What is the most boring book you have ever read?

Upon discovering a list declaring the most boring books of all time, there's at least one choice I disagreed with: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. What, that well-crafted tale of a young girl who narrates not only life in a small southern town in the Great Depression, but also how she witnessed both gross injustice in the form of the railroading of innocent black man Tom Robinson and high moral courage on the part of her attorney father Atticus Finch boring? Yeah right! Thankfully, it did not make a second list found on a Librarian blog.

However, missing from the Librarian blog list but present and accounted for on the first Goodreads list is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.  Now we are talking when it comes to boring literature. Admittedly Salinger does a pretty good job in his writing style. In fact, it is so good we can easily follow the stream of consciousness narrative of his protagonist Holden Caulfield, but the story he weaves goes absolutely nowhere at all.  

All Holden does is leave his school and drift about New York City until he is washed up at a mental hospital. Throughout the novel, he beefs about his life and times but does nothing to fix the former. You would think that by the end of the book Caulfield could have pulled himself together and did what he had to make his life what he wanted, right?   Apparently all he wanted to do was wander about and beef.  

One other boring novel (in this blogger's opinion) that did not make either list cited here was John Irving’s The World According to Garpe.  Like Catcher, it too is well-written but its plot also goes nowhere as Garpe goes from illegitimate birth to convoluted childhood and subsequent adulthood to abrupt and violent death in a story I am half-surprised did not put Irving on feminist’s most hated authors lists due to how Irving satirizes the movement via the character of Garpe’s mother who only conceives her son by all but taking advantage of a fertile but mentally maimed and mortally wounded patient also named Garpe at her hospital during WWII.  

Except for that little stunt, she avoids men like the plague and becomes a feminist hero thanks to writing a manifesto entitled A Sexual Suspect. Incredibly, Irving kills her off too just like he later does her son. In fact, he kills all his characters off at the end of the book by describing how each and every one meets their death by choking on an olive, dying of cancer, drowning and other swell ways to die young. At least Salinger let his protagonist live despite a run-in with a thuggish pimp at one point.

Both novels are ones you can read if you want, but you probably are not going to re-read them. Can anybody else suggest any boring books they would like to share?

Article image courtesy Hennepin County Library.