Inspired by a thread asking “What book has everyone read but you?” I pose the inverse question.
What so-called classic book have you read, where you’ve never met another person who has read that same book? Books read for school don’t count.
In my case, that would be Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, by Mary Mapes Dodge.
I get a lot of blank stares for *The Violent Bear it Away * by Flannery O’Connor.
I bet others have read Ivanhoe.
Does poetry count? Idylls of the King, and also by Tennyson, the mention of Ulysses is either mistaken for the novel with a really strange look, or the thought that I am trying to describe Homer.
The Divine Comedy.
All three parts.
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. Great Russian writing. It’s a short novel inspired by things that happened to some of the author’s friends in the Soviet Union.
“Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and The Drama” by The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
Published in 1892.
“Typee” and “Omoo,” both by Herman Melville, and both well-loved by crossword puzzle editors.
“Classic” meaning something that’s on a best literature list somewhere?
I’ve read Hans Brinker (required in grade school), the O’Connor story (was that the one with the unhappy little girl?), and Darkness at Noon.
The only classic I can think of that others may not have read is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
I don’t know anyone else IRL who has read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Also The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
Pretty much anything I’ve read by Beckett.
Well you have now! Oh wait. I’m not IRL. And yet it seems so R here…
I don’t know if this counts but I’ve read Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years. And yet I never read Robinson Crusoe.
And I just read the Kreutzer Sonata.
I don’t meet many people that have read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I’ve read it three times.
I’ve read Frankenstein two-and-a-half times. (The 1/2 time was when it was assigned to me in an English class, and I just needed to refresh my memory about the parts I was writing an essay about.)
Mary Elizabeth Bradley, “Lady Audley’s Secret.” Wonderful 19th-century novel.
Me either, although I just read it last year myself.
I’m ploughing my way through it at the moment. A friend recommended it as one of “the all time great classics”. I can’t say that it’s grabbed me yet.
I read Shelley’s *Frankenstein * a few years ago.
I’ve read Frankenstein several times over the years. I actually kind of enjoy it.
I’m probabl the only person who sought out, and read, Algernon Blackwood’s *The Education of Uncle Paul * (on the recommendation of S.T. Joshi).
How about The Illiad or The Odyssey? Granted I read much of them in the original Greek at school, but I read them both in translation afterwards.
Never met anyone else IRL who has read Martin Chuzzlewit. I’ve read it and damnit, I bloody enjoyed it! I’m a freak. 
Tennyson is one of my guilty pleasures. I’ve read both “Ulysses” and “The Lady of Shalott” and loved both.
Alasdair Grey’s Lanark. Crazy, crazy book - like Lewis Carroll writing his own version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man while possessed by the spirit of Kafka.
Red Harvest is a touchstone for me in a lot of ways, although when I mention it, especially to people who are fans of either Kurosawa’s Version or the several homages/ripoffs of the Kurosawa version, I find that most haven’t heard of it and don’t care. Salon had an article a few months back talking about the troubled history of attempts to make Red Harvest into a film. The copyrights have been difficult to secure, so a number of people have settled on making things similar, including The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing which combines the plot of Red Harvest with that of The Glass Key, making it unique enough to avoid a lawsuit, but still fairly invocative of its sources.
I also don’t know anyone else who has read A Shropshire Lad to speak of it, although my fellow grad students are usually familiar with To An Athlete Dying Young.