping all day. Now there is underlying meaning to this, but??

Try it. Yet am glad that I had exposure to this.

Joe

Into Thin Air. Although starting off quite exciting, it ends up with the author introducing tons of random people's biography...snore.

Moby Dick. Even worse than 20,000 leagues under the sea, its complicated language and vague sentences make it unreadable. Couldn't make it past page two before dying of boredom.

Gadsby. Being the longest book without the letter E, it starts off interesting, introducing "Gadsby, the champion of youth" and the challenge of no "E"'s. However, it quickly slows down, because the author is forced to use circumlocution insanely often so as to not use the letter E.

Ulysses. Said by many to be "the hardest book to understand", it truly is a big guy to take down, with so many puzzles and complicated plot. Which both make it boring to read.

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow -- I struggled through it, but then wondered why I did. Oddly enough, I quite liked The Crying of Lot 49. Go figure.

Most boring book -in my opinion:

"Turn of the Screw"

I didn't understand the point & it was tremendously dreary to plow through.

"The Count of Monte Cristo" or "Ali Pacha" by Alexandre Dumas. I couldn't finish either of these. But I don't fully blame it on Dumas or Verne. They originally wrote their books in French, the translator who translated the book into English also bears some of the blame. A more updated translation might make the book better.

"Catcher in the Rye", "A Voyage to Arcturus" by David Lindsay and "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde are a few more recent of the ones I have not been able to finish.

Anything by Thomas Mann. Especially Buddenbrooks and Magic Mountain. He is the GOD of boring literature.

Runner up goes to Anton Chekhov. Books in Chekhov's day were either weighty philosophical tomes like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or melodramatic adventures like Dumas' novels. Chekhov sought to create a style of writing that didn't depend on plot and excitement like the melodramas, but was free from symbolism, allegory, philosophy, satire, etc. Simple and believable writing about everyday life. Basically his works are like Seinfeld without the witty humor. Ambitious for the time but BOOORING as hell!

A lot of my textbooks during my various degrees of schooling were most certainly not the most exiting reads, while they contained knowledge they often were stuffy at best. The history books were always exempt from this judgement.

Gotta be Min ven Thomas.
One part teenage wangst, one part early eighties understanding of AIDS and one part sluggish and uninspiring writing makes this book about as interesting as watching paint.
And yes it was a school assignment

I have stupidly persevered with numerous boring books in my reading career, my 'beyond the point of no return' is about 50 pages. If I have read this much I have this silly unwritten rule that I have to finish the rest of the book. Thankfully, this rule is not often employed. However, there are some novels that I have read that have been very boring but I do not necessarily mind finishing them to make the next book I read even more enjoyable (a rough with the smooth kind of ethos). Then there are those novels that have been extra specially boring that make me question why humans do this curious 'reading' thing and make me contemplate my place in the Universe. But there is one book that I read that redefines dull, it forms a new realm of boredom (I have been fortunate enough to have encountered only one in my lifetime). Had you asked me immediately after I had finished the novel what Jack Kerouac's On the Road was about I could not have told you. Firstly because you would have seen a zombified, gibbering, wreck on the floor and secondly because absolutely NOTHING of any interest happens at all anywhere in the 300 odd pages of this soul destroyingly dull, grindingly verbose, emotionally draining, torturous pap.

I have to say Moby Dick or Oliver Twist. Probably more so the first. If you cut out all of the whaling descriptions, the book could be about twenty pages.

Ayn Rand - "Atlas Shrugged".

I have read a few very boring books, mostly nonfiction or text books. To rate the "most" boring I would have to choose TITUS GROAN by Mervin Peake, though both THE RING OF FIVE DRAGONS by Eric Van Lustbader and THE BURNING CITY by Larry Niven would come in as very close second and third choice. I usually read at least a hundred pages before discarding a book as "to boring, bad, or poorly written" to read further.

So I love Classical Lit, but there have been a whole lot that I had to stop a few chapter in. I am reading "50 Classic Books" I got it for nook for $0.99. Here are some of the most horrible reads, that caused me to stop after a few chapters:

"The Afterglow" by George Allan England
"The Black Arrow: A Tale of Two Roses" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Jacob's Room" by Virginia Woolf
and
"The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757" by James Fenimore Cooper

"War and Peace" Read it for school took me forever. Tried again years later still didn't care for it. Life is too short.

If I find a book boring, I don't finish it, unless it was required reading for a class. In that category I'd include:

William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

Notes from Underground

How are you going to make your goal of reading 1,000 books though, if you only choose the entertaining ones...?

Verne's work is a classic.

The most boring book i have ever read is The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. The author kept describing the statues and everything else, way too much details, unnecesary if you ask me but i guess thats what baroque/ rococo is all about. anyways it was just not the book for me. I felt like nothing was going to happen any time soon and i was so happy when i finished the book.

Une Vie by Guy Maupassant, you can not beat that ! (Or maybe the Karamazov brothers...)

Foundation and the Battlefield Earth books