Oh, if we’re bringing science fiction into it: Dune. Ugh. Maybe I was just too young to appreciate it (I think I tried to read it in junior high) but talk about BORING. I’m not sure how far I made it in, but it couldn’t have been more than a few chapters. Never tried again after that.
You know, this is an interesting point, and one that often occurs to me when I slog through old books. I’m often reminded that back in the days when these were written, books were often the only entertainment available, especially in the long winter nights when the farm was dormant. Back then, a book that quickly zoomed through its plot and wrapped up nicely was the last thing you wanted. It would have been a significant expense, and I’d imagine you’d want your money’s worth. Much more valuable would have been the book that you could spend weeks with, killing day after day of interminable boredom in the evenings, before finally arriving at the end of a long, satisfying journey.
Just my opinion, of course.
No accounting for taste I guess. I read it in college, and then purposely took another class later just because Lolita was on the syllabus and I’d have an excuse to read it again.
I’ve also most Dickens I’ve read except for Dombey and Son which probably doesn’t rise to the leve of a Great Book.
My vote is another for Catcher in the Rye, which I hated. Most probably, I made the mistake of not reading it until I was in my thirties. If I had read it at 15 I probably would have appreciated it more.
Anything by Daphne du Maruier (e.g., Rebecca). I don’t care what happens to the characters in her books. Why should I care about these boring, self-absorbed or spineless ninnies? And why so many filmed adaptations of this dreck?
Also, and I know I’m gonna get shredded for this, but I gotta mention, anything to do with Hobbits. Og knows I’ve tried to read those books. Started many times, only to give up in boredom. What is the attraction to this nonsense? Does not compute. (PM me for an address where your mail-bombs will reach me. :D)
Wow, we must not have read the same book, because that’s hardly how Mary is portrayed in my version.
She is a hypochondriac, fancies herself sick when she is displeased but is happy enough to dump her kids for trips to Lyme and Bath, and she has two kids and a nanny…hardly overworked.
Not that’s she evil or anything, but hardly worthy of much sympathy.
Posted to say this. Thank God for Cliff’s Notes.
I’ll never understand why they teach ONLY “classic” books in high school English and literature classes. It turns so many people off reading. It bores lots of students to death. Why do they do it this way? They never teach anything remotely current. If this is an attempt to make some kind of point about important issues being “timeless” or something, it’s bullshit. Just stop. Assign a few books written in the past twenty years. PLEASE. I guarantee your students will be more enthusiastic.
I don’t think it’s entirely that. I really do think that literary taste changed significantly between the first part of the 19th century and the second part. Mark Twain wrote not just once, but twice about James Fenimore Cooper’s literary style., and Twain was living in a time devoid of TV, radio, motion pictures, and other such diversions. He grew up during Cooper’s active years. If he could so firmly reject Cooper, then something more was at work.
It wasn’t until I tried to interest MilliCal in Edgar Allen Poe that I realized that Poe was similarly wordy, using a surpluds of words where a ouple would do, using quaint alternative words in unusual substitution, using circumlocutions – precisely the “crimes” Twain accused Cooper of. (MilliCal, like her parents, reads voraciously. But she still won’t read Poe) Other period authors, like Washington Irving, do the same thing.
I’m sure there are plenty of folks who preferred the wordier style (and still do. Somebody has to provide the demand that keeps Henry James in print), but it seems clear to me that prose generally got more streamlined and less formal by Twain’s day, and has remained that way.
In my AP English class in high school, we were assigned pairs of books, a classic book, and then a modern book with a similar theme. It was very interesting to then compare the two.
For instance, we read *King Lear *and then Jane Smilely’s *A Thousand Acres *(which is a retelling of Lear, so maybe not the best example.)
Most philosopy books.
Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and G.W.F. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” ought to marketed as sleep aids.
Teaching “Twilight” would certainly get 14 year old girls more enthusiastic, but I don’t think it would be doing the kids a service.
LOL. Is “Twilight” the only book that was written in the past 20 years?
All the hate for Melville is breaking my heart.
I’ll throw in all of Cormac McCarthy’s work up until the truly great Blood Meridian. Really terrible stuff.
One thing my AP teacher did was give us a list of classic books and allow us to choose something to read from the list. It allowed us to read stuff that she wasn’t allowed to teach due to thematic elements, and it allowed us to avoid the stuff we hated. I chose Catch-22 (LOVE.)
Of course, for the first half of the year we had to read crap we hated. I wish kids were given a little more leeway in lit classes. I think it would definitely make a difference for the kids’ interest in reading.
Depends, we moved back to the US when I turned 5, and pretty much at that point my sister got diagnosed with leukemia. All I really remember is her going from home to hospital, being cared for pretty much entirely by the nanny while Mom an Dad were gone - dad to Vietnam, my mom to stay near the hospital that she was in. Mom and sister would come home, then she would get sick and they would be gone again, then everybody was home, both grandfathers and my grandmother were there, my uncles and their families and a big party at the house where there was no music or presents. We got told to sit down and behave a lot, and not to bother people for the year or so it took from dx to grave. My brother got pretty disruptive for a few months, and I had an imaginary playmate that we are not going to discuss here, but it was the apparent ghost of my very dead great grandfather.
Yes, peaceful death can be very disruptive and traumatic to kids, adults tend to tell us to sitdown and shut up, and really do not answer questions about terminal illness and death, leaving us to wonder when it is our turn to get sick and die. Just because there isn’t blood and screaming does not mean it isn’t traumatic.
That’s Thomas Wolfe. I read that and liked it in college, but have no recollection why. If I read it now I might hate it (kind of like I enjoyed A Secret History in college and found it execrable on re-reading).
I enjoyed the first bazillion pages of Proust, but once you put it down it never gets picked up again. I think I left him lounging in bed, ill, laboring under a delusion of love for some girl with a French name.
Ulysses I finished on try #5 and loved it. I could write a whole essay on what made that fifth reading different, but whatever the case it ended up being worth the work.
Oh! I just remembered one I hated that I read for book club. It was a book with only a few characters, but every one of them seemed like a bad stereotype to me. It was something called The Remains of the Day. Yeah, that’s right Kazuo, I’m talking to you.
These classic bashing threads always depress me. 
Until,
…sweet validation!
I’m with you. I can’t recall a single word of it, and I know I read it.
Actually I know it seems dated but my favorite adult Heinlein is still The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
You know, some of his juveniles are pretty good, Podkayne of Mars and The Rolling Stones are pretty good.
I’ve just read through the list of 100 classics, I doubt I’ve read close to half of them but it’s reassuring to agree with so many of the entries. Anything by Margaret Atwood, Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (tho’ not* Lola*)
I have read and enjoyed Cervante’s Don Quixote.
I know I enjoyed reading Charles De Lint’s books, but minutes after putting them down I can no longer separate the plots or characters from any of his other books.
Heinlein, again I enjoyed at the time, but the Lazarus books left my conscience feeling a little … sticky, as though I’d spilt something nasty and hadn’t cleaned it all off.
Richard Bach, I cannot separate the man from his writing. How often do you dump a woman for daring to age or have your kids, pick up with a pretty young thing and still call it spiritual enlightenment?
I tried re-reading The Lord of the rings, but couldn’t make it through the first chapter. That wasn’t a fun read, dry and pompous, how could I find it so fascinating at fifteen?