Another has occurred to me, about which I feel on more solid ground than re my aversion to Jane Austen (though I find that saliqmind is on a similar page to me, as regards the Divine Jane). I got nowhere with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – concerning which, I have heard a fair few other dissenting voices; though there are those who love it, sometimes passionately. TS was the favourite fiction work of a late uncle of mine (not a particularly big intellectual or arts maven) – he read and re-read it. I endured the first few chapters; and feel no hesitation in writing the work off, for me, as a huge assemblage of drivel and babble, with the occasional weak and flogged-to-death joke – extending over many volumes.
I brought this up with my American Lit. Prof. He was amused but still had to read the damn thing.
I’ve read most of the books mentioned in the thread, but I’ve never managed to get more than about 20 pages into Moby Dick.
Going over the thread, I have to agree about Hemingway. I read him at the same time I learned to appreciated Great Expectations and found his minimalism boring. It’s OK in theory to write a dull character to imply the character is emotionally repressed, but he’s still a dull character.
We by Evgeny Zamyatin. It’s usually thrown into the science fiction curriculum because he didn’t write in English, but it’s really just the same sort of dystopia Orwell and Huxley did better. Why they overlooked the immensely superior Stanislaw Lem mystifies me.
Definitely not a fan of Henry James. Daisy Miller is fine (especially with the joke about Schenectady), but his later work is wordy as hell and he was constitutionally incapable of making a point, dancing around it with phrase after phrase that circled without getting to. I did discover the change was because he started dictating all his work, which make you run off at the mouth.
I actually bought the book because I liked the movie version of “Last if the Mohicans”. So if you didn’t like the movie, maybe there’s not much difference. 
I just had a hard time parsing Cooper’s prose. Long convoluted sentences that didn’t scan easily, so I’d have to stop and go back and read a sentence two or three times before it made sense. A lot. Plus, everything in that Mark Twain critique is pretty much spot on.
I read it in my teens and wanted to slap him.
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I’m always amazed by how many people refer to Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper without getting the joke. What Twain criticizes in Cooper’s works is exactly the things that Twain himself did in his own works (which are quite justifiably considered classics).
Atlas Shrugged, followed closely by Wuthering Heights. Ayn Rand should have been aborted, or possibly strangled at birth.
I’ve seen a movie adaptation of WH, and it was bearable, as so many of the movie renditions of the classics are.
I agree with Blood Meridian, as noted above. What a slog that was. To call it ‘dark’ is like calling Satan ‘mischievous’.
Forgot honorable mention for Stephen King’s Tommyknockers. Oy.
Yep. and Pilgrims Progress.
I kinda liked it, but not as much as some of my friends who thought is was “fanFUCKINGtastic!”
Yeah, got halfway through, thought it was crap and stopped. Bad book.
I gave to agree with Great Expectations. I had to read it in High School and I was an all-A student in HS. I finished the book and I couldn’t re-read it to study it for the test, it was just so horrible. I wanted all the main characters to die and I got a D on the test rather than pick that shitty book up again.
Yes, and giving them Fahrenheit 451 as their “Science fiction” selection turns many off SF. Yes, I know, it is a classic, but it’s not really SF.
I enjoyed Moby Dick, but it can be a slog. It is based upon a real incident, the wreck of the whaler Essex. In The Heart of the Sea, by Philbrick. They made a film too.
Well, yes, some but not all:* 7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the “Deerslayer” tale.*
Twain was true to his dialects and was justifiably proud of it.
And this. We spent a huge amount of time in my senior year English class on it. OK it probably wasn’t that long but it sure felt like it. We analyzed it. We wrote papers on it. We spent a class period watching Apocalype Now. I hate that book. I keep books. Never throw them away and seldom donate them. The Great Gatsby it still in my bookcase despite how much I hate it. (Not sure why now that I think about it.) I gave away my copy of Heart of Darkness.
another book i read is “the secret agent” by conrad because it was supposed to be the first spy book
But it was too true to life … bunch of pseudointellectuals sitting around in dive bars making plots and spouting empty social and political philosophy BS not doing much and the main character was just a hateable thug of bum that didn’t want to do any real work until he had to and when he did he messed it up so badly … and was rightly killed in the end by his wife whom he merely married as a cover …
This is potentially quite a highbrow critique - and for that I apologise - but George Eliot can fuck off.
I also love Moby-Dick and most of Charles Dickens. I’ve made my way through nearly every novel, and am saving Our Mutual Friend for laters.
I admit to not finishing Nicolas Nickelby, his second novel. I started it long after reading Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and his other top-level novels, and Nick just seemed too basic in plot, the characters too flat and dull.
I’m in with you other Hemingway haters. Read The Old Man and the Sea as a teen and disliked it. Read The Sun Also Rises at 20 and loved it. Had no luck getting through A Farewell to Arms of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
If I want minimalism to that degree, I’ll stick with Dashiell Hammet, Hem’s contemporary, who was also using that style but provided great characters and fascinating plots. He also wrote better women.
I also loved McTeague…nasty, nasty book about lovely nasty people…but could not get into Norris’s next novel, The Octopus.
It’s not an original thought, but Journal to Eliza is every bit as bad as its reputation. Never intended to be published, and never should have been.
Someone mentioned DH Lawrence; agreed.
Catcher in the Rye - dear Jesus, another vote for that and another slap for that little shit Caulfield.
No hate for Thomas Mann? Then please allow me. Read Death in Venice because I adored the film. A word of advide: don’t.
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Jane Austen. I simply cannot read her, and can’t understand all the Austen love. I had to read Pride and Prejudice for a college class, and it was a real struggle.
I loved A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, but I couldn’t stand Hard Times or The Pickwick Papers or the other Christmas novels that Dickens wrote after A Christmas Carol. I intend to try some others, someday, like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, but I’m afraid that they may turn out to be like Hard Times.
I tried reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, but simply couldn’t do it.
Mind you, I’ve read many and exotic works from mall cultures and time periods. I’ve read numerous translations of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and just finished up a thick book of translations from ancient Egyptian. But Jane Austen and Cooper are just not for me.