Classics you couldn't finish

Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Unbelievable!

I've got a blimmin Kate Bush earworm now.

"Merely the branch of a fir-tree that touched my lattice as the blast wailed by, and rattled its dry cones against the panes ... it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible ... ‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in—let me in!’"

Sleep well . . .

😂Just seen this. Should I expect a tap at the window tonight?

The Hobbit. People kept knocking on bloody Bilbo bloody Baggins' door and every one of them had to be described in great detail. It got to the point when I said if one more fucker knocks on that door that's it, I'm done. They did and I was. I like some Dickens, Oliver twist, Nicholas nickleby, great expectations and many others, i even managed to get through Little Dorrit, but I just could not get into A tale of two Cities.

Sorry, to answer the OP.
I regularly give up on books. I still begrudge reading LOTR to the bitter end.
Life’s too short.

I love novels with a far-reaching character list. I have the Frederica (Byatt) books to read in the right order as soon as I retire.

So A Suitable Boy is a favourite.
Middlemarch, ploughing through the first 300 pages gives great rewards afterwards. It’s as scandalous as any Jackie Collins.
Dickens was a favourite in my 30s, not before.
Jane Austen, over popular (William Hurt is not Mr Rochester) but I did enjoy Mansfield Park.

I’m now approaching Ulysses in ever-decreasing circles.

Vanity Fair.

Struggled with Bleak House but crossed the finish line in the end.

Well yes, but poor little Jiiiip ...

@JaneyGee Sickens was great at highlighting the awful circumstances people had to live in at the time. His stories are awful because the story matter is awful. I can’t get over what he did to his own wife though.
nasty piece of work.

@JaneyGee omg Jo's death in Bleak house [weep] I know I'm being manipulated (even more so by the fact that I was listening to Miriam Margolyes read it on Audible) and still in total floods.

I love the fact that so many of the things that Dickens was skewering are still so relevant today. I am on a thread over in FWR about the National Trust and someone said something like "charity should take care of people at home, not go off tilting at windmills abroad" and all I could think of was Mrs Jellyby ministering to the African masses.

I can't read anything he wrote about Dora without having to brush away a tear trickle of vomit from my eye mouth.

I finished all of these but I'm not entirely sure why I bothered, all of them were a slog or depressing:

Gulliver's Travels
Lord of the Rings
Jude the Obscure
Mrs Dalloway
Wives and Daughters (this was more enjoyable than the others but I didn't realise it was actually unfinished until I reached the end)

Another odd thing about Dickens is that he's the only writer who makes me cry. I hate mawkishness, and find 99% of films sickening (I burst out laughing at the end of Titanic). Yet Dickens has me in floods.

There have been a few threads over the years on 'bits in books you can't read aloud without blubbering'. Top of my list - total failure on my part, I physically couldn't do it - is the scene in David Copperfield where Dora is expiring 'offscreen' but her daft little dog dies. It was really annoying, it's sheer emotional manipulation of course!

I love hearing people's opinions on the classics. It's so interesting.

There's something about Tolkien that repels me, and I can't put my finger on it. Harold Bloom said LOTRs reads like The Book of Mormon! Yet he does create astonishingly vivid characters. Get a good audiobook and the effect can be overwhelming. Tom Bombadil, the Ents and Gollum are astonishing, and a good reader really brings them alive. He also has a profound sense of evil – the nature of evil, I mean.

I also have mixed feelings about Dickens. I do prefer him to Tolkien though. At his best, he really is a genius. The scene in which David sees his mother for the last time, or Joe Gargery has to visit Miss Havisham, but can't look her in the face, are superb. Like Shakespeare and Chaucer he also packs his writing with energy. Harold Bloom said we read Dickens for the vivid life – the rush and gusto. Very few writers have that gift. He also make you feel that life is worth living, and that human beings are worth caring about. Another odd thing about Dickens is that he's the only writer who makes me cry. I hate mawkishness, and find 99% of films sickening (I burst out laughing at the end of Titanic). Yet Dickens has me in floods.

