Most long and boring book ever written

[Siwi]

Done Proust. Done Nelson Mandela autobiography etc.

You could try Tristram Shandy, I read the whole thing in a month only to find out my tutor [for my degree] hadn't even read the bastard. I was the only one in the whole year that actually read it.

Suspect they've read Salman. Def woman in white.
Almost certainly mn.

OMG I loved The Woman in White! (And The Moonstone).

Hang on, Ulysses is brilliant! Finnegans Wake now is another matter. And Proust and the Collins and Middlemarch are wonderful. Eliot's Romola is pretty turgid, though. That gets my nomination. Or Trollope. I hate Trollope.

Sorry, your mum was reading your teenage diary, or have I misunderstood?

Oo Oo what about Clarissa (by Richardson) - it's interminable.

Thomas Mann sounds promising. Which is longest?

So you're getting your revenge on your mother for reading your teenage diary by making her read Ulysses???

One hundred years of solitude. I think I managed to get about a quarter of the way through, yawn.

My mum read mine when I was 17.

Your mum was reading your diary?

Limey. I think that you understood correctly.

I'm after a book to bring them both down from that level of intrusion by boring them.

The magic mountain 752 pages, but Clarissa is a whopping 1532

I just cried.

But I like the cut of your jib here, OP.

Ulysses is wonderful! Skip the first three chapters of insufferable Stephen Dedalus and start with nice Leopold Bloom listening to cat noises and musing on the loo.

I mean, I cried when it happened to me.

I hated Cloud Atlas. And I tried to finish A Passage to India a few times, since I bought in 1998, before finally sending it to the charity shop two years ago. I also dislike Tolkien.

Any James Joyce frankly, also George Elliot Mill on the Floss. Pileo'shite. Depressing shite at that.

Anything by Dickens! (I know, I'm a philistine but I've never managed to force my way through anything he wrote)

Loved Cloud Atlas though.

Yep. It's a slooooooow burning revenge.

They've read most of these, but lots of helpful suggestions. If you could state page numbers?

Mary! You MUST persevere with Ullyses! It doesn't really 'click' until the last few chapters.

Wherein lies enlightenment.

Ironically, the same diary-reading mother gave me a bible as my main Christmas present when I was 5.

Lord of the rings and for added snoredom the hobbit?

You need to get into Dickens' style and then you would love it. I know he describes things to the nth degree but so does Hardy and Hardy is so yawnsome in comparison. Far from the Madding Crowd read during English when I was 14. Nearly turned me off literature for life.

Catch 22 is horrifically dull, but a 'classic'?

Anything by Edith Wharton.

DP votes for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.