Ho Hum

There have been many lists of the best books--the ten best, the 100 best, etc. What about a list of the ten most boring? Editor Fon W. Boardman Jr. of Pleasures of Publishing, a Columbia University Press trade letter, thought it might be fun to make one. He polled several hundred U.S. librarians, editors, authors, reviewers and schoolteachers, asking them to send him a list of the ten classics that have bored most people most. Last week Boardman announced the results.

The ten that led all the rest: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Melville's Moby Dick, Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Richardson's Pamela, Eliot's Silas Marner, Scott's Ivanhoe, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust.

All in all, Boardman's readers listed 427 boring classics--including the Old Testament. The consensus was that the most boring author was George Eliot. The author with the most titles listed (17): William Shakespeare.

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