Proust. Just impossible to read. It really is like drowning.

The Divine Comedy. Nope, sorry, not for me. I just about made it to the end of the Inferno.

Portnoy's Complaint. Vile book with the most loathsome central character in all literature. Isn't funny either.

I also struggled with Shakespeare's comedies. I have read all the plays (it's my big boast), but Shakespeare isn't funny. I don't care what people like Harold Bloom say, comedy doesn't age well. Give me P. G. Wodehouse or Douglas Adams or Evelyn Waugh any day.

Howard's End. I'm sorry to say this, because A Room with a View is my favourite film. I also like Forster's other stuff. But I found HE slow and dull. Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf cover similar territory, and do it more enjoyably. Maybe I wasn't in the right place when I read it.

Oh and Samuel Beckett. Ugghhh...we get it Sam, life's horrible and meaningless. You already said that in your last play, and the one before that, and the one before that.

Surprising it wasn't moor..

For anyone put off by the length of War & Peace, you can skip the military sections in their entirety without missing anything. It's a better read without them IMO (sorry, Tolstoy), even though I do like military history.

Crime & Punishment - got through it but I must be missing something. I just couldn't care less about Raskolnikov's moral anguish and I found his lack of insight (even for his era) into his own misogyny and snobbishness disturbing. Top tip - if you don't want to be wracked with guilt about a murder, don't murder someone for no reason.

The Brothers Karamazov is a good 300 page novel, trapped in an 800 page book. I did like The Idiot, though.

Only twice

I have read WH twice, once at 19 and once at 40- I loved it at 19 but couldn’t finish it at 40. You can tell that EB didn’t have much experience of affairs of the heart, it’s very feverish.

Only twice.

Feverish . . .

The trick to reading Dickens is to spot and skip over most of the descriptive passages. They were surely written to be performed, so if you want those listen to a good reader like Jarvis. Or watch an adaptation with good production values. If Dickens had been born in the 20th or 21st century he'd surely have been writing for the screen.

It occurs to me that apart from his public serialised performances, there would have been a lot more reading aloud in homes in the past, with limited other entertainment, poor lighting etc so listening to audio books could perhaps be viewed as quite authentic albeit better quality than getting whoever had the best eyesight to do it.

I love Middlemarch! Studied it for A level and have re read it several times since. Definitely worth persisting!

I think that irony is in abeyance to an extent in Mansfield Park, where the heroine is a morally-unimpeachable mousy dullard, the hero is dutiful and sensible (at best!’, the two ‘bad’ characters, Henry and Mary Crawford, are by far the most charismatic, and the comedy comes from ghastly Aunt Norris and the practically-comatose and dim Lady Bertram. I still love it for the set pieces like the visit to Sotherton, the home theatre, Fanny’s visit to Portsmouth, her ‘coming out’ ball, but in JA’s other novels the heroine gets to be witty and playful as well as broadly right, once she’s corrected her ‘prejudice’ or snobbery or over-romanticism.

Joan Aiken wrote a good, short sequel called Mansfield Revisited, where the Crawfords are rehabilitated as good eggs (Henry wasn’t involved in Maria’s affair, Mary had really loved Edmund), Fanny and Edmund are sent off to Antigua, and Fanny’s livelier sister Susan is the heroine.

Adam Bede. First year of uni, it was so very tedious. It was very long and absolutely nothing happened, "Hetty the pretty buttermaker" basically made butter and tried to be wooed by the "Strong Adam"_ I always pictured Gaston from Beauty and the beast... Anyway end of the year many of that class destroyed the damned book.

Oh, yes, of course! How could I forget Moby Dick? Or, rather, how could anyone not forget it? Joseph Condrad famously summed it up as 'a rather strained symphony, on the subject of whaling', which sounds about right.

I started it but couldn't finish it. However, I very much enjoyed an audio book of it on Spotify (which I also didn't finish).

I do think its purple passages are very very enjoyable, but they get in the way of the nnovel a bit.