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

NCbear

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That's very peculiar; you're the only person I've heard express that sentiment. Have you recently suffered a head injury? :wink:


Hey! I also liked The Good Earth. I read it for fun in the third grade. VERY interesting due to the historical details.

NCbear (who used to be extremely bookish but now only has 15 bookcases in the house that are his height and stuffed to overflowing with all manner of books)
 

NCbear

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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.

I agree. Anything by Pynchon was a waste of time. I read two novels by him for a college-level class and never went back to that particular (poisoned) well.

NCbear
 

NCbear

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Oh yeah, try reading it now. :tongue:

Most things I liked then, I still like now, but from an adult's perspective. Double :tongue: !

NCbear (who's amused at remembering having read the unabridged Gulliver's Travels, Gone With the Wind, Kidnapped, just about everything by Edgar Allan Poe, several novels and short stories by Ray Bradbury, and The Hobbit that same year -- all for fun)
 

JustAsking

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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.
And not to mention the fact that it is basically a screed about Global Warming denial. I am betting the American Enterprise Institute paid him a lot of money to write that book. (lest you think I am paranoid, the AEI has recently been writing to climate scientists offering $10k for any articles they would write against the notion of Global Warming. )

I used to respect Crichton, but now that he has sold out to the tin-foil hat crowd, he is now on my list of people to avoid and disrecommend to anyone who will listen.
 

GoneA

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And not to mention the fact that it is basically a screed about Global Warming denial. I am betting the American Enterprise Institute paid him a lot of money to write that book. (lest you think I am paranoid, the AEI has recently been writing to climate scientists offering $10k for any articles they would write against the notion of Global Warming. )

Really!!! Do tell; my curiosity has been sparked! Have you any links I can reference (for the furture)?

JustAsking said:
I used to respect Crichton, but now that he has sold out to the tin-foil hat crowd, he is now on my list of people to avoid and disrecommend to anyone who will listen.

I did lose a great deal of respect for him after reading that novel. And the graphs in the book? I remember studying them very closely and couldn't tell where they supported his argument. Also, I'm surmising, that we were to assume he's fully comprehended the scientific papers his footnotes reference?

I can somewhat answer my own question. Yes, we are to assume that, but we would be quite remiss in that estimation. James Hansen, of Columbia University Earth Institute and Goddard Institute for Space Studies, an author of several scientific paper that support the claim to global warming (papers to which Crichton gave a rebuttal in his book) has described in great detail how Crichton has misunderstood his essays.


He's becoming a quack.
 

Love-it

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Haha@ you.

Yes, I'm certain The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged could both be considered tedious, but they would make for good shelving. Anthem is worth a read, if nothing more than as a pop-culture reference, and it only takes a couple hours. The story is interesting enough until she unleashes into bitch mode at the end, I know you'll roll your eyes at that- I nearly did myself. I'm sure she's even more tedious to those who share very few of her political or philosophical ideas, but I'd have to say I'm interested in at least half of her subject matter, which makes any writing more tolerable.

Maybe so, but when I read Atlas Shrugged I was only 11 or 12 and I swore I would never read another one of Ayn's books. Maybe it would be a better read today, I am an inveterate reader, but there is so many more interesting books waiting to be read.
 

madame_zora

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Maybe so, but when I read Atlas Shrugged I was only 11 or 12 and I swore I would never read another one of Ayn's books. Maybe it would be a better read today, I am an inveterate reader, but there is so many more interesting books waiting to be read.


I'm not suggesting you read it again. Most of her book support the same genre of thought, if you're ever interested, I'd pick a shorter one. She can sometimes take a very long time to get to the point in her fictions.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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Maybe so, but when I read Atlas Shrugged I was only 11 or 12 and I swore I would never read another one of Ayn's books. Maybe it would be a better read today, I am an inveterate reader, but there is so many more interesting books waiting to be read.

Officer Barbrady reached the same conclusion.

Actually, he swore off reading altogether.
 

D_Bob_Crotchitch

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The most boring book that I have ever read was a Chemical Engineering text book on heat transfer. It was written by three verbose Englishmen. It took them 6 pages to say "as the heat transfers across the flat plate". Argggg it was so bad, I don't even remember the name of it. Of the ones I do remember, "Jeffersonian Democracy And The American Indian" was the pits. I had to eat crunchy food to stay awake.

Why on earth do publishers agree to pay for these things.
 

B_big dirigible

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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.
 

Belly_Dancer

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Unfortunately, I never finish boring books. That fact earned me some less-than-stellar grades in English and Literature courses, but I guess my ADD-esque brain just doesn't have the discipline plod on through something I hate...

And there's very much in life I hate more than being bored.

Life is just too fucking short. :tongue:

Now if you wanted a list of boring books I haven't finished, I could give you that....:biggrin1:
 

B_big dirigible

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Unfortunately, I never finish boring books.

How can you stand the possiblity of missing the good parts?

Now if you wanted a list of boring books I haven't finished, I could give you that....:biggrin1:

James Hutton wrote (and very radically, too, for 1795), in his Theory of the Earth, "We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." I'm counting on that second part - there are lots more Fridays on the way. Or more specifically, lots more Dumb Post Fridays on the way.

By the bye, THEORY of the EARTH; or an INVESTIGATION of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, is online. Is the Internet the cat's ass, or what?

THEORY of the EARTH