Classics you couldn't finish

@Footle I'm on the younger end of Gen X (so ancient, now we're up to Alpha!) Despite my Dickens antipathy I very much enjoy many older novels and don't like much contemporary stuff. I definitely prefer to read pre-2000 in most cases.

Other authors I've liked over the years include Agatha Christie, Elinor Glyn, P G Wodehouse, Mrs George de Horne Vaizey, Victoria Holt, Jilly Cooper, Tove Jansson. And some of the vintage Mills & Boon writers like Anne Mather and Charlotte Lamb. Plus a lot of childhood stuff like Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl (his adult stories are something else!), Nicholas Fisk.

Anything you like/recommend? Or advise steering well clear of?!

@istara , I'm old and have similar feelings about the same books. I'm wondering what sort of age you are. I was definitely out of step with people my own age.

Possibly because Dickens was one of the first soap writers I think, or so I read once. For stuff like Bleak House he got paid in instalments so had no immediate incentive to wrap it up, as chapters went out in magazines.

It’s an interesting point. I do sort of agree. But…I firmly believe in the canon. Just because I don’t like something, that doesn’t mean it isn’t great. It just means I’m not bright or perceptive enough to understand it. I agree with Harold Bloom on this.

Also, I read for more than simple entertainment. I want wisdom, guidance, comfort, connection, beauty, etc. The classics are classics for a reason. The brightest, sharpest minds of every generation have admired Homer and Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton. And if you commit yourself to them, and plug away even when it’s hard, they will repay you.

Loathe all Dickens.

Loathed Middlemarch.

Loathed Jane Eyre and can't get past the first chapter of Wuthering Heights.

LoTR took me three attempts to get through but I did eventually manage it. It was okay but not as fun as The Hobbit.

Love Wilkie Collins.

Love all Austen.

Lol, yes @clowniform . I thought after posting that I had misfired a bit in relation to your post. I realised after I hit post that I absolutely agree that the Abrahamic existential wailing () is massively less readable than the gripping Gwendoline bits. I think your post just reminded me of something completely different, a really silly rewriting of the novel 'from Gwednoline's standpoint', by someone who evidently thought they were achieving the same sort of progressive recentering of Eliot's novel as the Wide Sargasso Sea had achieved for jane Eyre. But who in fact just wrote some sort of romantic bilge that was waayy less progressive than the orininal novel, which does centre Gwendoline thoughout because it centres her (or eliot's) authorship of her own redemption via a proxy messiah.

I think I have a medical issue known as HT-DDRS (hair-trigger Daniel Deronda ranting syndrome), which makes me go off on one every time I half-remember some thoughts about a novel I had a decade or more ago. It was unfortunately triggered by your perfectly reasponable take on DD.

@Random789 I don't disagree with anything you wrote about how Daniel functions in relation to Gwendolen, but I think taking 2/3rds of the novel to writhe about establish this unbalances it. Perhaps I would also be more tolerant/appreciative if leaving decades between rereadings, but as I generally revisit the novel every other year, will continue to heathenishly skip all the Mirah Sue and Mordecai and Zionist maundering business 😁

I accept this low tolerance for Abrahamic existential wailing and gnashing of teeth indicates little hope of my ever making it through the Big Russians....

It's such a good point - it is possible to appreciate something without liking it. I recently had this very conversation with my ds in the Rijksmuseum (he was so bored 😂)! I am able to appreciate Wuthering Heights, despite my dislike of it - American Psycho is another I feel like this about, although my feelings are much stronger than dislike (appalling book), I can still appreciate that it is clever.

Just remembered that one classic novel I couldn't finish was The Mystery of Edward flipping Drood. Being a world-class numpty I hadn't realised that it was an unfinished novel and I got all the way to the end of the text before I found out. That was sooooo frustrating.

I read a good comment a while ago (Grayson Perry or someone of that ilk). It was to the effect that there should be a notice in places like the National Gallery that says 'You aren't obliged to like everything in here.' It's the same with classic books - they come freighted with the expectation that you read them and like them because they're classics.

Love quite a few of the novels mentioned in this thread but I couldn't finish Our Mutual Friend. I was 400 pages in and he was still introducing new characters with daft names.

I couldn't get very far with Nostromo either.

I love NDDP so much and yet I’ve never managed to make it even a tenth of the way into Les Mis.

i got about halfway through Toilers of the Sea and liked it and yet even at the time I don’t think I was entirely sure what was going on. I’d have to start from the beginning now if I tried to finish it.

i also started Wuthering Heights, got about a third in and was enjoying it (I hadn’t realised that there’s some humour in it too) but I keep forgetting to finish it so must pick that back up, this thread has reminded me

Midnight's Children, I've tried 5 times I think and I just can't.

