Not only that, but he revised the damned thing and republished it in 1977, twelve years after its initial release. the republication shows his improving abilities as a writer (he had started working on the original twelve years before its 1965 publication), but apparently it’s still as annoying.
I’ve read and actually enjoyed (to varying degrees) most of the books mentioned here, but Atlas Shrugged is basically the “Dianetics” of literature - contrived, stilted, preachy and vile.
I was also forced to read multiple Thomas Hardy novels for high school English and I really wish I hadn’t (although I rather like some of his poetry).
Every man should read Catcher in the Rye twice in his life: once at 15 because Caulfield really understands the curdled truth underlying the thin pretense of civilization adults maintain to justify their own banal lives, and once again in his 30s to discover what a whiny immature little shit Caulfield really is and what a whiny immature little shit he was too at age 15.
A novel written by Balzac (I have blocked even the actual title) , a renowned French author. I tried reading it (for Senior English class, of course) and I HATED it. I finally told my teacher I just couldn’t do it and she claimed it would mean a bad grade and implied I would never get into college if I didn’t read it. I said I didn’t care. Ultimately, it didn’t stop me from getting into college but I never regretted putting it down. SO VERY BORING.
I call that the “Maltese Falcon” effect. The first time I saw The Maltese Falcon, I thought it was a cardboard mashup of every stilted detective-slash-noir cliche ever.
Then I realized that of course it was; it created them.
I agree with many posters about Thomas Mann, but it is not Death in Venice that is really tedious, that at least is mercifully short, not even The Magic Mountain (which is not short at all), if you want to get bored to death, read Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Points of view of an apolitical person, in case somebody ever bothered to translate it into English - which I doubt). And so wrong as wrong can be.
Catcher in the Rye: showed me the meaning of so what? in all its depth. Could have had that easier.
Books I was unable to finish: *Jude the Obscure, Moby Dick *(have not given up yet… since 1990), Wuthering Heights, El Quijote, Sense and Sensitivity.
I did not like One Hundred Years of Solitude at all when I had to read it in school, but when I re-read it on a long railway journey I loved it and have read it perhaps ten times since back to back. That is maybe where my hope for Moby Dick comes from.
I’m a simple man and I dislike things for simple reasons:
Greek classics: Don’t know how to pronounce the names, making the characters unrecognizable. Sorry Xestaphones or Xylophoneatris or Xanaxacryea or whoever! Might want to try “Ann” or “Mary” next time.
Huckleberry Finn: Don’t need 7 ways to spell words, Mark, just one or two will do, understand? The purpose of language is communication and spelling “going” 7 different ways in the same book is not “communication”, it’s “pretension”.
The first time I tried to read Huck Finn, in childhood, the dialogue and spelling were too much for me; but when I was older they didn’t present that much of a problem.
(This might be a book where a good audio version is the best way to experience it, although when I tried to listen to the version narrated by Elijah Wood, I gave up on it because I didn’t think he was doing justice to Twain’s humor.)
Yeah, it was a 9th, 10th grade reading assignment. Just did not care for it - if you’re going to write a book in English, use English! 
Catcher in the Rye: for reasons stated ad nauseum.
Pretty much anything by Hemingway as well. I have to mention his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” just because I hate that title, and that fact that the woman in the story actually utters that sentence during what is supposed a very tense and difficult conversation, and not in an attempt to add levity.
Huck Finn took me some years to appreciate. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was way more up my alley as a young reader. Tom was a slick little SOB, and young me was amused by his antics, especially since I was an extremely well-behaved young man on the outside with a rebellious streak deep in my soul. Somehow, I suppressed the rebel until college.
I only read it as an adult. Never could find a reason to care about any of those people. Maybe it made more sense at the time Fitzgerald was writing it.
Huck Finn would be a lot better if Clemens hadn’t brought Tom Sawyer back into it in the later part of the book. Tom and his games only belong at the very beginning, when Huck is moving beyond all that.
Our family had at home, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; as a kid, I sort of gathered it to be implied that they were a “two-fer”. I read Tom Sawyer aged probably about nine (parentally encouraged thereto); frankly, found it dull. The comedy passed me by, and / or it seemed to me weak. Feeling this way about “Tom”, I had no wish to tackle Huckleberry Finn, which I envisaged would just be “more of the same”.
Not being in the US, nothing by Twain was required reading in my formal education – for a long while, all I “knew” about Huckleberry Finn was that it was supposedly the companion volume of you-know-what… At 19 or 20, I decided that I might as well give “Huck” a go; though I entered in, expecting only boredom. I was surprised and pleased to find it un-put-down-able, and in my perception very different from Tom’s tedious antics – discovered it to be a scathing indictment of attitudes and abuses in the pre-Civil War South; and also, often hilariously funny.
The problem with Holden isn’t that he’s a whiny immature little shit. It’s that he doesn’t understand anything. There’s a big difference between seeing that stuff is phony, and merely calling stuff ‘phony’ because you don’t like it. And Holden just does the latter.
Maybe a total “conversion experience” on my part – conviction by the time I was getting near the end of the book, that Twain could do no wrong as regards this particular work; but I found Tom’s nonsense about pretending that they were heroes on a perilous mission a la Monte Cristo, to free and spirit away the prisoner Jim, wonderful laugh-fodder. (Plus, as per your words above, it being pointed up that Tom is still fundamentally a kid – Huck has been going through a rough initiation into the ways of the adult world.)
By far the most loathsome “classic” I was ever forced to read in school was Chip Delany’s Dhalgren. I didn’t even have the excuse of youth - I was coaching our school’s Academic Decathlon team that year and that was the novel assigned. All of SF to choose from and they picked that steaming pile of crap.
Outside of that one, Dickens could disappear tomorrow and the world would be a far better place.
Very, very true. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, and forgot about that.
The Hobbit by Tolkien. Just an overrated, sprawling, dreary 400 pages.
That pretty much described my response to the first time I watched Citizen Kane.
As for Catcher in the Rye, I never cared for it even when I was a teenager myself. Having grown up in poverty I had a hard time relating to Holden at all and disliked him immensely. I found myself relating better to Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows.
Best thing about Citizen Kane was this Peanuts strip (click on the strip in the upper left):
Lucy: “What are you watching?”
Linus: “Citizen Kane.”
Lucy: “I’ve seen it about ten times.”
Linus: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen it.”
Lucy: “‘Rosebud’ was his sled.”
Linus: “AAUGH!!”
I saw it once, back in college IIRC. It wasn’t bad, IMHO, but I wouldn’t bother seeing it a second time.