Classic or renowned novels that you didn't enjoy?

Moby Dick, so tedious!

I've read very few "classics". But those that I have managed to finish, I have enjoyed. So, my favourites are Pride and Prejudice; Northanger Abbey; Jane Eyre; The War of the Worlds; The Woman in White; The Moonstone; David Copperfield; The Lord of the Flies; Brighton Rock.

I've attempted to read many others but have given up. I've never managed to finish anything by Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy or Emily Bronte and have only ever read one Dickens. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was another one that I tried twice but it failed to engage me.

At school when I was about 8 my teacher forced very strongly encouraged me to read Children of The New Forest. I was quite bright and an able reader but I remember it being very tedious , boring, and quite a trauma. It seemed to take forever to get through it.

Exactly the same happened to me, only I was 11 and the book I was forced / encouraged to read was Great Expectations. Such a slog. I thought I hated Dickens until I had to read A Tale Of Two Cities at uni and loved it.

These threads always go heavy on Wuthering Heights and Catcher In The Rye, but I love both of those!

I did Wuthering Heights for both O and A levels, so I've read it about six times, and can confidently say that I hate it.

I love Austen and a variety of Victorian novels, but have never really got on with Dickens. I actively hated Hard Times which I had to study at school because of the baffling anti-union plot.

I've also tried a few times to read Ulysses but never got past page 3. I found my eye was just moving across the page but my brain was thinking of something else entirely, like what to have for dinner.

I adore a good classic novel but I found Middlemarch very heavy going and dull. I wouldn't read it again.

I found Don Quixote funny at times but less than fabulous.

Jane Eyre is my all time favourite - I guess I also read it at the right time iyswim which I think is an important factor.

I loathed The Goldfinch- tedious and in need of a MASSIVE edit.
Midnight's Children - never got past page 20.
Don't really like Dickens but love Hardy and Austen.

I really disliked Catcher in the Rye too. I read somewhere that introverts don't like that kind of book, where you're inside someone's head looking out.

I didn't like Dostoyevsky, but that might have been to do with having to read them for a course. I particularly didn't like the way that everyone had different names, I got quite easily confused. But then later I thought that it must also be a nightmare for non-native English speakers to read some authors as we do the same with a few English language names where the formal name and the nick name are not obviously related, like Richard/Dick, Sarah/Sally or Margaret/Daisy.

Ooh here’s a controversial one: I absolutely hated I Capture The Castle which I think judging by previous threads is one of MN’s most widely loved novels. Anyone else or just me?!

I also hated On the Road, as well as anything from the Beat Generation.

Classics wise I dislike Dickens, except for the excellent Tale of Two Cities. Jane Austen I used to like when I was younger but find it hard to plough through nowadays. I agree re Middlemarch, I think I made it to chapter 3. Hardy I find unremittingly depressing, all his protagonists are so unlucky and seem to meet unpleasant fates. I don’t think there’s one book with a happy ending. I ploughed through Far from the Madding Crowd after watching the film on telly in my teens and read Tess and Jude the Obscure at a later age and vowed never to read another. So grim!

Anything by the Brontes is usually fairly bleak, although I enjoyed Villette, probably because it’s not set in a cold and draughty house somewhere and the tone was a lot lighter. Jane Eyre I detest, which I attribute in large part to having to do it for O level all those years ago.

Foreign literature wise Dostoevsky I can’t bear, Milan Kundera I could read to a point then he just got boring. War and Peace has far too many characters. I made the mistake of putting it down halfway through to go travelling, when i came back I couldn’t remember who was who anymore. That said I loved Vikram Seth’s aSuitable Boy because of the plethora of characters, probably because they were a lot more fun than Tolstoy’s.

I find the language of the Brontes and Dickens too long-winded to get through. I persisted with Middlemarch and enjoyed it eventually, even though it is long-winded at times.

Some other writers of the same period did write straightforwardly though, often those with a scientific education.

Wuthering Heights’ popularity has always baffled me. Confusing, repetitive plot. Overwrought characters. Everyone has the same names.

I'm not sure I've read any classics
At school when I was about 8 my teacher forced very strongly encouraged me to read Children of The New Forest. I was quite bright and an able reader but I remember it being very tedious , boring, and quite a trauma. It seemed to take forever to get through it. My poor dad (who had the patience of a saint ) had to explain almost every other word, and I think even he lost the will to live by the end of it.
I actually think that put me off reading any sort of classics or "weighty" material.
Now I generally read chick lit when I go on holiday. I probably only read about 4 or 5 books a year if that

I’m afraid Atwood is on my Life’s Too Short pile. Haven’t watched the series either.

