I would say “Wuthering Heights” except that “Ethan Frome” was even more pointless, irrelevant and depressing.
Wendy
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That’s what Cliff’s Notes are for. To further your education by allowing you to gloss over the dross and use the time saved to further your education.
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For me it was The Yearling by Majorie Rawlings. Not badly written, just boring. The best was Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
DB2
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Taming of the shrew…without a doubt…I saw myself as an up and coming feminist at 14-15…
Catcher in the Rye.
Though, I hesitate to say it was “the worst”. I didn’t particularly like it. Perhaps it resonated with some people. None of us assigned to read it in my class liked it (we had to discuss it in small groups). A young man trying to bumble his way around with no real point to any of it.
Close second would be the Scarlet Letter. I later learned it was meant to be a short story, but some nitwit made Hawthorne expand it to a full book. It was probably a great short story. As a book, it was painfully, mind-numbingly dull.
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Advanced Organic Chemistry, Reaction, Mechanisms, and Structure.
Don’t think I got through two chapters.
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With that citation you win enormous cred from me (once again, as you have did so long ago, even though on most subjects I find you both dogmatic and incorrect).
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It was probably “I Promessi Sposi”. Nearly everyone in class found it to be boring and tedious.
Since I read quite a lot, and read even more in my youth, I’ve mostly lost track of what I read for school and what I read for pleasure. But one of the best I’ve read was “The Mouse that Roared” by Leonard Wibberley.
The really fun part of Organic Chemistry is the lab. But the molecules are beautiful in their own right.
Wendy (M.S., Organic Chemistry)
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Well, nobody’s perfect…
DB2
You are saying that like it is a bad thing.
LOL
Ditto. I can’t really recall any “bad” books, just the fact that having to read, then critique, and write about the book, took the fun out of it.
One thing I did do every summer, the books that were talked about being placed on a “ban list” became my reading list.
I’m going with Catcher In The Rye. Billed as a ‘coming of age’ book, I couldn’t relate to anything Holden was going through except recognizing adult hypocrisy. I’ve softened my stance on that as I’ve aged. 
My monthly book club, currently in our 21st year, reads 1 “classic” book each year. In 2025 it was Catcher In The Rye. Re-reading it over 50 years later, I still disliked it, but thought it was more about mental illness than ‘coming of age.’
Generally, if a book doesn’t catch me (in the rye or not) in the first 100 pages, I stop reading it and move on.
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For me, the assigned books I enjoyed least included things like Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Yeah, as you might suspect, The Great Books Program was still part of an undergrad’s mandatory course of study no matter his major at my college. In four years, we worked our way through the whole list.
Some of the books I’ve have returned to over the years, such as Iliad, Plato’s Dialogs, the Greek plays and histories for their themes still being engaging and relevant today. But not the heavy-duty philosophy stuff. That was mental punishment.
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I hear you. The Great Books collections over the years rarely used translators with a sense of style, and heavies like those you named were almost always overly obsessed with extreme accuracy in both translating words and phrases but also in closely echoing the syntax of the original text — often painful in the the extreme when the language and “music” of the words has shifted, like swallowing giant horse pills….
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Supposedly read a good translation of “Dante’s Inferno”. What was missing was contextual references. Constantly had to Google names, events, etc., that were mostly likely common knowledge for people at the time. Kind of like when I throw down a movie quote from the 80s to my 16 y/o nephew, just get a blank stare.
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I’m surprised no one has mentioned Atlas Shrugged. Yeesh, just unreadable.
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I didn’t like it the first time, nor any other time I’ve read it. I’ll leave this here..
The one the sticks with me is The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky. I finished it the first time through sheer will power. After all, if Siberian prisoners could suffer through digging holes for no reason, I could surely suffer through reading that book.
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