That is a cast-iron ballbreaker of a book. Felt painful in a way some of the more difficult modern writers can be, although there is nothing avant garde or explicitly challening about the style IIRC.
Generally I’m pretty well-aligned with established literary ideas of what the canon looks like - if something’s considered great then I may not love it, but at a minimum I’ll think it’s good and worth reading. The one exception I can think of is Nabakov’s Pale Fire, just thought it was dreadful - mannered, tediously clever and unprofound.
Happy to be told I’m wrong and need to go back and re-read it, it’s a deep structure and I could have missed several major ideas. Or if you told me it was hugely influential and deserves respect, I’d take that on board. But one thing I can never accept is that it’s a funny book. Jesus Christ it was the Dad-joke of high literary comedy, like seeing a stand-up comedian full on bombing on stage.
Pretty much any American writer (poetry, essays, novels, whatever) before Twain. I’m sure that’s more my problem with the general writing style of that era than anything I hold against them personally.
Dickens irritates me because his works are so obviously padded - but he was paid by the word, so what the heck.
I loved it (as in I wanted to read more, not that I liked the characters) until I figured out who John Galt was, at which time I lost any desire to continue on.
Oh, yeah, I’m another one who has no clue what the big deal is supposed to be about Catcher in the Rye. Holden tries to accomplish nothing, and he succeeds.
Many of mine have already been listed, such as Catch 22, Wuthering Heights, and Ulysses. One very recent example for me: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The narrator does nothing but hitchhike across the country, meet with his friends, have drinks at bars, etc. In spite of it all, there was nothing remotely relatable about the characters, and I gave up after 40 pages.
I liked “Portrait of a Lady” and “Washington Square” was all right. But Henry James actually thought his writing was improving in his later years (all evidence to the contrary, IMO).
More George Eliot hate from me. I had to study The Mill on the Bleeding Floss for two years for A level English Lit. Such a tedious writing style. Eliot cannot just show you a thing and she cannot tell you about it without going to great lengths to tell you what to think about it as well. So much misery piled upon the bright little girl protagonist until she is a destroyed young woman.
Jane Austen. What others have said plus she is really really spiteful. She never met a person she couldn’t snark about and she’s not as funny as she thinks she is.
A Death in Venice is the one I came in to mention. I never got past page 29 because I literally kept falling asleep. Had to do Cliff notes to pass the exam.
I don’t know… I read it when I was 16, and I remember thinking he was entitled and something of a dick. It certainly did not resonate with my 16 year old experience.
And I agree with Chronos- but extended. A lot of the books we read in high school just didn’t GO anywhere, or worse sometimes everything just turned to shit for the people in the book. And in a few choice ones (Sons and Lovers), both happened.
I actually liked the stuff like Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight, because they actually had stories, unlike a lot of the other stuff we had to read.
I would also climb on the Holden Caulfield hate train…I think I was about 18 when I read it and it did nothing for me. Maybe I wasn’t disenchanted enough or something…
Ulysses is another one- I guess to be fair, I only read an excerpt assigned to us by my college English teacher but it involved a bowel movement and a bunch of other literal bullshit. Maybe I would not have had that reaction except the teacher had try to convince us that reading it would be a life changing experience.
Oh! When I was in the 7th grade, we were forced to read “Shane.” This was our introduction to concepts like symbolism (“what does the dad’s struggle with the stump represent?” “No, Kevin, it doesn’t represent his desire to get the stump out of his yard. And quit using that language in my classroom.”).
Loved the class. It was that teacher, Miss van Osdel (she of the polio brace on her leg), that made me realize that reading for fun was okay. She had us read a little bit of every genre. I had to read “Shane” and “The Hobbit” and others. Still love “The Hobbit.”