"Great Books" that no one seems to like...what are we missing?

[kitap]

@Dancer_Flight

I don’t know if it is considered widely to be a Great Book, but I absolutely could not get through Tess of the D’Urbervilles in high school (IB English). The only assigned book I never finished. My mom even bought me the cole’s notes for it so I could get enough of the gist to fake it.

There was a highly appropriate pithy quote about Thomas Hardy which sparked a thread here: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-thomas-hardy-is-like-eating-a-pillow/508416/6

From what I read of the book (I got a few chapters in before giving it the Dorothy Parker treatment), I agree with Fenris here:

@Fenris

Tess of the Duhuberviles is the single worst thing ever written. It’s like a fart in prose.

And not a silent, odorless fart, it’s like a loud stinky sulpherous fart that destroys one’s appetite in the same way that Tess can destroy one’s love of reading for months.

I hated Tess-the-Character. I hated Hardy-the-Writer for writing about Tess. I loathed our teacher for making us read Hardy’s writings about Tess.

Frankly, we would have been better off reading any generic Harlequin Romance novel–at least the pacing, prose and dialogue would have been improved and the plot would have remained pretty much the same.

-DF

Most of the lit I read in high school was really depressing. Including Tess. And like, why? Poetry was really the lone exception.

But why isn’t there fun stuff to read? Surely reading Thurber’s piece on his college days would be more enjoyable than some depressing short story.