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Original poster

Which books or authors do you know you *ought* to like, but just can't?

65 replies

Cosmosis · 16/04/2009 11:33

I find both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights almost unreadable, and yet I know many people who love them both. It's not a Bronte thing I don't think, as I loved Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Also, other than Hard Times and Great Expectations, I really can't read Dickens.

OP posts:
spotofcheerfulness · 16/04/2009 12:55

Third for midnight's children. And portait of the artisit as a young man.

Bucharest · 16/04/2009 12:49

The English Patient. Bleargh.

moonshine · 16/04/2009 12:47

Hate Martin Amis
Hate Trollope
Hated Hundred Years of Solitude
Hated The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I'm sure there's lots more but I am not a fast reader so have stopped ploughing through books I just don't like.

bloss · 16/04/2009 12:47

Message withdrawn

MrsDanversAteMyIpod · 16/04/2009 12:43

Loved Jane Eyre but couldn't get on with Wuthering Heights at all,

Got to about page 50 of Ulysses.

Read and liked Crime and Punishment but couldn't finish Notes From Underground.

Anything by Hemingway, too. I don't know what it is. I just don't like his style, too masculine and curt?

ohdearwhatamess · 16/04/2009 12:42

Wuthering Heights here too (love novels by Anne and Charlotte Bronte though)
Catcher in the Rye
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Captain Corelli
Brave New World
Suitable Boy

Bucharest · 16/04/2009 12:38

Anything with a bonnet overload.

Cold Comfort Farm. Meh.

Don't much like Magic Realism either. It's just Harry Potter pretending to be Lit-rich-er.

artifarti · 16/04/2009 12:37

Catch 22 - urgh. Had tried to read it sooo many times, finally got through it during the two last overdue weeks of pregnancy. Wish I hadn't bothered. Ditto Midnight's Children by Rushdie.

Joe1977 · 16/04/2009 12:35

I have tried to read midnights children on several occasions (Salman Rushdie), and it seems that the story could be great and worth the effort, but I just don't enjoy his writing style.

Flamesparrow · 16/04/2009 12:33

I finally finished Jane Eyre this year

BitOfFun · 16/04/2009 12:29

I couldn't get along with Catch 22.

Original poster
Cosmosis · 16/04/2009 12:27

McMummy I finished it, but only out of duty!

infin, I've never attempted Ulysses!

I can't remember if I finished OHYS or not, I know I did't finish Love in the time of Cholera and I get them muddled.

I hate not finishing a book, it upsets me.

OP posts:
infin · 16/04/2009 12:20

Ulysses, James Joyce.
Makes me realise what it must be like to be 10 years old with the wrong book during a silent reading session.

McMummy · 16/04/2009 11:36

I have tried very very hard to read Wuthering Heights, but can't.

TotalChaos · 16/04/2009 11:34

One Hundred Years of Solitude. I find Magical Realism mildly irritatingl