Herman Melville was a hack who was rightly mocked during his life. Only after death were his books forced down the public’s throat as “good”. This was, I believe, some sort of horrible prank which got out of hand.
Billy Budd was sooooo bad I wanted to fake my death and move to another country and start over rather then finish the book for a report.
Dracula. I kind of liked the cheesy, nothing-like-the-novel movies with Christopher Lee so I was happy it was required reading. Sadly, I just loathed that book. It seemed like I was reading it for an eternity.
Also, another vote for Catcher In the Rye. I read it on my own out of sheer curiousity. It is pretty boring and I’m afraid I just didn’t get it.
How about a classic movie or is that OT? The Wizard of Oz bugs me so much. It doesn’t fill me with magical wonder whatsoever - it’s creepy, creepy, creepy! (I’ve never read the Baum novels so I can’t comment on them)
Chalk me up for Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter BLEW.
But HO! Beloved, blessed Pearl!! Shame!! Despair!! Sol…sol…solitude…[sub]ZZZZZZZZZZZ[/sub]
I found Melville’s chapter on whale phrenology to be fascinating 
For that very reason Ulysses is collecting dust on my bookshelf.
I read Catcher in the rye at 13 to see what all the fuss was about, and hated it.
I waited too long, OTOH, to read **The three musketeers. ** I should have read it at age 10. Those musketeers drove me crazy, they acted like they were about 4 years old. Gah.
I really enjoyed Catcher In The Rye.
I’ve read it several times.
The Three Musketeers was gripping compared to the last book in the series, The Man in the Iron Mask. Don’t let the movies fool you; the whole Louis/Philippe thing only takes up the first third or so of a very long book, and ends badly. If you must read Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo is much, much better.
If we’re starting on films, I watched Nosferatu for the first time the other day and giggled through the whole thing. Yes, it’s a triumph of German Expressionist cinema and Max Schreck is truly creepy. Unfortunately, so is the heroine. Also, I think the captions (or titles or whatever they’re called) were translated into English by a non-English speaker, given the strange and stilted language and the consistent misuse of apostrophes. This is a film deserving of a thorough MST3King.
I liked Three Musketeers, but I don’t think the image of them as wonderful, honorable, chivalrous, loyal (ad nauseum) friends is coorect. At least, that’s what I thought of them when I was younger. I read the book a few weeks ago and liked it, but still, they were all pretty childish.
Count me in as one of the “Catcher in the Rye” haters though. Holden is a self-righteous little prick who really needs to get over himself.
I’ll see your:
*Dickens (save A Christmas Carol - agreed, his best work)
*Catcher In the Rye - read it when I was 12, and I couldn’t understand what Caufield was going on and on about, or what was the big deal about the book. I then read it again this year at 28, and thought that I was pretty much right on at 12. I mean, I understand the sort-of groundbreaking-ness (is that a word?), but as to content - yech.
*Middlemarch - otherwise known as my sleeping pill in college. I never made it past the third page.
And raise you:
*Heart of Darkness - dreck - absolute dreck. Good idea, horribly executed.
You ever see “Shadow of the Vampire?”
I am quite amazed at how many people here seem to hate “Moby Dick,” which is, in my opinion and in the opinion of most literary types, probably the greatest novel ever written by an American.
Moby Dick has everything you could possibly ask for in a novel:
Great theme, great characters, beautiful poetic writing, humor, tons of information, etc., etc.
I estimate that I’ve read Moby Dick about 10 times and will continue to read it for the rest of my life.
Of course, I’m not dissing anyone who hates this book; there is no reason to expect uniformity of views on aesthetic experience.
There are lots of “classics” that I find intolerable. Speaking of American lit, I used to enjoy Faulkner, but not any more. I recently tried to read THe Sound and the Fury, but put it down after about 50 pages.
And, I really don’t enjoy those long victorian novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens and so on.
But my pick here is:
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
This is embarrassing to admit, because I know that I am missing out on something important. When I was in graduate school studying literature, I tried to read it, got through the first 2 books, then quit, promising myself that I would finish it “when I had more time.” Since then, I have tried several times, but now I’ve given up. I find lots of interesting and beautiful passages, but it’s just too hard to plow through the boring endless descriptions of occasions that just seem irrelevant to my life.
I read an interview with Harold Bloom who stated that he reads THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORK every single year!!! One reason I feel embarrassed is that I have learned so much from Harold Bloom.
Gravity’s Rainbow.
What a waste. I kept saying “it has to get better.” Nope.
School ruined a number of books for me. Had I read them on my own, I would have enjoyed them, but being forced to read these “classics” made me resent them.
The Great Gatsby
Great Expectations
To Kill a Mockingbird (I read this again out of school, and it was really a fantastic book. Again, proof that reading for enjoyment and being forced to read color experiences).
The Scarlet Letter
The Wave (not a classic, but I was still forced to read it, and gods above it still sucked).
Any number of stories in the readers throughout school (with a few exceptions, like “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Outsiders.”)
Most poetry. And a number of other literary works of epic shit that I’ve blocked from my mind in self defense.
Supposedly the first English translation of Proust was quite poor, and there’s a more recent one that’s better.
Having given up on Proust after reading the first few chapters of Swann’s Way, however, I wouldn’t know.
I have read plays recently that are considered among the classic literature, only because they are depressing. Such the case would be The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman. Both of these just made me want to dig a hole and die…i hate those kind of books. It seems like in order to be a classic, it has to be somewhat crappy.
But those two plays i mentioned have to be the worst i have read in a long time…
Dracula has always intrigued me, but i have never read it.
Sister Carrie by…I don’t remember. Which is a good thing, because if I KNEW who wrote it, I would find their corpse and grow numerous clones of them so I could kill them repeatedly via industrial “accidents”.
Notes from Underground - Dostoyevsky. I’m russian! I’m insecure! Nobody likes me or respects me! So I’ll whine and plot ineffectively for several hundred pages so everyone else can feel my pain and you can hate me, too! And pity me while you’re at it. Please?
Oh yes, and Olesha’s book Envy. See above description of Notes from Underground. Insert more mentionings of “sausage” and a slight possible homosexual undercurrent, and you’ve got Envy!
Old Man and the Sea
Horribly dull. It was the only book I read during school that I just could not finish. Everything else I was able to at least get through, but this piece of crap I just couldn’t.
Gone With the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara must have been the inspiration for that great line from As Good as it Gets:
“How do I write women so well? I think of a man, and take away reason and accountability.”
You got a second on that one. I mean I read it in high school because “It’s only a hundred pages” However of that 50 pages are “Gee the sea looks X today” while that bum is out in his boat. I’m still convinced Hemmingway originally was contracted for a 100 page book, wrote his 50 page story and then padded it like a high school student.(Unless the whole point was that the sea is really really really boring especially if you don’t have a coke and a sandwich.)
I’ll add one though, “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. It’s bad enough that my university wasted my time by forcing me to take a useless foreign language so what happens? I then have to read this absolute piece of excrement, easily the worst book I’ve ever read in either French or English.(I tried to read both versions) I just knew it was going to be an unmittigated abomination when the French chick that ran the course said “it has no plot.” Actually come to think of it I don’t think it counts. The librarian at the local library thought it was a mess too:D