Mann's
Death in Venice. I suppose boring isn't the right verdict, as I was on the edge of my seat, anticipating the moment when it would emerge from its chrysalis of tedium and become scintillating. It never happened. But I suppose, despite its monumental badness, it's not really big enough to count as a boring
book.
Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. More a fraud than a play. And it's not that I insist on clarity in theatre; I'm a fan of Ionesco's
The Bald Soprano. But
Godot doesn't really count as a book either.
Anything by R.Buckmister Fuller. The absolute wackiest ideas about mathematics that I've seen in print. They're so wacky I don't know if his stuff should be classified as fiction or non-fiction. What a weirdo. Maybe "boring" isn't the right word. Waste of time, definitely, but that isn't exactly the same as boring.
Ah, here's a good one.
Lolita. Very promising start, but it deteriorates into a mere chase. Boring. Not that Nobakov doesn't know how to write interesting material; his book-length critique of one of my old favorites, Gogol, I found to be both insightful and entertaining. But he surely doesn't know how to write interesting chases. Maybe Ian Fleming could have done it - he managed to make even card games sound exciting. But Fleming was probably no good at novels about child abuse.
Oh, two more corkers I almost forgot! Not well known, perhaps furtunately -
The Promise of Air and
The Centaur, both by Algernon Blackwood.
Now this actually hurts. I've accumulated a huge amount of Blackwood's material. He's best known as the writer of one of the English language's quintessential horror stories,
The Willows. It's very common in anthologies, even though, at some 20,000 words, it's long for a short story. It's even available online. Here's a good one in HTML -
The Willows
Blackwood had a tremendous output, including many other famous horror and weirdo stories -
The Other Wing, Ancient Lights, The Wendigo, Secret Worship ... quite a run. Admittedly, they do tend toward verbosity. In those days a professional writer really had to work at it to live off a ha'penny a word or whatever the rates were. He also wrote quite a bit of something ... I don't know what ... one of the modern anthologists, Bleiler, called it "nature mysticism," and I suppose that will do.
The Centaur and
The Promise of Air are two of them. They go on forever, and never go anywhere. I can't even figure out where Blackwood was
trying to go with these. They're indescribable - perhaps their only memorable feature. It's not easy to crank out hundreds of pages which defy any sort of summary. But by my reading, he did it at least twice. Which is enough for me - I've learned my lesson. Stick with the horror stories.