Token post for Dumb Post Day (Friday) - World's Most Boring Book

[Ethyl]

My nomination for boring: Nana, by Emile Zola.

My nomination for whatthefuckdoesitmean: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. That one was my first exposure to absolute surrealism in literature (I kinda like surrealism in painting...)

That book should be read more than once although if it frustrates you the second reading might not be worthwhile.

 

[Ethyl]

L
My contribution: Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. I loved it when I was in college. Reread it recently and found it to be really boring and contrived. I think it is a W.A.S.T.E. of time. My son liked it well enough to put a bumber sticker on his car that says, "My other car is a Pynchon novel."

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. After plodding through that one, I swore i'd never feel obligated to finish a book I didn't like. Several people recommended it to me and I thought it was one of the most pretentious things i've ever read.

 

[B_NineInchCock_160IQ]

After hearing everyone go on and on about how much better the book was to the film, I read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. After finishing the book, I decided the only reason anyone would say the book was better than the film was to sound smart. Very dull. Essentially Chrichton using any contrived plot device he can think of to march us through every single paddock in the whole park in order to describe to the reader what he thinks dinosaurs looked like.

I've read worse, and started and failed to finish much worse, but that was the first thing that popped into my head.

 

[B_big dirigible]

Many years ago when Andromeda Strain appeared and was widely reviewed - those were the days when the New York Times Book Review pretended that it had never heard of science fiction, so the editors must have called it something else - a relative handed it to me, with the comment that she was major-league underwhelmed. After whipping through it, I had to agree. A finer piece of "so what" I've rarely encountered. Uninteresting story, uninteresting characters, uninteresting writing, uninteresting cover art. It wasn't even interesting enough to qualify as bad. It was just an empty space on the fiction shelves. That was the last Crichton fiction for me. I'm not surprised that he's continued to live down to his earlier efforts.

Oddly enough, as an essayist Crichton's not bad - original, even iconoclastic, dynamic, concise to damn near the point of elegance, and, in the main, sensible. The contrast is such that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's two different guys writing under the same name.

 

[invisibleman]

Old Testament, New Testament, both pretty bad.

I agree. The Book of Mormon is right there as well.

 

[B_NineInchCock_160IQ]

Many years ago when Andromeda Strain appeared and was widely reviewed - those were the days when the New York Times Book Review pretended that it had never heard of science fiction, so the editors must have called it something else - a relative handed it to me, with the comment that she was major-league underwhelmed. After whipping through it, I had to agree. A finer piece of "so what" I've rarely encountered. Uninteresting story, uninteresting characters, uninteresting writing, uninteresting cover art. It wasn't even interesting enough to qualify as bad. It was just an empty space on the fiction shelves. That was the last Crichton fiction for me. I'm not surprised that he's continued to live down to his earlier efforts.

Oddly enough, as an essayist Crichton's not bad - original, even iconoclastic, dynamic, concise to damn near the point of elegance, and, in the main, sensible. The contrast is such that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's two different guys writing under the same name.

I agree with all your assertions. I think as a novelist he's simply bogged down by his ridiculously huge ego and assumes that any narrative can be carried completely by the audience being completely enthralled by his opining about anything. Under this assumption, he completely ignores other things- like interesting plot or decent character development.

JP the film was superior to the novel IMO because it edited out most of this crap and tightened up the story considerably. The actors made several of the characters more likeable. Plus of course the landmark FX work was a lot more entertaining than Chricton's opinions about dinosaurs.

 

[Epistasia]

Great Expectations.

This is my favorite book to hate! Dickens is just impossible to relate to and reading Expectations is like listening who loves to hear them self talk.

Of Human Bondage, though I had known that it wasn't as fun as it sounded before I read it, it was even less fun than I thought reading a book could possibly be. It's not even fun to make fun of! Maugham just comes off as so whiney.

Brit

 

[B_big dirigible]

Anything by John Le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell).

His first real biggie, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, was almost tolerable, although the plot suffered from huge holes, and the notion that spies and double and triple agents, who should be professionally suspicious of everything, would prove to be as gullible as Japanese tourists whenever the plot needed an unlikely turn, stretched the limits of the permissible even in fiction. But at least the story moved along in a fairly even way. Everything else he's cranked out since has been tedious drivel. It looks like he stretches everything out until his editor tells him it's long enough, then he ends it in a few pages, with a mass of loose ends big enough to choke the late lamented Linda Lovelace at her enthusiastic best. His characters, intended to be engagingly eccentric, cross the line to childishly annoying, and the side action, with old government papershufflers perpetually bonking the underage office help, makes me suspect that he's angling to be the ghostwriter of ex-Representative Gary Condit's autobiography. Perhaps most irritating is his chronic anti-Americanism, which is really mere resentment - the American spy agencies are invariably portrayed as too rich and too efficient, and not properly obsequious towards their bumbling British colleagues. Cornwell has some baggage here, to be sure, as his own real-life career as a spy for MI6 was cut short by Kim Philby's treason, though it would take a better gymnast than Cornwell to blame the US for that.

The books are complex, but not thoughtful. Cornwell's political views strike me as astonishingly primitive and naive, casting a general pallor of triviality over his stories. He may know spies from real life, but his grasp of politics and history seem rudimentary.

The peculiar thing is that the books seem bad, but not particularly boring, until the reader realizes that he's actually wasting time on such a bad book. Even worse, if he's read other Le Carres, he'll soon notice the nagging feeling that he's read that book before, and will develop the creeping suspicion that it won't get better if he just keeps reading. These effects, I suspect, are because most of the le Carre books are bad in the same way and for the same reasons. Only after that realization does the boredom set in. It's a curious effect.

 

[B_big dirigible]

Any of the longer works by Franz Kafka. At the start, a big lump like The Castle is mildly intriguing. But it never goes anywhere. This was undoubtedly deliberate and was all part of Kafka's intent, but it makes for major-league tedium. Deliberate boredom is still boredom, and perhaps all the more boring for being deliberately planned by a writer who, despite his intrinsic wackiness, knew what he was doing.

 

[DC_DEEP]

That book should be read more than once although if it frustrates you the second reading might not be worthwhile.

Ha, although I'm guessing you are talking about the Marquez book, you don't specify. I suppose I could get through it again (and perhaps I should try to read it in the original Spanish...) but I would scrape my eyeballs out before anyone could force me to read Nana again. Given the subject matter, it should be at least mildly interesting, but it was (what, 600 pages of) more-boring-than-the-begets-in-the-bible.

 

[JustAsking]

This is my favorite book to hate! Dickens is just impossible to relate to and reading Expectations is like listening who loves to hear them self talk.

I have a soft spot for Dickens, but only as an author of victorian soap operas. I can't get through a Dickens novel, but I love well done movies made from Dickens novels. For example, the recent Masterpiece Theater version of Bleak House with the astonishingly beautiful Gillian Anderson.

I mean who could argue with Smallweed?

 

[B_big dirigible]

Another thing I hate is reading the beginning of a trilogy or tetralogy and waiting for the author to get around to writing the rest of the story.

I happen to know a moderately successful mystery writer, with a dozen or so paperbacks out. She's just broken into "serious" fiction, with a couple of historicals, and those put her into the hardcover market. She told me two particularly interesting things about publishers. They're wild about trilogies or serials nowadays, as they believe that will generate further sales. Sell the first of a trilogy, it's only a matter of time before you sell all three, at least in theory. And I suppose it must work to some degree - why else would anybody bother to read, say, Asimov's Second Foundation, if not for the forlorn hope that it would justify the time already invested in Foundation and Foundation and Empire? It's a publisher's plot, rather than an author's. The other thing is that the tacky sex scenes aren't the author's fault, either. Editors think they help books sell, and beginning authors have nothing to say about it. After the author is a marketable commodity and has a following, he has more control about that stuff, particularly if his agent is a hardass.

Fortunately neither trend has infested non-fiction. I can't imagine what the obligatory sex scenes in, say, Jane's Fighting Ships of World War 1 would be like. Many years ago National Lampoon published proposed obligatory sex scenes for famous works - Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Plato's Republic are the only ones I remember. Pretty rude stuff.

 

[justmeincal]

One of my neighbors is a well known mystery writer. He recently gave me a signed copy of his latest book. It was awful; boring, poorly written with LOTS of exclamation points. It drives me crazy whenever every other sentence ends with a '!'.

Anyway, now every time I see him, he asks me what I thought of the book. I just tell him that I've been so busy, I haven't had time to read it yet. I know, I know, it's a lie. But I can't bring myself to tell him I thought his book sucked.

 

[B_NineInchCock_160IQ]

Fortunately neither trend has infested non-fiction. I can't imagine what the obligatory sex scenes in, say, Jane's Fighting Ships of World War 1 would be like. Many years ago National Lampoon published proposed obligatory sex scenes for famous works - Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Plato's Republic are the only ones I remember. Pretty rude stuff.

"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes"

"Why should we longer cherish any social acerbities...let us all squeeze ourselves into each other"

"'it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self- complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction."


~from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

 

[rawbone8]

"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes"

"Why should we longer cherish any social acerbities...let us all squeeze ourselves into each other"

"'it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self- complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction."


~from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Small wonder why pages 414 and 415 were stuck together in the volume at the high school library.

 

[SpeedoGuy]

Anything by John Le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell).

His first real biggie, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, was almost tolerable, although the plot suffered from huge holes, and the notion that spies and double and triple agents, who should be professionally suspicious of everything, would prove to be as gullible as Japanese tourists whenever the plot needed an unlikely turn, stretched the limits of the permissible even in fiction. But at least the story moved along in a fairly even way. Everything else he's cranked out since has been tedious drivel. .

Agreed 100%. When I read The Spy I thought I was in for something really dramatic and special. It wasn't for all the reasons you stated. The Le Carre novels are way over-rated.

I'd add that Tom Clancy's first, "The Hunt for Red October" was entertaining, as was "Red Storm Rising". But after that it was all downhill for Clancy and his novels: The characters proved to be wooden and one dimensional, plots were predictable right up to their conclusions. No legs for his series.

 

[GoneA]

I have a soft spot for Dickens, but only as an author of victorian soap operas.

That's a neat (and, actually, very insightful) comparison. I would like to use it in the future.

At any rate, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Dickens fan ... I've enjoyed immensely everything he's written! Color me odd, but, Great Expectations, is high (if not the highest) on that list. However, this thread isn’t about what authors and works we find fascinating, but in keeping with classic literatures and writers (and bestowing the term “classic writer” upon this author is being magnanimous, to say the least), I don't see how anyone can tolerate even so much as a single word from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Everything he produced seems so very ... fake. As if his issues with verbosity weren’t enough, it's as though he's made no effort to give his audience a story with some believability to it, and then resolved to give us an abundance of it!!

Fortunately for me, though, This Side of Paradise ended when it did, or I would’ve certainly gouged my eyes out, but Gatsby!!! Gatsby actually made me happy Fitzgerald wasn’t amongst The Living, anymore. It was all talk, and no walk; a lot of buildup, but no crescendo. Reading Gatsby was the first taste I got of writers going out of the bounds of their own scope and breadth. These writers are simply not enjoyable, and will often piece together a novel with the expectation that their pretentiousness will somehow mask their inability to tell a good story.

Put differently, I think The Great Gatsby would actually have a fighting chance if another writer told the story. A great deal of Fitzgerald’s problem is he’s much too dominant; he tells his story as opposed to letting them tell themselves. He also writes with an undertone of arrogance that I just can’t stomach (go figure).

But, alas, I’m afraid his books have taken on immortality and will continue to be read in 10th grade English classes all around the world. Be that as it may, why and curriculum-planner would have students read threadbare literature that’s devoid of expression, style, irony, wit and every other redeeming quality is something I’ve yet to fathom.

 

[GoneA]

Oh, and lest we forget, I think everyone will agree when I say Michael Crichton's State of Fear was so boring it makes a library look like a KISS concert.

 

[B_big dirigible]

but I would scrape my eyeballs out before anyone could force me to read Nana again.

I was just cruising the stacks here at the Fort Dirigible, and came across a copy of Nana. 1933, Illustrated Editions Co, with silhouette illustrations by Mayer. It has a strange semi-flexible cover, maybe sort of like very early Modern Library books. I haven't a clue as to where it came from or when, or why I might have filed it right next to Marine's War by Fletcher Pratt. As time progresses I lend more credence to the theory that the things breed when nobody's looking.

Maybe I'll give it a shot later, if we're really snowed in here.

 

[Ethyl]

Ha, although I'm guessing you are talking about the Marquez book, you don't specify. I suppose I could get through it again (and perhaps I should try to read it in the original Spanish...) but I would scrape my eyeballs out before anyone could force me to read Nana again. Given the subject matter, it should be at least mildly interesting, but it was (what, 600 pages of) more-boring-than-the-begets-in-the-bible.

Yes, I was referring to Marquez' book, IMO, it's one of the best books ever written but not what I recommend for first time Marquez readers. Love in the time of cholera, Leaf Storm, or No One Writes to the Colonel are better choices. His latest book was excellent, too.