Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Oooof, marone!
Too bad - it seems quite relevant these days.
Tried to read the unabridged edition of The Three Musketeers. After finding out everything you never wanted to know about the Spanish telegraph system during the 1700’s I gave up.
I can see the dislike of Moby Dick. I liked it, but I found the best way to read it is to skim through the middle.
Re: The Iliad. There’s a prose adaptation for children called Black Ships Before Troy which I thought was very good if you’re interested.
Victor Hugo. The poetry’s really good, but Notre Dame de Paris really illustrates why paying authors by the word is not a good idea. I gave up after realizing I was twenty pages into a description of the cathedral’s door and there was no indication I was coming close to the end of that bullshit.
My bad - I think I was confusing it with East of Eden, thank you for the correction. I must confess I have read neither - I read (and enjoyed) The Grapes of Wrath but it was hard work and I think when I saw East of Eden was a similar size, decided to leave it on the shelf.
I first read it aged about 18, 15 years ago. Not to disagree with your theory, but I am one counterexample to it.
This surprises me - as I recall (though it’s been a while), the plot moves along fairly fast, and indeed is quite gripping towards the end. But I suppose there is a fair bit of exposition/description/poetry that gets in the way.
Some Amazon reviewers do this. Unfortunately, the reviews sometimes get mixed up when a new edition, or worse, a new translation comes out. It can get really confusing at times, but it’s a start.
As for The Iliad, I read it in a French translation, which will be of limited interest here.
I very much enjoyed parts of that book.
You very rarely get to go on such a great drug trip without taking any drugs.
The whole series can be summarized as Hornblower with quadruple the page count. Still, I enjoy it greatly, but yeah, there are slow bits.
Cannery Row and *Sweet Thursday *are both a series of rather short vignettes , and are the antithesis of long, hard slogs. Which indeed, Grapes of Wrath can be. Perhaps you are thinking of East of Eden?
I, too, hated The Great Gatsby in high school. When I revisited it a decade or so later, I actually quite enjoyed it. It seems to me that high school English classes are designed to suck any pleasure you might get from reading a book right out of it. So, elbows, I wonder if you’d have felt any differently about Catch-22 if you had taken that backpacker up on his offer? (I read it as an adult; didn’t love it, but didn’t hate it either.)
For me, in the “tried to read” category: The Bible. Ugh. What a miserable slog. How is this garbage the basis of an entire religion?
Lord of the Flies was my other pain-inducing classic.
I ran into the English teacher who made me read both that and Catcher in the Rye at least a decade later and registered my complaint.
She said yeah, they’re both awful but if you think it’s bad for you I have to talk about them every year.
Put me down for another voice saying “read Catcher in the Rye in high school and LOATHED Caulfield”. Ugh. Actually, basically hated everything I read for English class that year, which included The Scarlet Letter as well.
I also distinctly did not enjoy Great Expectations, which was also high school, albeit a different year.
For classics that I read in adulthood, I found that most of them weren’t very compelling, but the ones I failed to finish out of my random scattering of free eBooks were White Fang and, embarrassingly enough, The Three Musketeers. How I soldiered through Robinson Crusoe and Last of the Mohicans to fail there, I cannot say.
Gonna be the anti-voite for the Hornblower lobby though. I read all the Aubrey Maturin novels with good cheer (Though to be fair, yes, the start of Post Captain is kindof a chore) but the one Hornblower I ever read was…ok? Like, I basically can’t remember anything about it, and it was just a few years ago. I just didn’t form any sort of emotional engagement with it.
Reactions to Catch 22 keep surprising me. In my late teens, I was aware of the fact that its title had entered popular parlance, and that it was regarded as a classic, and so bought it. I had a quick look…then read it as I walked home. Seriously, I walked home from the bookshop, reading as I walked. Got home, lay on my bed, kept reading. Loved it.
A year or two later, as a literature student, I was obviously really pleased to discover it on the American Fiction Since 1945 syllabus, and was amazed to discover that my best friend despised it. Like, really really hated it. I was surprised that anyone did, but a lit student who loved the whole post-war American fiction thing we were doing? It didn’t compute. I still find it weird. I loved it so much it felt like it would be impossible to dislike it as much as that, if at all. My wife eventually read it (because her Dad hated it and she hoped to disagree); she finds it utterly, utterly loathsome too. And then I discover that they aren’t alone!
It’s completely at odds with my entire reckoning of the world. Honestly, it’s like discovering that huge swathes of the population hate comfortable beds or being well fed.
Maybe it was just way too overhyped by the time I picked it up, but I didn’t think the writing was anything spectacular. Combine that with not really caring about the characters and yeah, it’s just not very good.
“Moby Dick” was my white whale. I tried, I really tried, but torturous prose all to describe every random character in the book was too much. Even though I consider “Tommyknockers” King’s weakest work, I still finished it. While I agree that “Fahrenheit 451” wasn’t quite science fiction, I thought it engaging from beginning to end.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, with Sanctuary by William Faulkner a close second.
Same with me. I read Catch-22 when I was a teenager, and was instantly hooked. The absurdity and the irregular chronology can be a bit to get used to (Pro tip: Heller used the number of missions the men had to fly before being rotated home as the book’s clock), but the absurdity gradually morphs into horror; Yossarian’s nighttime walk through Rome at the end of the book is one of the most harrowing passages of literature I’ve ever read.
You can easily skip Post Captain, without missing too much of the story, though you miss a bit of the history of Jack, Maturin, Sophie and Diana.
Another vote for Moby-Dick. I tried to read it again as an adult, twenty years ago, and I completely agree with the earlier comment that each page is good, but the whole is a miserable slog. I was surprised to discover that Melville was capable of lively writing; the scene in which Ishmael describes the cod and clam chowder served at the Try Pots is almost food porn. Still, the interminable prosing on the minutiae of whales, whaling, misconceptions about whales is tedious in the extreme. I can’t read more than about twenty chapters before giving up in despair.
I don’t know why I dislike the book so intensely. It’s probably just that the writer’s style doesn’t work for me.
In sharp contrast, I found Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” to be an excellent read, though one could definitely describe it as “absurdity gradually morphs into horror” as well. They even share the feature of hyphenated titles.
Maybe it’s because of all of the hype surrounding “Catch-22”…as well as it’s bulk. I tried reading it multiple times as an adult and never made it past a hundred pages.
Life’s too short to read literature you despise. But if you’ve never gotten past the first hundred pages, you might have missed the steady drumbeat of horror as the various characters die, or as other, seemingly goofy characters reveal themselves as monsters. But, de gustibus non disputantum est.
Speaking of George Eliot… We had to read Silas Marner in middle school. OMFG, I’m surprised I ever opened another book after forcing myself to wade through that dreck.
But I’m not saying a word about Atlas Shrugged. 