As I’ve done with The Stupidest Books Ever Written, here’s a selection of careful and considered mini-reviews highlighting the most boring-est books. Presented without comment, for obvious reasons.

Of Mice and Men

I would have to say another book which I found to be rather boring is Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, I do not care for him overall as an author, he will take like 5 pages to describe the same field
Romeo

David Copperfield

David Copperfield made me want to kill small, furry animals
Vanilla

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is the most horribly boring book I’ve ever read. Every other book I’ve ever read has had at least some redeeming value about it, but Wuthering Heights was just… ugh… I love reading, but I’d rather get kicked in the balls every two minutes than read that again…
HasBeenCorrected

The Rape of The Lock

i don’t really care for alexander pope’s poetry(e.g. the rape of the lock). the rhymings are kinda awkward and the contents are boring. i’d say they are the worst i’ve read so far.
finnegan’s wake

The Catcher in The Rye, Emperor’s New Clothes, All of Shakespeare

Catcher in the Rye – like the Emporer’s New Clothes, I think none of the pro’s are willing to admit it is a terrible read. As for Shakespeare, he is probably an acquired taste. His work becomes intelligent and funny after studying with a Shakespeare-phile. Without that, you really miss the point.
amandamorgan

Lord of The Rings

I have to say LOTR even though I pretended to myself I liked it I didn’t, I lied to myself man. There are so little action…parts. Where in the movie theres a lot, like that whole final battle in the end of the first one never happened in the book.
DMWMDK

The Art of War

It would be a stretch to call it the worst… but I had an extremely hard time completing “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu… I delved into the book expecting tactical information on warfare that could be translated universally to everyday conflicts… unfortunately, i didn’t get much out of the book…
Andrew

This post was going to be a rant about ironic libraries but I just can’t do it. See what five minutes reflection will do for you? Instead I’ll try and embarrass myself, then rant a teensy bit and then try and engage you in conversation. So get ready to comment.

When I was a teenager I liked buying stupid books. Now a lot of teenagers buy stupid books when they’re buying books at all. They just have terrible taste. But the terrible books I bought as a teenager weren’t—for the most part—bought because I was tasteless. Nope, they were purchased, if I’m going to be embarrassingly honest, to make me feel superior. Yep, that’s buying books for irony’s sake. When people saw a Harlequin romance on my shelf or a management book on personal power and had a good laugh the comedic turn lay here, I was too good for those books. That’s the thing. I didn’t buy the books to make myself feel superior, I mean, consciously. In effect, however, that’s what I was doing. We can appreciate dumb books ironically because it makes us feel we’re not dumb.

Which brings me to my rant that won’t be a rant. If it doesn’t come across here, this makes me more sad than angry. I guess that’s a lament. Anyway, I recently had the misfortune of coming across a personal library that seemed to be almost given up to irony. Once, someone had collected these books with a definite purpose, mostly to entertain, to instruct somewhat, but through neglect irony, like a disease, had spread over it. Worse yet it was for children. I’ll tell you this, children don’t appreciate irony. They’re looking for a good story.  Now, I may just be a sad old grump (or a twenty-nine year old grump) but it really drove me nuts to hear selections read from the library out loud to a group of college students as we all (me too) had a good laugh over the sorry state of the library. I confess my sins. But fix the stupid library already.

What do you think? In the case above the library was, as I noted, for children. I won’t say where the library was but I’m sure you’ve seen one like it before at a camp, or your church, or worse, a school. Shouldn’t they have something decent to read? Am I just an old grump? Did I mention I still have the Harlequin and copy of Power!?

My love/hate relationship with the public Library continues. By necessity really; I have to keep going back there to return my books, and what? I’m supposed to leave there empty-handed? Still though, the Library can be an odd place. Let’s take last night for instance.

Last night, while my son and I sat in the not-quite-a-café in the foyer across from the security desk I couldn’t help but notice them getting agitated. A few minutes later the head security guard walks by, wearing heavy duty disposable plastic gloves, carrying a large plastic bag at arms length. He’s making his way towards the exit at a sort of “I’d like to look calm, I hope I look calm” pace. What was in the bag? I never found out. But the junior security guard followed behind and I heard him remark to another colleague, “Well, we’ve never seen that before.”

The kid’s section was completely empty last night, except for one guy. A grown man, maybe fifty. He was sitting at one of the kid’s sized study tables right in the middle of the the section, reading out loud from an over-sized children’s Bible. And I need to emphasize he was reading as loud as he could possibly read. Like he was reading a sermon in a church. Earlier, he walked by and grumbled menacingly and frankly, just plain weirdly, at my son and I.

Lastly there’s me. Sometimes my reading interests strike me as odd. Am I the only person out there checking out The Selected Poems of Herman Melville alongside Seth Godin’s famous marketing book Unleashing the Ideavirus? Does that set off alarms somewhere in the bowels of the Culture League HQ? Alert! Alert! A reader with conflicted reading tastes—good God, he reads marketing books!—is leaving the downtown library! Send out the dogs! Save Melville!

Maybe not. But I’d actually kind of like to go to the Culture League HQ. I bet they have a cool library.

You may or may not remember Scuppers The Sailor Dog from your childhood. I didn’t but my son will. Scuppers, born at sea, is a sailor and the sailor is a dog. This short little Golden Book by the sad and weird (well, I get that feeling anyway) Margaret Wise Brown, taught me every thing I needed to know about reading to kids. The thing is, Scuppers teeters on the border of absolutely terrible, as far as kids stories go—unless!—unless, you can read it a certain way.