Also 100 Years of Solitude.

I read On the Road, but hated it, what a load of egotistical shite.

I loved Wolf Hall and the subsequent books, it was so refreshing. I had read too many Philippa Gregory just before WH came out and it was shockingly good in comparison.

lolol, @StColumbofNavron, at the 'who was the best Bronte' question being the default landing place for all classics threads. Aside from Wuthering Heights I've only read Charlotte, but I'm going to take a punt on her being Top Bronte because flipping blimey Jane Eyre and Villette are soooo good.
Further lol at 'trudging across moorland on principal'.

Love that film

Vanity fair. Tried 3 times... I have absolutely no sympathy for any of the characters and decided not to waste anymore of my life on them.

A classics thread always takes a sideways lurch into ‘who was the best Brontë’ - I’m totally here for it.

I do love Wuthering Heights, but I sometimes really prefer a novel where everyone is heinous in their own way. My favourite character to hate on is Nellie Dean, such a shit stirring gossip. I think it’s an incredible piece of work to come from such a young mind and it doesn’t have all the ancillary plots of other bigger classics.

That said, I do also enjoy Jane Eyre and amongst my reading friends we often ask ourselves ‘what would Jane do when faced with a moral dilemma and find ourselves hilarious as we wonder if we need to trudge across moorland on principle. We are morons!

I love and have enjoyed most of the books listed here, especially Tolstoy and Hardy. I think Adam Bede is one of the most accomplished books ever.

I have read Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol and have tried to join the read alongs here but Dickens just doesn’t work for me. Oh, I also read about 80% of The Old Curiosity Shop and decided I didn’t really care.

I'll take the architecture in Notre Dame de Paris over the long and detailed description of the Paris sewers in Les Miserables. I can still smell them just by thinking about it. (I loved both books, Penguin Classics translation, and read them lots of times.)

Ha I came on to say Dracula too !

THE ARCHITECTURE!!!! The book would've been so much better without all the obsessive descriptions!

One of my favourite books but you’ve got to skip all the bits where he’s chuntering on about architecture

It was probably partly that, but you often see that - as authors get more celebrated and become big earners for a publisher - it's hard for editors to insist on changes. If the Mirror and the Light had been by a less successful writer, it would have been better edited, and a better book as a result.

Having said that, Mantel's writing of Cromwell's actual execution is superb - transcendent.

I think someone did something like that. And the result was absolutely terrible.

Daniel Deronda is absolutely my favourite novel. And I don't think at all that the 'Daniel Deronda' bits are an intrusion on a novel about Gwendolen. I think that they elaborate on, and provide a wider cultural context for, the 'saviour' or messiah role that she has created for him in her life.
I haven't read any commentary on the book, but I think this strange kind of saviour role that Daniel has for Gwendolen is absolutely about Gwendolen not about Daniel. Her 'redemption' via him is absolutely her own work, and his life outside his relationship with her magnifies the reader's understanding of his passivity and Gwendolen's authorship of her own life
I think Eliot was reflecting on religion, on the notion of coming to self-knowledge via the reflective medium of a god or messiah, and Daniel is a proxy for religion in the story. Calling the book 'Daniel Deronda' instead of 'Gwendoln Harleth' feels a bit like a nod to the contemporary Feuerbachian critique of religion -- the claim that when we talk about God we are actually talking about ourselves, projecting onto another entity the drama of our own self-realisation

Gwendolen knows nothing much about Daniel. She projects massively, using him as a kind of canvas on which to try and paint her own redemption. In that respect he is a bit like the more modern figure of a psychoanalyist, who helps a patient to reach self-knowledge via the much-vaunted 'transference', and I often wonder what Eliot would have thought about psychoanalysis.

He is her tool, a catalyst, and the 'Daniel Deronda' bits of the story seem to reflect on what it is to be trapped in this role of being a device for other people's redemption. (I haven't read it for decades, but I do seem to remember that all the confining circumstances of history and destiny kind of trap him into taking a certain direction, like Christ being funnelled by his own destiny into the passivity of suffering and death.)

Someone should put out an edition of Daniel Deronda with the Daniel bits cut out, entitled 'Gwendolen Harleth' -- that would be a contender for best Eliot novel.

Villette is the best Charlotte Brontë novel of all time!
FTFY

@EmilyBrontesGhost you are cracking me up! Mr Mybug clearly not on MN to champion Bramwell I see.