Classics you couldn't finish

Anything by Tolkien. Just can't bear it!

Wuthering Heights is weird. Like some kind of adolescent fan fiction. It reads like something Emily B should have put into a drawer for ten years and then extensively revised into the Best Novel Ever Written

I did English at uni and there were so many. It really put me off reading for pleasure for years.

One that sticks out is Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Incredibly difficult to read.

I can't believe I am typing this but I think I am about to DNF Mansfield Park. It's a shock, as I love JA

I have a hunch that whichver Austen novel you read first stays with you as such a perfect crystalline joy that when you eagerly move on to others she has written you feel furious and wretched because they are not your JA Beloved First.

I was certainly like that after reading Pride and Prejudice (my own JA Beloved First). Took me a while to get past that and gobble up the others.

Particularly Emma. I didn't read that until relatively recently, in my 50s!!! It is perhaps her most accomplished book, brilliant and hugely enjoyable, but the first sentence got my hackles up, made me think I would never like the eponymous emma. I see now that its statement of her extreme (and annoying) good fortune is ironic, in the same way as the first sentence of P&P is ironic. Though privileged of course, she has the extreme burden of her feeble and grasping dad, so that she has to give up on all ideas of love and marriage, even to the extent of deluding herself into believing she doesn't want them. Horrible old man.

I could put all the books mentioned so far into three lists. Books I Read Again And Again, Books I Quite Enjoyed Once, and (shamefully, the longest) Books I Never Got Round To Starting. The only classics I remember not finishing were Ulysses and War and Peace. In both cases, I was finding them laborious, put them aside temporarily because my brain needed a palate-cleanser, and didn't get round to picking them up again.

Yes. EMO over a hundred years before EMO was a thing.

have always despised Wuthering Heights

The most over-rated book in English Lit, IMO. Everyone in it needs a good slap.

I did English at university and mostly love the classics. I did a module on Dickens so I think I’ve read most of them, and enjoyed them. And I absolutely loved Middlemarch. Classics I’ve hated are Ulysses ( tried several times and come to the conclusion it’s unreadable - by me, anyway); Crime and Punishment, War and Peace.

I can't believe I am typing this but I think I am about to DNF Mansfield Park. It's a shock, as I love JA - I'd never read this one (also haven't read S&S). I have just read the chapter where Henry Crawford has told Mary how much he adores Fanny - I didn't really get the extent of his feelings from the adaptations I've seen - and I really want him to be a reformed rake and for her not to marry that boring, pompous hypocrite Edmund (who doesn't love her even half as much as HC), so I think I might leave it there. I know what happens. I love the writing, as always, but am deeply unhappy with the story.

Other than that I have never got on with Dickens and have always despised Wuthering Heights, although I did finish the bloody awful thing, as I studied it for GCSE.

Love P&P and NA. Quite fond of MP, despite Fanny. S&S & Emma - meh. Persuasion bores me to the point that (spoiler alert) I want to chuck myself off the cobb at Lyme Regis.

Unpopular opinions: 1) Emma is more annoying than Fanny. (2) Henry Tilney would be a far better husband than Mr Darcy.

Like @Random789 verbose Victorians are my chocolate bar comfort reads, but I find the big Russian classics a struggle. War&Peace, Master&Margarita, Dead Souls... maybe I need to try one of the derided Victorian translations.

I'm just here to make sure nobody says Shakespeare 🥸 he's The Man. I concur with other posters though, fuck Charles Dickens.

Middlemarch.

And I gave up on A Suitable Boy and watched the film 🫢

Love Dickens, it’s rare I don’t finish a fiction book but Les Miserables (in English!) got the better of me.

Also Catch 22 - it's been sat on my shelf ever since I attempted it for the first time and just can't bring myself to try again!

Tom Jones. I failed to finish it for A levels and University, I did finish Clarissa though

Oh god I'd forgotten Henry James. Has anyone managed to finish 'The Golden Bowl'? I take my hat off to you if you did!

Dickens was verbose because he was paid by the word - he wasn’t daft.

I can’t read Dickens- I find him verbose- same for Tolkien

Totally agree: it’s like being back at school.

So many of my favourites on here 🤣. In fact Anna Karenina, War and Peace, 100 years of solitude and Tale of two cities are the only books I've read multiple times.

Agree Catch 22 was awful though and didn't get anywhere near finishing it

Also, more of a modern classic, but Brick Lane was just a total bore fest and abandoned half way through

ah @MrsDanversGlidesAgain glad to have found another Alaistar Sim fan-the best Scrooge-not Christmas without it!!!

Love in the Time of Cholera - I just cannot settle with it. I tried it again in Lockdown and still couldn’t.

I pushed myself through so many of these as a teen and now I have less patience. But then I get FOMO because some of the best books are slow burners. I’d struggle to articulate why Portrait of a Lady is worth the time but it was sublime

Lord of the rings. Also Life of Pi but when I saw the film I did like it so will maybe try again one day. Also Harry Potter but I am sure I would have loved them if I was a child as I loved the faraway tree.

Anna Karanina. I forced myself to finish, but by the end I was just reading the individual words out of sheer stubbornness. Never again. And Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I was so excited for its release but couldn’t follow the plot to save my life even though I love her other books…

Moby-Duck is the one about bath toys and ocean currents. I think I'd be more likely to read that than Moby-Dick