The most boring novel I've ever read (or started)?

I have to say that Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I'm abandoning after 100+ (dense) pages (out of 500, and this is the first volume of a trilogy) is among the most boring novels I've ever encountered. Why is that? Compare this epic with some of the other great  novels about patriarchs - The Leopard and 100 Years of Solitude come to mind - and you can see that Mahfouz flouts the first dictum of fiction writing: Show, don't tell. These hundred pages were a series of about 15 relatively short chapters about the various members of the family, sketching in the back story and the personality "type" of the five siblings, the oppressed wife, the domineering and unfaithful husband, et al. I can't exactly say they're stereotypes, but it feels to me like none comes to life, that each is an authorial idea rather than a rounded personality: the beautiful but aloof sister, the less attractive and therefore jealous other sister, the youngest son who's a rebel just like dad, the oldest son obsessed with women just like his dad, and so forth. But nothing happens! Their characters should be revealed by what they do, not by what the narrator says about them. We are just maybe building toward the first conflict these 100 pp in, as the father, Ahmad, pursues a renowned wedding singer, Zanayba (I probably have these spellings wrong, the proper names are a challenge for American readers), while unbeknownst his oldest son is dreaming about Z's young assistant. (I would admit that the dialog between Ahmad and Zanayba, in which the flirt by taunting each other, was a highlight - reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick.) So Mahfouz won a Nobel prize, largely on the strength of his Cairo trilogy from what I recall, and I know his winning made him a target in Egypt. Truly, I have to wonder why. If this novel is meant to be an expose of the hypocrisy and chauvinism of Egyptian life - the father is a tyrant at home and a gallant wit when he's out every single night drinking with his buddies; the characters mouth Muslim piety but they sin without any compunction - Mahfouz did shrewdly set the novel during World War I (it was published in 1956), so there's always the sense that he's not writing about contemporary Egyptian life - so it's safe for everyone to read and say, yes, this is how it used to be - how far we've come. I don't know - perhaps these characters would grow on me and tensions would mount and drama would build and it would in the end be as grand as War and Peace, but life is short, this novel is long, and I'm moving on.