Most long and boring book ever written

[Siwi]

Done Proust. Done Nelson Mandela autobiography etc.

Varney the Vampire is VERY long and pretty boring. Doesn't exactly count as one of the classics of literary fiction, though.

1984 is my fave book

I really enjoyed Catch 22, but I didn't find it funny. I was probably only 13 to 14 when I read it so maybe the humour was too dark or adult for me.

Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. 924 pages of the most impenetrable ridiculous guff ever written. I can read Henry James now, after some practice, and getting used to the style, but Parade's End was 10 times worse. Soul destroying prose.

The Aeneid. Did it for A-levels. A few interesting parts, widely spaced by masses of boring.

Room by Emma Donoghue. How that book won awards I will never know. It was so dull, and badly written felt like it took years to read.

Alf Wight recommended The Brothers Karamazov as a cure for insomnia.

Surprised to see A Suitable Boy get so many mentions! Yes, it is long but I really enjoyed reading it. I felt quite bereft when I had finished it; it was like saying goodbye to old friends.

Donkey, I loved Foundation too; but could it break the OP's diary-reading parents?

I loved Room!! It was gripped and read it all within a day which is a record for me.

I*

I just loved a Suitable Boy.

I have been trying to read Catch 22 for about 35 years.

Ex DP gave it to me about 40 years ago & DH gave it to me 2 years ago.

Still can't get past page 6.

If you want long, boring and really sloppily written then Labyrinth by Kate Mosse was horrible to read. I don't really know why I finished it, I was sure it would improve, but it didn't.

missmodular2 - we need to be friends IRL. We have the same taste in books. These people are heathens.

Too many of my favourite books have been mentioned now. I'm going to have to go to sleep before someone mentions Les Miserables and I get really upset!

Finnegans Wake, because incomprehensible. Ulysses huge fun
Arcadia
The Faerie Queene
The Tin Drum
Evelina. Burney beats richardson's Clarissa hands down.

Second tier

Moby Dick has flashes of brilliance to lighten it.
Most of the non Barchester / Palliser trollopes
Anything by Ezra Pound
Ivanhoe and most of Scott
Sartorial Resartus and indeed anything by Carlile
The Forsyte Saga

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

So much tedious detail could have cut about two thirds of the book and then it might have been good

The Forsyte Saga is one of the best books ever written - so muchdetail, such a window into those times.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil. TWO VOLUMES. Nothing happens in either of them.

Or, if you want genuinely unreadably boring, rather than just boring, you could go for Diodorus Siculus' Histories, or indeed numerous other classical texts.

Get some text books!

Arcadia beats Don Quixote hands down, no humour.

Yes Spenser has got mentioned.

Paradise Regained is pretty dull

I think TLOTR pretty unreadable.

Also can't bear Zola. And Hugo needed a good editor with a ruthless blue pencil. As did Thackeray.

Oh god classical texts. The Gallic wars, anyone, or marching against the bloody Persians. Parasang by parasang, no RAF bombers then...

The kamasutra

The book thief isn't long but it is exceptionally terrible. I mean really really a bad novel.

Someone up thread mentioned the golden bowl by Henry James. I read long dense books but I gave up on this one - just so dense. Nothing happens. At all.

However no one has mentioned A man without Qualities. It's gi-fucking-gantic (think: need a wheelbarrow to carry it around) and its severely hard work. Look it up, seriously.

The three I couldn't finish are LotR, Zen & the art of Motorcycle Maintenance and one by Ellis Peters, The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet. Now I do like a good think dollop of history but I just couldn't get going with this. And I'm from Wales so it isn't a problem of too many consonants. It's huge.

Ooh what about gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon? Loooong and bizzzzarre.