If we have another lockdown this year I am considering filling the Russian gap in my reading: War & Peace, Life & Fate …. Maybe even Anna Karenina if I get that far. Last year I did 1920s & 30s English authors.

Wuthering Heights - have never managed to read it.

I rather like Jane Eyre, but I think I first read it rather too young as I found it hilarious, so melodramatic, and the amazing coincidence of her stumbling over her 'cousins'.

Hated The Great Gatsby, so boring and went on and on, even though it’s a relatively short book.

Ooh and The Cazalet Chronicles ...
I think that I just love living in the past!

I love Trollope's Barsetshire and Palliser Novels . Also The Way we Live Now is brilliant
I also love that he worked for the postal service and produced all his work in his spare time

Oh yeah, I disliked Catcher in the Rye too. Probably read it too late - mid twenties, so over teenage wangst

I can't abide anything by Jane Austen....she's vastly overrated imho. As are the Bröntes and George Eliot.

Russian literature leaves me cold. I really wanted to love Anna Karenina.....and I have tried lots but never make it past the first couple of hundred pages. Even the Master and the Margarita I find hard going.

I don't understand the hype around The Great Gatsby - it was ok, but nothing to rave about.

I don't enjoy Victor Hugo - Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame have both been abandoned by me three times now!

I do love Hardy (Tess is my least favourite, try the Return of the Native, The Trumpet Major or the Mayor of Casterbridge.....I think they are the most readable)

I much prefer modern classics to Victorian and earlier literature though.

I found Wuthering Heights frankly disturbing at times, and that together with parts of the other Brontë works made me wonder what on Earth was going on in their lives.

Couldn’t read it again.

Oooh, I took four attempts to read Jane Eyre before leaving it for 20 years Wasn't particularly blown away by it then, either.

Couldn't stand Wuthering Heights, though to be fair I didn't actually get into the story because I was so pissed off by the bloody stupid multi-layered narrative conceit (ffs em, just use a god's-eye narrator! nobody cares!)

Quite enjoyed Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though again the narrative conceit was ridiculous (those sisters really should have met a few more people, if you ask me).

For some reason I took three attempts at Sense and Sensibility. Never worked out why because I enjoyed it.

Read an abridged version of Oliver Twist when I was about 12, and didn't like it much. Since then the only Dickens I've read is A Christmas Carol - which I did quite enjoy - and bits of the Pickwick Papers, which were mildly entertaining but didn't really hold my interest.

Eventually got round to reading War and Peace in about 2005. When the TV series came on I realised that all I could remember was the thing about the date confusion and the fact that it was quite normal to be addressed by any variation of one's given name. Enjoyed the series but when I recently considered reading it again I discovered that I didn't want to: didn't like any of the men except the father, didn't like the suggestion that you a man can achieve purity and simplicity by marrying it, fed up of couples who first meet when he's an adult and she's a young teen.

Discovered 15 years after reading Lord of the Rings - when we listened to the radio adaptation - that I hadn't actually finished it. Somewhere in the bleak grey stoniness of the bleak grey stones of the bleak grey stony landscape of bleak grey stony Mordor I'd obviously given up. [Last time I used this phrase my son rolled his eyes and said "Mum, it's about half a page! ...despite having (against my advice) read it at eight, three years younger than me and not as advanced a reader anyway, he devoured the lot.] Since then lots of people have said they thought Eowyn was hard-done-by having to make do with Faramir instead of Aragorn; but I thought that - a Real Proper Romance with a Real Proper Person, both of them starting to heal on the inside as well as physically - was the best part of the book.

The Handmaid's Tale - well I'm torn. This is what I wrote at the time:

You all know the premise. This is an author whose prose flows over me, like Harpur Lee or Kit Whitfield, and as such I loved reading the book. I liked the fact that Offred was not Moira, or her mother, or Ofglen, or even the previous Offred. Possibly I suspect I would be very similar. There was a lot of sororital love in the book.

The world-building was better than the plot.

I did feel that there was a bit too much detachment in the description of the high-emotion parts. Possibly this was intentional - it is supposed to have been noted in significant retrospect, and there's some musing on the act of memory and creation - but the last part, which is actually meant to be the academic detachment, is a little bit of a caricature of that (and no, you can't make it seem less so by adding the note laughter).

Wish I'd read it thirty years ago, when the film came out and I thought "oo, that sounds interesting"