The best boring books | Books | guardian.co.uk

Robert McCrum has a list of top ten best boring books. Only Marx makes it from philosophy!

“There’s no Blitz today, of course,and it’s difficult to recapture or conjure up the kind of reading that might anaesthetise the anguish and pain of day-to-day existence in such circumstances, but I think I do recognise a class of slow reading that can be immensely comforting. Here’s my top 10 of favourite dull books (obviously, a highly subjective choice), with “dull” being almost a synonym for “classic”:

1. Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy

2. Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

3. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled

4. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano

5. Virginia Woolf: The Waves

6. James Joyce: Finnegans Wake

7. Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel

8. William Thackeray: Pendennis

9. Karl Marx: Capital

10. James Woodforde: The Diary of A Country Parson”

via The best boring books | Books | guardian.co.uk.