Most long and boring book ever written

[Siwi]

Done Proust. Done Nelson Mandela autobiography etc.

Interesting thread. Shocked that Paradise Lost was suggested, it's one of my favourite books ever.

I'm now going to order myself Don Quixote for a dose of humour

The Famished Road Ben Okri
The book with the description of cauliflower by Emile Zola, can't remember which one it was.
Most works by Charles Dickens or Evelyn Waugh. Unlike a PP, Bleak House was the one I enjoyed.
War and Peace, Dostoyevski.
And Ulysses. And the Hobbit, which was so bad I didn't read the others... you know the ones I mean.

You're a pleb, Tess, you don't like the clever stuff.
That's right, Tess, I don't.

The Unconsoled - Ishiguro - deadly
A suitable Boy V Seth

Loved Middlemarch and Bleak House and Goldfinch

Moby Dick. So tedious.

Atlas shrugged Ayn Rand

Think you need to go for trashy.

How about a complete set of Jodie Picoult.

Also thought The Taxidermist's daughter by Kate Mosse was dire.

But I love A Suitable Boy and Trumpet. Can't believe they have been mentioned on here.

adventuremathmatical im reading the wheel of time books, im on book ten but I have to say its been a long hard slog and im reserving judgement til its finished

Loved this thread. OP, what did you buy in the end?

I find A Tale of Two Cities impossibly boring. I also started Don Quixote, but gave up.

The Egoist by George Meredith - OMG - if my window had been open, I would have thrown that book out of it.

I love Middlemarch and I've read it several times. I also like Thomas Hardy.

Finnegan's Wake. Unreadable.

What did you go for?

The Water Babies.

I read all of a lot of these (Moby Dick, Catch 22, Ayn Rand, Dostoyevsky, preen ).
Only managed 5 pages of Ulysses, maybe 1.5 chapters of Life of Pi. Lord of The Rings is on a constant repeat cycle, but I think I got half way thru 2nd book before giving up.

Wolf Hall - turgid twaddle

A little Life. Dull & depressing. 700+ pages of misery.

Definitely Moby Dick. So tedious. Daniel Deronda is up there as well. Those are probably the two that spring to mind.

Moby Dick.
Our lives as humans are just too short !!!!!

I really liked some of these! A Suitable Boy was lovely; the bone people made me cry (a good thing).

Kate Mosse on the other hand is a bit shit but very long. Or try Tom Clancy.

'The Bloodline of The Holy Grail' by Laurence Gardner. Over 1000 pages of obscure Hebrew linguistic analysis and tedious medieval l'angeudoc politics.

If Satan ever fell to Earth again in the form of a book,

It's the book that Dan Brown ripped off and Disneyfied into 'The Da Vinci Code'.

Alternatively, Finnegan's Wake. No one in my university tutorial group managed to make it all the way through to the end. In a moment of weakness our tutor admitted that he'd never read it all the way through either.

You could just get them the 50 shades books and write "because I know you enjoy badly written sex" inside the cover. Or Twilight with a card saying "For all your teen angst needs".

Thanks for an entertaining thread!

Agree that Nostromo is unreadable, god almighty!

Ditto Lord of the Rings, much of Rushdie, much of George Eliot and much of Dickens. Oh - and amazingly, considering his coulourful life- Clinton's autobio.

But Paradise Lost?? Suitable Boy??? And fgs, Canterbury Tales??? God no, all fabulous in v different ways

Give her the whole A Scots Quair trilogy by Grassic Gibbon. They tortured us with Sunset Song at school. I'm pretty sure there's a circle of hell where they force you to read that boring shite continuously.

I profoundly disagree. Chris Guthrie is one of the best written by a man female characters you will ever meet.

However anything by Irvine Welsh, Jeff Torrington or James Kelman will bore you to tears.

Or The Silmarilion.

Actually these 2 are much, much worse than anything suggested. I'm one of the 1 star reviewers for both , and in the case of the first one, amongst those who gave up. It was so badly written it was offensive. I think one would be ill if one persevered to the end.

The second one is also appallingly badly written but unlike the first one the author does understand English grammar. It's actually so bad it's funny.

Helen Phifer -The Ghost House
www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0263254003?ref_=cm_cr-mr-title


The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie
www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00BM7Y1L4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1451874561&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=the+rose+labyrinth&dpPl=1&dpID=51aMPrk2JZL&ref=plSrch

Anything by Milton. Anything...still vividly recall first ever tutor group at university, where tutor admitted she disliked Milton intensely and had never had a student who liked him either.

I'm not remotely surprised.

I really enjoyed Paradise Lost. The aim of the thread was to find something utterly unreadable as a revenge for mother reading OP's teenage diary. From the description of her parents I suspect her mother might have already read Paradise Lost or if she hasn't , it would not be that much of a trial.

She mentioned her mother won't give up on a book so for that reason I think my suggestion of Helen Phifer -The Ghost House would be perfect. It's so astonishgly badly written and littered with grammatical errors it would be painful to have to finish it.

Pl- is a challenge and not a pleasurable read but entirely worth it, imho. Did it aeons ago at school and would like to revisit when I have loads of free time and an alert brain!