What's good about these books?

The Little Stranger was v dull really.

I like Frankenstein; I like EM Forster. Couldn't get on with Life Of Pi at all.

Mansfield Park - I do like it BUT I find myself liking the Crawfords more and more with every re-reading.

Balloon slayer - Frankenstein is way cool. All that brooding Gothic stuff, philosophical discussion about the nature of God and hubris, the limitations of science...and she was only 10 when she first wrote the story. Fab.

Oh good, I thought I was the only one bemused by animals eating each other in a boat.

I will defend Need To Talk About Kevin. Was totally riverted by it, that was pre DC though. Captures the ambivalence of motherhood from a position of ignorance, that's how I read it then. Now I suspect I'd just just snap the book shut and tell her He's Just a Baby.

But, sieglinde, she's so bloody virtuous and ghastly compared to Lizzie Bennett or Emma or any of the others. And the man she eventually marries (Edgar? Edwin?) is such a prig. I can see why she might have been considered a wonderful woman when the book was published but the past 200 years have not been kind to her.

I think Howards end is all about snobbery rather than being snobbish, per se.

Life of Pi
We need to talk about Kevin

Oh and The little Stranger most recently

I don't think you get it about Fanny Price (heroine of Mansfield Park, cue smug grin), Fanjo. She's not a wimp or a victim; she the only one who gets what she wants in the whole book.

Howards End, by contrast: just so effing snobbish. Leonard Bast - let's drop a bookcase on his head for Not Knowing His Place.

I liked Villette, but mostly because I used to live in Brussels so I like the setting. If you think it's about a woman dripping around in France you may not have been reading that carefully. But I hate the ending - oh she's going to live happily ever after oh, no she's not because I will kill bloke off pointlessly, or will I?

And the whole set up is insane, woman has tiff with relatives and decides to get on random boat to foreign parts despite having no money, no plan and not speaking any French.

Awww, yeah, give it another go Fanjo. If you don't enjoy it, you can start a thread for all the WH-haters . (I hated Mansfield Park as well but, distressingly, Fanny Price was said to be Jane Austen's favourite heroine.)

lalalonglegs I loathed Wuthering Heights when I was forced to read it. But your description is so fantastic I feel a strange compulsion to give it another try!

Owen Meany - I would rather exfoliate with a cheese grater than read that again.

Mansfield Park - hated the lead character whatever her bloody name was (not very good on remembering detail - a useful trait if you want to read the same book over and over again). Hated the whole thing, found it to be a drip fest. Shared this feeling with my tutor who was irate and told us that Mansfield Park was her favourite book and she related very strongly to the lead character as she had also been a victim of bullying. Oh dear. I felt very guilty and didn't ever quite recover in her class. Remember getting very average marks from her!

Middlemarch - my favourite book, it is wonderful. YY to the poster who couldn't stand it when Dorothea marries Casaubon. Noooooo don't do it woman!!!!

E M Forster is fabulous, CJC. Really shocked to see Middlemarch on this list - it's a wonderfully humane treatment of the limits on people's lives at that time - long but almost the opposite of an epic as it's examining such a tiny corner of provincial, mostly bourgeois life and expectations.

I know Wuthering Heights really divides people but it is wonderful: this tiny, claustrophobic, untamed group of people going beserk with love and rage. It's hard not to get carried along by their obsessiveness, their passion, their nastiness. I do love its lack of restraint, its madness - it's kind of like several years of being a teenager distilled into 200 pages .

Have to stick up for EM Forster (except The Longest Journey - more like The Longest Week of My Life). Howards End is fabulous.

I loved Life of Pi; it was just so utterly silly.

It's the only one I've read by her but I think will look up some others. What is your name about? I feel I'm being thick and missing something obvious??

Thanks Elephants - wow! Nobody I have ever met has read that book except me!

Animal Farm was classified under 'Agriculture' in my school library.

Oh me too Kurri - I just keep my angst to The Smiths now, rather than Hardy! :)

BG - I like TH, but suspect I may be an angst ridden 16 year old, trapped in a fifty year old's body

Agree with the mention of Moab is My Washpot. I don't mind SF, but when I read that book I was constantly thinking he must not have had an editor.

Thank god that age has passed - so I don't have to now?

You have to read Thomas Hardy as an angst-ridden 16 year old for it to be good.

Boo - I did read all the way to the end of Owen Meany but saw the end coming. It was a nice enough ending - but a hell of a load of crap in reaching it!

Glad there are others who didn't 'get' the Life of Pi.
I'm afraid I don't get Thomas Hardy at all. My mum and sister think I'm a philistine because of this (maybe I am?); truth is I have never even wanted to read one. Am I missing something?
Metamorphosis I actually enjoyed, but read it when I was about 16 and really had no concept that it was about anything other than a man turning into an insect! Oh dear. I feel suitably enlightened now .

oo purple, but did you see sean bean playing chatterly's gardener?

What a hot story.