All time favorites: The Fountainhead (not for it’s political/sociological aspect, I genuinely like the book), all 5 books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, and Lord of the Rings.
Least favorite: that goofy “Left Behind” series (they really should have put a warning on the cover!) and Atlas Shrugged (about 500 less pages and it would have been better!).
Not prepared to defend what constitutes a ‘classic,’ but:
Favorites: Crime and Punishment, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, East of Eden.
Least favorites: **Lord Jim **(did I miss something?), House of the Seven Gables (it’s Hawthorne - noone to blame for reading it but myself), Fahrenheit 451 (which bravely taught the world that book burning is bad), Lord of the Rings (magical solutions are much more interesting than guts and character).
Favorites:
Everything by Jane Austen
Vanity Fair
Jean de Florette
Nicholas Nickleby
Villette
A Tale of Two Cities
Hate 'em:
The Great Gatsby
Les Miserables
Return of the Native
Everything by Hemingway and Faulkner
I used to adore almost everything written by John Steinbeck, but now I find him misogynistic and soaked with booze.
Like a Lot: The Master and Margarita, Confederacy of Dunces, Lord of the Flies (was assigned it in high school English and had finished reading it before I went to bed that night – it horrified me), To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet
Can’t Stand: In high school my English teacher gave me extra things to read in lieu of my school having any kind of advanced program. I remember that when she gave me back my book report on A Catcher in the Rye she said, “Well, you didn’t like Holden Caulfield, did you?”
I hated Heart of Darkness so badly I could be considered a one-person crusade against its publishing. I hated it SO BAD. If it hadn’t been inside a Norton’s Anthology, I would have burned it. I hated it that much.
I also hated Catcher in the Rye. I could not stand anything about that book. Not one thing.
However, I love To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, most Russian literature, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my favorite book of all time.
Favorites (in no particular order):
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Cap’n Stormfield {etc.} (Twain)
The Good Earth (Buck)*
1984
Several of Shakespeare’s histories (Henry IV i and ii, Henry IV, Richard III)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
If plays and short stories count there are several I could add by Bierce, Hemingway, Borges, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Capote, others.
LEAST FAVORITE (again no particular order)
Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe (I love some of the prose… but it needs to lose at least 300 pages)
Moby Dick- I think I may have liked it better if I hadn’t had a professor who drove all the love of it away (I’m convinced it’s the only book he ever read and so he had to pound every inch of it in lectures)
Romeo & Juliet (if it counts since it’s a play)- some of the most beautiful lines of English lit but I can’t stand the play itself.
*I’ve always wanted to read the sequels to The Good Earth (*Sons *and A House Divided) and they’re finally back in print. Has anybody read them.
Favorite: To Kill A Mockingbird
Least Favorite: The Scarlet Letter
Favorite: Probably Moby-Dick
Least favorite: without a doubt, The Last of the Mohicans
Favorite: War and Peace–having a list of characters and how they’re related to each other in the front of the book helped me enjoy this a lot more than I probably would have otherwise.
Least favorite: Moby Dick–very very boring.
1984: Awesome!
Atlas Shrugged: Kill me now!
Favorites: Ivanhoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dracula, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment.
Least Favorites: The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary
When I was in jr. high and high school, I was required to read a bunch of classics. Hated every friggin’ one of them.
Later, I went back and re-read them. Once I no longer “had” to read them, I changed my tune. Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, 1984 and several others became favorites.
But some didn’t. Frankenstein and Dracula - it still amazes me how two total shitclumps like those managed to spawn some excellent horror movies. But the worst of the bunch was Great Expectations. Oh, OG - my stomach is turning just typing the title.