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Original poster

Classic or renowned novels that you didn't enjoy?

164 replies

AlpacaTheBags · 03/01/2022 13:19

I do generally enjoy the classics and I'm trying to read more of them this year but I finally read Jane Eyre last year and I didn't particularly enjoy it.

It took me 4 attempts to get through Pride and Prejudice, though I liked it in the end but I loved Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park and had no trouble getting through them.

I struggle with Hardy and I had to give up on Tess but perhaps I just haven't found the right Hardy for me.

Which classics didn't you enjoy?

OP posts:
allfurcoatnoknickers · 03/01/2022 14:03

@suckingonchillidogs

Didn't like On the Road by Kerouac or Beloved.
I also didn't like Beloved. I know it's sacrilege to say so, but I thought the writing was really pretentious.
MuesliNameChange · 03/01/2022 14:01

Ugh yes like a PP said, On the Road. I've blocked out the details but just recall it being constantly both tedious and exhausting the whole way through

SimonedeBeauvoirscat · 03/01/2022 13:50

Oh yes I also couldn’t get on with Middlemarch.

SimonedeBeauvoirscat · 03/01/2022 13:47

I can’t be doing with Hardy. Or the Brontes.

I love Trollope. Have read all the Barsetshire books, and The Way We Live Now. Also most of Dickens. I know a lot of people find both interminable. Oh, Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga too. And A Dance To The Music Of Time. I guess my main reading-related skill is endurance 🤣

NutCheeseBag · 03/01/2022 13:47

Hate all Dickens except Christmas Carol, all Jane Austen and Catcher in the Rye. I’m a bit of a philistine.

Rogue1001 · 03/01/2022 13:45

100 years of fucking solitude

DuckonaBike · 03/01/2022 13:41

I read Wuthering Heights as a teenager and was really disappointed.

Later on I concluded that I had read it too young and tried again as an adult. Nope, it was still shit. It’s well written of course but the two main characters are just too annoying!

If you want to give Hardy another go, have you tried Far from the Madding Crowd?

Viviennemary · 03/01/2022 13:38

I absolutely loathed Middlemarch. The most boring long winded piece of padded out writing ever. Only managed a couple of chapters. And it's considered by some to be the best novel ever written in the English language. Confused

Laska2Meryls · 03/01/2022 13:37

I love Mansfield Park OP.. but Persuasion is my favourite Austen

Laska2Meryls · 03/01/2022 13:36

Couldnt get on with Henry James .. actually all of them that I have tried ..
Same with Virginia Woolf .. though I did struggle through most of Orlando ..

I also really believe that no one has ever got to the end of Proust's In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past - as the famous Madeleine moment is at the end of an interminable first part ( If I remember , I had lost the will to live by then.. !!)

Loved Middlemarch but hated The Mill on the floss

Love a lot of Hardy - especially The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess and Far from the Madding Crowd ( but some- Jude for example .. so utterly depressing..)

Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and North and South are also both favourites

I read Jane Austen on repeat ..The only one I am not really keen on is Northanger Abbey

PhoboPhobia · 03/01/2022 13:33

I’ve always avoided classics. Not sure why but I don’t particularly enjoy anything set far in the past and also I worry they will be a huge disappointment.

I think the most ‘classic’ thing I’ve read is A Christmas Carol and I do love that.

Original poster
AlpacaTheBags · 03/01/2022 13:29

Sorry, it was Northanger Abbey I enjoyed, not Mansfield Park. . I haven't read the latter yet. I was sitting looking at a copy of Mansfield Park as I typed this.

OP posts:
suckingonchillidogs · 03/01/2022 13:26

Didn't like On the Road by Kerouac or Beloved.

Original poster
AlpacaTheBags · 03/01/2022 13:22

I almost forgot. I really didn't like We Have Always Lived In The Castle or The Haunting of Hill House. I loved some lines from both books but as a whole, they didn't work for me.

OP posts: