This far down and no one has mentioned Hemingway?!? 
I admire his prose but find most of his stories deadly dull and self-centered, especially The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. They’re ridiculously easy to parody.
I have read Moby Dick several times, but I have also quit more than once on the chapter describing all the different kinds of whales in great detail.
If you get to that chapter, know that the story picks back up in the very next chapter.
Like Victor Hugo, Melville’s long descriptions are a primary purpose of the book. In the right hands, a description of grass can be thing of unique beauty worth savoring.
I decided that the whale was a metaphor for the book’s plot, which remained mostly submerged beneath the calm waters of the book’s chapters, and I was Captain Ahab, hunting that plot desperately and in vain.
Unlike the Captain, I abandoned the hunt before it destroyed me.
I remember a chapter entirely about a rope or line on the ship. I did not enjoy reading Moby Dick (on the other hand, Billy Budd was tolerable, though we thought it obvious that the title character was being eroticized). Nor did I like the novels of Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen. I liked Charles Dickens’ novels (particularly A Tale of Two Cities), though he seemed to be padding for length. (His novels were serialized in magazines and he was being paid by the word, so perhaps.)
Yeah, and even where he describes the end of the ship in excruciating detail right down to the foam circling over it’s grave, there’s an epilog where he reviews stuff you might have missed.
Nice take on Catcher in the Rye. Likewise at about 20 I used to think that Nietzsche was Really Profound Stuff…
One thing I’ve found is that a lot of “classics” are great once you get into them, but slow to get to that point. So a trick I use is to bring them along with me when I’m traveling, and thus will have long stretches of time with nothing better to do. If I spend five hours reading because I’m on a plane and what else am I going to do, then I force myself to get to the good parts.
Of course this doesn’t always work. Take Hemingway, for instance: Maybe it’s great writing, but what does it matter? Nothing ever happens. People exist until they die, and then they don’t exist, and the world doesn’t care.
Add another non-fan of Great Expectations. What a slog. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities.
I churned (voluntarily!) through a lot of classic literature in my teens. Another one I recall as being a drearily dull experience was Two Years Before The Mast. Six months would barely have been tolerable.
Not only did I like Two Years Before the Mast, but I liked Five Years Before the Mast even better! (Different author, similar premise).
What are we missing?
In Moby Dick, I believe, it’s that individual chapters can be read as free standing essays. Some examples:
Chapter 37 is a good read and worthy of meditation alongside “To be or not to be…” and the “Man in the Arena”.
Chapter 89 on the law and society even has a bit of humor.
Chapter 96 “The Try Works” is a technical description of the dangers of maintaining a large fire on a wooden ship in mid ocean, and how the men doing it appear like demons with spears dancing before the flames.
I read them like they are short, short stories.
Silas Marner - What I am missing is what was I supposed to learn by reading the book?
As an adult I have revisited some classics and found that they were just over my head when I was a student. Age and experience are an aid to understanding. Now I can even make it through Conrads’ Victory. But, Silas Marner - what am I missing? What’s in there of value that I should have mined?
I went to a small school full of goombahs desperate to graduate (or drop out) to go work alongside their fathers at the factory, along with the typical middle class kids and one or two ‘brains’. We were assigned Heart of Darkness - meaning, copies were passed out with the order: read this book. … No one, no one could make head or tails of it. We got no discussion, no help with it, no Cliff notes or internet then. … turns out nobody read the foul thing. NOBODY. So they had to give us an alternative selection, one of two. I think we picked A Separate Peace, also tiresome, but fairly relatable to high school students.
That’s the thing with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Someone once said that when you get to a certain point in the book, it’s as though great bells begin to sound, and solemn music begins to swell up.
The first chapter or two are a hurdle to get over – but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the whole book is like the first chapters. It covers the full range of human experience and human emotions in a way that’s unique in any novel.
War and Peace can be laugh-out-loud funny, bitterly satirical, deeply moving, profound, angry, tragic, despairing, optimistic, spiritual, gross, and simply warmly and subtly human. Tolstoy manages to get inside the minds of completely different characters with completely different values and outlooks on life. No other author except Shakespeare does that, and Tolstoy does it in novel form rather than in poetic plays.
In almost all books, the characters, both heroes and villains, are reflections of the author’s individual worldview. In Tolstoy the characters are like real, fully three dimensional people, covering almost the full spectrum of human life.
Someone upthread mentioned having to read Shakespeare plays in school. Someone pointed out that the plays are meant to be performed, not read, so they might be better understood if you listened to or watched a performance.
I think there are a couple categories of “Great Books” that no one seems to like:
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Books that are not only ‘great’ but legitimately good reads if given the chance. This is of course subjective. Per the OP’s example ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, I too was assigned to read it in a High School AP English class, and I dreaded it, thinking it would be a miserable slog. But I loved it, and I afterward I devoured just about everything else Steinbeck wrote.
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Books that are considered ‘great’ but are challenging to read, and anything but enjoyable to all but the most determined masochists (again, subjective). I’d say this would include ‘Ulysses’ and everything Faulkner wrote.
On a side note, I used to be a much more avid reader of ‘great’ novels in my late teens and 20s, but something changed along the way. I went through a Dostoyevsky stage, first voluntarily reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ and enjoying it very much, eventually moving on to the ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, Dostoyevsky’s ‘War and Peace’-style magnum opus. I very much enjoyed that too.
But then years later I tried reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ and I just couldn’t get through it. Same with ‘Moby Dick’ a few years ago, though I did enjoy what I did manage to read, to a point. Is it because I had a full-time job, a family and responsibilities by then, and I just no longer had the mental space to get through ‘great’ novels? Or did my formerly young, plastic brain harden up and fossilize?
I didn’t think Camus’s novel was that bad.
I think maybe the better translators should be given much more credit. You hear about the poetry of some Russian writer, but it’s moot if it’s being translated by some educated piece of wood.
Exactly what I came in to say. Holden has got to be the whiniest little fuck in all of Great American Literature.
Reading is a skill developed over a lifetime. We present these works to kids and expect them to see the greatness in them, but they don’t have the experience to truly appreciate them. Sometimes you have to read them for the story, sometimes the language, sometimes the history.
Catcher would be a good example of reading for the language (the story was certainly crap). Grapes would be reading for history (the story and language were mostly just okay, but the picture Steinbeck painted of the depression and the dust bowl was striking). Tolkien would be reading for the story (his writing could be stilted and he rambled, but damn what a story!)
Occasionally, you’ll get a Shakespeare, particularly with a Romeo and Juliet or a Macbeth, who excels at all three.
An excellent point, and I think one of the reasons why books that some people love, others find tedious.
In general, I don’t think there are many “‘Great Books’ that no one seems to like.” There are plenty of “Great Books” that a lot of people dislike, but you can almost always find other people who love and appreciate those same books.
And I think that this is partly because different people want to get different things out of the books they read; and partly because different people bring different concerns, and life experiences, and skill sets (including, for example, that reading speed thing that @Melbourne mentioned) to the books they read.
From a comic essay I once wrote titled “Help Stamp Out Literacy”:
"In some cases, aversion therapy can be helpful. Forced book reports on “War and Peace” and “Moby Dick” can yield lasting immunity.