First of all, you have to be dead serious. That’s right you have to read a story about a sailing dog shipwrecked at sea as if it were the most important thing in the world. Sort of in the spirit of Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston or William Shatner—only not so cheesey. It’ll make it more fun for you anyway. Why do you have to be dead serious? Well besides not insulting your child’s intelligence and taste, it’s a good trick for letting the author’s emphasis come out from the page. Reading Scuppers like it’s important turns a simple and boring story into Robinson Crusoe.

Secondly, your rhythm is important. You can’t just blow through a kids book especially when your kid is at the age where they can’t read but can clearly see the benefits of it. Reading, at this stage, is a big deal. Anyway, one can’t just blow through Scuppers without feeling they should set the book on fire it’s so terrible. The tenses change from past to present (to put the story in the “now” for kids) and several pages are given up to long boring lists (without commas or any sort of break). But, find the rhythm of Scuppers, work with the mutt, and the story—this will sound lame—comes to life.

Finally, you have to sing any poetry you encounter. Or, at least, read it in an overly pompous, “life or death” manner. This is made surprisingly and frighteningly clear the first time you read Scuppers and come to “His Song” at the end. Yes, you will have to sing a song about a sailing dog to the tune of “Popeye, the Sailor Man”. And yes, you will have to sing it with salty gusto and life. Failing that, you must read it “Shakespeare” style (think Bill Shatner again). Why must you embarrass yourself this way? Because you love your kid. Get over it, it’s not embarrassing.

Get Scuppers. Learn how to read it. Embarrass yourself. You’ll make yourself and someone else very happy.

As a reader and lover of words, words, words, as a blogger loving WordPress, as a graphic artist concerned with essential simplicity and as a burgeoning web design hobbyist, it makes me all sorts of happy to read this loaded comment from WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg:

I try to imagine code like the poetry of T.S. Eliot, where words can work on many levels but their economy is paramount. To remind me of this, I sometimes code in a large serif font like Georgia rather than the traditional fixed-width font.

Mullenweg’s comment also serves to remind me that I constantly underestimate modern poetry. Even though I’m currently reading Auden I have a long history of disregarding it altogether. I’m usually only interested in poetry if archaeologists are too.

Anyway, stop reading my mind, Mullenweg. It’s creepy.

Via The Blog of Tim Ferris.

One of my favorite bookish movie adaptations has to be the 1967 Russian animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book by Soyuz Multfilm. It’s certainly more faithful than the somewhat recent adaptation featuring Jason Lee that completely misses the point of The Jungle Book and instead features an Indian Tarzan in a story too dumb for adults and children. Is it OK to ask for your money back even if it’s a dollar rental special? But I digress. The Russian Jungle Book cartoon is more of an epic, by people who quite clearly really enjoyed the book.

My son refers to the Russian version alternately as his Jungle Book or “the one with pink gitch”. Wikipedia refers to it as the “heroic” version and while I like the “pink-gitch version” heroic certainly does do it justice. It’s fairly faithful to the first and second Jungle Books, highlighting tales from the youth of Mowgli, the tortured outsider, with two major changes, one of which is brilliant, the other just weird.

The first, making Shere Khan the big bad, is a no-brainer. Sure, Disney did this too but did they have Shere Khan follow Mowgli around until he was 17 where he’s finally defeated (off-screen) in bare-handed combat by having his head torn open? No they did not—but I would like to hear the jazzy number that would have accompanied that scene in the Disney version.

The second change, the just plain weird one, was making Bagheera female. Thanks for confusing my son Soyuz Multfilm. On the other hand, making Bagheera female did seem to deliver inspiration to the animators. Bagheera is one of the most interesting animated characters to watch on screen, with a knowing slink that explodes into action and then twists into retreat in time with every one of his, er, I mean her lines.

Speaking of lines, The Soyuz Multifilm Jungle Book is, of course, dubbed and features narration by none other than Charles Heston whose pained reading is a guilty pleasure of mine. As an added bonus he mispronounces Mowgli (think cow instead of flow) for the first half of the film. Classic.

Bonus Weird Russian Cartoon Links

• Check out the Soyuz Multfilm version of Winnie the Pooh on YouTube. It’s, um, it’s very Russian.
• Some screen captures from the Jungle Book featuring Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera.

How do I do this again? Let’s see, hunt, peck, b-o-o-k-s-b-l-o-g, ah, yes. Hello there, I’m back from vacation.

Taking a step away from this blog has been somewhat nice for me (perhaps even somewhat amusing) but, of course, I didn’t exactly remove myself completely. Observant readers may have noticed a slight change to the categorizing of posts amongst other technical things. All part of my plan to take full advantage of WordPress 2.3 and Sandbox 1.0 when they reach a more finished state. Speaking of which, I’m going to be involved with bringing the billionth blog to the internet—a quarterly theology magazine creatively set in “The Great Tradition”—don’t worry, I won’t be writing for it, just designing it. I hope it pans out. And in more bloggy news, Holy Heroes!! should be getting a spiffy new costume very soon has a spiffy new costume.

But enough of this nerd-talk let’s talk about books! I’ve various non-reviews, topics, grievances and bookish ideas stewing in my mind, all some of the things you can look forward to—or quickly mark as read in the feed reader. Amongst them:

• Some of my favorite bookish movies
• Useless libraries for children
• Bill Mason
• Karl Barth and the Pope
• David Quammen
• A toast to Grant Morrison
• and gushing appreciation of Craig Thompson
• … and other hastily concocted posts that keep me from reading

To everyone that’s new here, especially all you visitors that are suddenly coming from Google, I’m back—my apologies in advance—welcome to Upper Fort Stewart.