What is the most tedious book you have ever read?

pragmaticWench you're not from Grantham are you? Or is there more than one bitch of an English A level teacher who banged in and on about Martha Sodding Quest?!

War and Peace - Couldnt get through the start seemed like it was never going to get going.

The wings of the dove. Loved the film so was looking to reading the novel but was completely different to the film.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme.

But it may just have been a question of maturity. I might like it better if I read it now.

"Death of a sales man"

Was literally the worst book/play I've ever read!

I need a good run up to Lord of the Rings, otherwise I start reading other stuff and never go back to it. I enjoy it once I'm into it though.

Les Mis - the actual story is good, but I never needed nor wanted know that much about the sewer system in Paris.

If you think Dickens is turgid, try a bit of Elizabeth Gaskell...

Sunset Song - Grassic Giibon.

Read it to help DS with his Highers when we lived in Scotland. God, it was dire.

I loved Wolf Hall - but it can't be read as a ten-mins-at-bedtime, type of book. It does demand that you sit down for an hour or so at a time.

Slug - The Museum of Innocenceby Orhan Pamuk is one of my favourite books.

Must admit to also finding most Dickens a bit turgid, but it's years since I've tried any.

And am not a Jane Austen fan, either.

The one with Anne Hathaway in the film version where they meet at Uni and bore on for several decades.

I had the great misfortune of reading Paulo Coelho this year. I also had to give up on Zadie Smith books.
Caitlin Moran always writes the same thing over and over.

I love One hundred years of solitude.

Catch 22 is my all time favourite book in the world, ever. I also love Middlemarch. Tristram Shandy is okay, Life of Pi is brilliant (at least, it starts brilliantly - had me in stitches!) Birdsong good. Room okay once you can get past the 'voice'.

My vote is for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think he died this year, so feel slightly bad, but my god. Tedious.

If we are talking most irritating book, rather than boring, it HAS to be Eat, Pray, Love. I can wax lyrical for months about Elizabeth self-obsessed-Gilbert.

Catch 22 - persevered with it (just) but it was a long, hard slog

Sophie's World - tried to read it about 3 times but just can't get into it

Time Travellers Wife - as above (find it way too complicated?!)

White Teeth - took me forever to read this & I didn't enjoy it at all

So glad Moby Dick is up there. I read quickly and almost always finish books. I limped through that piece of nonsense, pausing halfway to read a book about the 'real' story.

Also, War and Peace which I didn't finished having started it, to date, 5 times.

Martha Quest by Doris Lessing.

I spent the entire book wanting to slap the main character for her complete and utter apathy and whinging attitude. Certainly not helped by my a-level bitch of a teacher raving on and bloody on as we read it about how amazing the book was.

I loved Wolf Hall, The Goldfinch and Middlemarch.

I ploughed through The 100 Year Old Man and The Luminaries as they were book group choices, but thought they were beyond boring.

I read Labyrinth and The Husbands Secret on the recommendation of friends and really regetted both. Dreadful books, and badly written.

Oh another vote for Moby Dick. Horrendous!
I also limped through the first 2 volumes of In Search of Lost Time and admitted defeat.

Loved Wolf Hall and The Goldfinch though (but not My Little Friend)

I read that after the success of The Secret History, Donna Tartt refused editors which is why her second 2 books are much longer and probably did need editing

Oh, Velvet, me too ! It was the kind of book my teenage self should have loved, but no, I gave up as well.
Jack Kerouacs On the Road was also tedious, although I perservered and wondered why I bothered.
I read everything with bikes/musings in it.
I never finished Sons and Lovers, an A level text. Zzzzzzz. The rest of the class loved it.

I love philosophy and i love motorbikes, but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is soporific. It is the only book i have never been able to finish.

Another vote for the time travellers wife.

group

Infinite Jest

I tried, in infinite ways..I even joined the support grop. I was so so sad, as I loved David Foster Wallace. I just could not get through it.

Books read for children brings up the terrible memories of Thomas the Tank Engine; the worst ever...

I wouldn't usually finish a book I thought was boring so that makes Twilight by far the most tedious book I ever finished. I read it to see if it was suitable for my daughter. I also had to read Hard Times for school and hated it. The last book I started and gave up on was the Joanna Trollope version of Sense and Sensibility. I should really have known better that to even start it.

Some of the books mentioned here I absolutely loved as a teen but I do wonder what I'd make of them now. Midnight's Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude come to mind and also The Company of Wolves.

Another vote for Wolf Hall. Mindbogglingly tedious.

But people who have nominated Cloud Atlas or the Time Traveller's Wife are wrong. That is all.

On the road