Most long and boring book ever written

[Siwi]

Done Proust. Done Nelson Mandela autobiography etc.

DH is a connoisseur of unreadable books, and has read Ulysses, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Moby Dick, Tristram Shandy, Midnight's Children, Catch 22, all of Tolkein, Dune, piles of Dickens, loads of translated recent Nobel prize winners whose names can neither remember not spell, loads of Dostoyevsky, and the whole of Proust. Most of these he has read multiple times for fun.

Hence he is speaking as an expert when he says that Don Quixote is the most unbearably tedious book in the history of the world.

I just read A Little Life. Very long, enjoyed the first half but then realised it desperately needed editing, decided the prose was turgid and charmless and lost interest in the main character. It's also relentlessly depressing. Could be just the ticket.

If I really wanted show my disdain, I'd just buy Midnight's Children though.

I love so many books on this list - Cloud Atlas (you have to persevere and then it is incredible); Middlemarch; Woman in White; Moby Dick.

I HATED Shanta-bloody-ram too. I would definitely recommend that for your mum.

Saint Augustine's 'City of God against the Pagans'. I've started and managed to finish pretty much every book mentioned so far but this one finished me off. It's well over 1000 pages of Saint Augustine trying to justify how miserable life was for most people (life is a pilgrimage etc etc.) My Cambridge tutor hadn't even read the whole thing and told me if I got desperate just to read chapter 19. I did get desperate.

I only kept reading A Little Life because I thought the author was playing a long drawn-out joke as to how many gruesome things she could inflict upon dreadful, damaged Jude before the reader rolled her eyes and decided that slitting her own throat with a blunt butter knife would be more fun than ploughing on to the end.

Fellow Munsnetters, if your idea of a fun book is one where every chapter is studded with lengthily described self-harm, interspersed with gruesomely detailed scenes of remembered child abuse, this is the novel for you. And it's incredibly long. And unlike many other long books, you feel its length...

Captain Corellis Mandolin the original version!

The mayor of fucking casterbridge, it just goes on and on and on.

Brilliant suggestions. The Picardy book sounds promising.

Might buy Morrissey for myself and pass it on for Jan birthday.

They never leave a book unfinished.

Liney. Not sure of phrase I am after but something like a long boiling pot of revenge.

They have read almost everything mentioned.

D gave m Ullyses as birth present. That's what we are up against.

Jane Eyre
Little Dorrit
A boring one about a lesbian playing a trumpet that I had to read at uni. Not a euphemism. It might have even been called Trumpet? Also I'm not even sure that it was a lesbian character because I didn't read it and based my comments in the seminar on Amazon reviews.

A Little Life sounds boring and depressing, but, is it looooooong?

Boring! Not boiling!

If you're not an economist, I suspect that Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century would be perhaps less interesting than it might be. It is also very long. And yet it's such a book of the moment, I feel that all educated people your DM ought to read it . . . (probably in the original French)

" The data we have assembled nevertheless reveal no structural decrease in inequality prior to World War I. What we see in the period 1870- 1914 is at best a stabilization of inequality at an extremely high level, and in certain respects an endless inegalitarian spiral, marked in particular by increasing concentration of wealth. It is quite difficult to say where this trajectory would have led without the major economic and political shocks initiated by the war. With the aid of historical analysis and a little perspective, we can now see those shocks as the only forces since the Industrial Revolution powerful enough to reduce inequality."

Need more on lesbian playing trumpet!

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnsian war is very dull indeed.

I'm going for Picardy for D. Rampant lefty.

Jackie Kay rings a bell- maybe that's the author? It had a lime green book cover! That I am sure about!

It's a book called Trumpet.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_(novel)

Style sounds promisingly arty but I think it's not long enough and has actually interesting subject matter, which is not what you want.

Or 'This Time is Different' by Reinhart and Rogoff: "Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe."

If your DM doesn't own any of Charles Dicken's unabridged works, maybe now is the time to start her collection off for her. Also- Shakespeare.

I gave up on War and Peace after about a third of it.

You're going about this the wrong way, though. If they read things like Ulysses and Midnight's fucking Children for fun then you should be buying them absolute trash like Twilight. Buy them the very last Twilight one because it is not only the worst, but then they won't have a clue what happened earlier either.

Or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Agreed, Clarissa is dreadful. Pamela is also extremely tedious (so bad that various spoofs were published at the time) but at least it's shorter. And anything by Walter Scott.

Those of you who think Ulysses is bad should try Finnegan's Wake. One of the tutors on my degree courses decided he would teach nothing but Joyce on the c20th literature course. There was quite the mutiny from his seminar group.

The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment or anything else by Dostoyevsky. I used to read anything but I had several Dostoyeskys to read at university and they nearly broke me.

Arthur C. Clarke's Cradle is great for making you sleep according to insomniac DH. It's also ridiculously long.