I hated Shakespeare in high school. Loved Shakespeare in late college/post college years.
Not sure why it works that way sometimes.
Maybe it was a woman I was interested in who liked it? I dunno…might be. I really do not remember.
For me, that was one of my HSC (year 12) texts, as was Catch 22.
Viscerally loathed both. Saw nothing of merit in either, had no buy in to any character. When luck had it I needed to write final essays on both of them. I almost failed English for my sins.
Decided to read them both again in my mid 20s for reasons beyond my ken. Loved them both. Read Catch 22 in two days. Put the book aside and 12 months later read it at more leisurely pace. Brilliant.
I think Tolkien was un-paralleled at world-building.
But, for many, a forest is a forest is a forest. No need to go on about it. Tell us our heroes are in a forest and be done with it.
But, to Tolkien, that forest might have had a background all its own and he’d tell you about it.
The universe/world itself was a character.
Hemingway generally, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, in particular. Dull, dull, dull.
Steinbeck, however, is a different story. I enjoy just about everything he ever wrote, including the previously-mentioned Grapes of Wrath,
To each his own, I guess.
Not sure if this is considered a “great book”, but I absolutely hated The Sound and The Fury. In a critique of the class, I said the sound was a yawn and the fury was having to pay (whatever it was) for the book. Wasn’t I clever?
I honestly don’t remember anything about it - no surprise considering how long ago this happened - but at the time, I hated it with a white-hot hate.
I’m rather surprised at how few “great” or typical pieces of literature we had to read in high school. So often, people will be talking about this or that book and while I’m familiar with the title and maybe the general story, it wasn’t one that was in my curriculum. Wonder why?
This would be my choice. Read it first at like 35. Hated it. Yeah, didn’t like any of the characters, but didn’t think they were interesting either.
I picked up a copy of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” at a booksale, and had read several chapters when I saw a note on the cover I had missed: Abridged. I felt so betrayed.
So I went online, and discovered that there are multiple translations. I read some parallel excerpts and found that some were better than others. I selected and ordered one in particular (notably called “Notre Dame De Paris”) and started over. I discovered that I enjoyed reading it far more than the first one.
So for translated works in particular, the translator may have as much to do with your enjoyment as anything.
I have attempted “Moby Dick” on at least three separate occasions, and have never made it through the entire novel yet. The thing is, I can’t really explain why. I’ve read, and enjoyed, plenty of 19th-century fiction, and I’ve loved plenty of books that are slow-paced.
I do think the format messes with my head a little. I think on the next attempt I will try it reading every other chapter (the “story”), and then go back and read the interstitial chapters about whales and whaling. Maybe that will help. 
Silas Marner.
I have read Moby Dick twice and retain my copy for reference. It is a great book, but I wouldn’t condemn anyone else to reading it.
The OP asks “what are we missing”. I believe that is well expressed up thread. It’s a matter of timing and experience.
I have never understood why I was subjected to Silas Marner.
Melville writes, in the book, that he had the same opinion. Moby Dick is more of a writers’ notebook of stuff that he is going to put in a book some day but never gets around to it.
I agree that Steinbeck is a great writer, but he’s way too depressing for me to “enjoy”. See also: Cormac McCarthy, who is very much in the same vein.
My senior (high school) year English teacher was a huge Thomas Hardy fan and forced us to read several novels including an intensive dissection of The Return of the Native. I will never ever read another Thomas Hardy novel again, so well done there on your teaching approach, Mrs W.
I was thinking about Catcher in the Rye the other day, which a lot of people seem to hate. I’m of the view that everyone should read it twice in their lives; once at 15, to be able to understand that Holden is a deep-thinking nonconformist whose youth allows him to see the fundamental flaws in society and its expectations of him; and once at 35-40, to understand that Holden is actually a naïve, pretentious and self-absorbed little shit who doesn’t understand anything about the world he thinks he knows deeply.
I greatly enjoyed Grapes of Wrath, I’ve read it twice. The final scene is among the most breathtaking in all of literature.
Ulysses is best read with some guidance. I took a course and read it along with others, so we had some discussion. I liked it, but felt it could use some editing (which opinion infuriated the professor).
Faulkner is rewarding, but takes work. I’ve read As I Lay Dying, Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and something else I’m forgetting.
I agree on Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, difficult and unrewarding.
The worst novel I ever read was Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Avoid it like the plague.
We need a new cliche now that we’ve discovered that a large percentage of the population don’t avoid plagues.
I had the same reaction when I read it in high school. When I had to reread it later, I recognized it as a classic. Dickens was doing some amazing things with the narrative and especially the characters.
I think the problem is that many classics require more life experience than most teenagers have.
That’s certainly true. I read War and Peace in the great translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude* and it still remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. But I find other translations unreadable.
*Available on Gutenberg
I had to read it at school, and then again in at university. But if you ask me what it was about, I can’t tell you. It left no impression on my mind, except that it was unutterably dull.
One chapter begins with a long description of a ship’s crow’s nest before finally admitting that, while that’s a crow’s nest, it’s not the one on the narrator’s ship. It then describes the narrator’s ship’s crow’s nest, then talks about other things people stand on, then talks about other things that other things stand on.
That chapter broke me.
Soon afterwards, I reached a chapter about the color white, and I noped out of there.
I read Great Expectations voluntarily as a teenager. I liked it until the end. This is how I remember it:
A young orphan named Pip is befriended by a man who promises to give him great wealth. The story follows Pip as he grows up, always depending on that future wealth which is repeatedly delayed for one reason or another right until the very end where the old man dies and it becomes clear the wealth was always a fantasy. It was the first book I remember reading that didn’t have a happy ending.
In retrospect I expect if I read it now, all that would have been clear much sooner to me, but at the time I was not as cynical as I am now.
I was so disgusted I’ve still never read David Copperfield or many other Dickens classics.