To roll my eyes when someone says their favourite book is a classic

[Eyeroller100]

I'm an avid reader and I'm always looking for new books to read so I often ask people what their favourite books are. AIBU to roll my eyes every time someone mentions one of the classics.

I know people do love them and they may well be their faves, but I am quite skeptical as if they are saying it to make themselves sound better.

I've tried reading a lot of classics and I just can't get into them at all! They are pure effort

We also did Wuthering Heights, and our teacher lived that book as we read passages and she helped us work through it. Personally, I didn’t enjoy WH, but it was rather lovely (even as a bored, cynical teen) to see the deep pleasure she got from it.

All this talk of Wuthering Heights makes me want to give it another go. I steadily hated the characters all the way through the book - who knows, maybe this time will be different.

It is worth trying books you didn’t enjoy again - obviously not wasting time if it still doesn’t work for you, but at different life stages things can feel different

To kill a mockingbird is also interesting to reread in the context of Go set a watchman

The characters in Wuthering Heights aren’t likeable. I think if you like to root for the main characters then you might not like it any better. I know quite a few people who strongly dislike it, even if they generally like classic literature. I’m ok with books where the main characters aren’t very likeable. My sister doesn’t like books or films where all the characters are awful, she says she just doesn’t care what happens to them and so it becomes a chore to read.

Great Expectations is a fabulous book for anyone to read, you don’t get more classic than that so yes, YABU.

Not my favourite btw!

Wuthering Heights is my favourite book (along with The Remains of the Day). It’s a hard, painful slog of a book but that’s the while point! It’s brutal and raw and it amazes me that such a young woman could create such horrid characters purely out her imagination. It’s base and powerful and I love it!

rose yes they should. But if they can't, especially if they clearly don't even understand the book themselves, it is not constructive to interrupt the flow every paragraph or two with inane, ill informed personal opinions that demonstrate nothing but ignorance.

Wuthering heights I like more for knowing about the brontes than I did when I first read it

I agree the Brontes are fascinating

I still can’t get my head around WH being written by such a young women or had so little experience of the world outside her little village and seemingly none of relationships or romance (not that it is a romantic story)

All this talk of Wuthering Heights makes me want to give it another go. I steadily hated the characters all the way through the book - who knows, maybe this time will be different

Noooooo! Stay over here with the rest of us haters! We need strength in numbers on this thread.

Can the people who love WH tell me whether a) they think Nellie Dean is doing the voices throughout and b) whether they actually give a toss about the younger generation?

#TeamAusten

The characters in Wuthering Heights aren’t likeable. I think if you like to root for the main characters then you might not like it any better.

No, that wasn't it - I like a horrid character as much as a Disney princess type. I just didn't connect with the WH cast on any level. They were tedious to me, instead of getting any power from the story. If I got a gripping sort of hatred from it I'd have enjoyed it much more!

@Jassey, I tried the same thing with Harry Potter before and my mind wasn't changed, I still disliked it But who knows! I like to give things a fair shot.

Also an avid reader but find the classics tough but actually planning to get to some of them this year just so I know I properly tried! I do understand what you mean but there is a chance that it is just the name of a book that springs to mind, although there are people out there that want to lord it over people. To all the people getting a bit annoyed above, OP was just asking a question! (I'm sure you were ready for it though, people have very strong opinions about books!!!)

The fact that you feel intellectually inadequate in front of people who have better and more extensive literary taste than yours, OP, is not a reason to call them liars. If reading classics is too much like hard work for you, then stick to the middlebrow piffle which presumably floats your boat - Helen Fielding, Jilly Cooper, Alan Titchmarsh.

Geordie - bit of a strange comment. OP might be reading high brow literature that might be considered classics in future.

LadyIsabellaWrotham - Lockwood/Nellie Dean are both unreliable as narrators, another thing I love about WH but I have in my head ND putting on a Heathcliff voice now like in a kid’s bedtime story.

I think Hindley is an interesting characters as he is a direct, innocent victim of Heathcliff’s wrath. Don’t care much for the others and Isabella is a twat.

Classics are Classics for a reason ... because they are well written because their words and stories and feelings they evoke stay with us .. hence why they become our faveorites and we go back to them over and over
that's what makes a great novel .
you can't say that about chick lit /etc ...
i have many faveorite novels
all
of them classics ..
Rebecca
i capture the castle
tess of the durbervles
far from the madding crowd
Crime and punishment

to name a few
...maybe you better get reading OP and you will see what i mean

raven I accept on one level neither are particularly pleasant. But I like them, and admire them to a certain extent within the context of their age and upbringing. Even the older H who is undoubtedly a villain I feel a mixture of pity and fascination for. I think that's why I love it so much, I find both characters mesmerising.

Jane Eyre irritates the hell out of me with her helpless pity parties, I want to tell her to get a spine. And I really didn't care what happened to her, but the writing is good enough to get over it. I respect a wilful C far more!

lady apart from when the text brings you back I always forget it's her narrating. At the risk of sounding like a cliché I get lost in the story, it's so alive.

Somewhat spoils the image to imagine it told by Nellie as a one woman cast, complete with accents, costume changes and stage makeup

And no, not really, only in terms of how they relate to Heathcliffe. Hareton being the exception. The other pair just seem to be C & H again with all their bad points and none of the good.

oh and i forgot Bleak House ...

Is Helen Fielding really middlebrow though? Sure, not massively complicated in plot, and definitely not difficult to read. But her themes really speak to a generation of women, she said some really interesting and quite complicated things about society, our expectations of women, and how we live now, and I'd say definitely not a trashy book.

She draws on the themes of great literature that came before her: Pride and Prejudice being a really obvious example - I mean, the entire Darcy Bridget and whatsisname triangle is basically commentary on Austen.

And what's not obvious to those who haven't read it (and you should because it's a masterpiece) is that stylistically, it's a loving homage to a much earlier 20th century classic, The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Which is an absolute gem of a novel, and perfectly and cuttingly captures the interwar/WW2 period.

I think the only reason Bridget Jones is slated and underrated is that it's women's fiction, written for women, dealing with themes and problems of being a woman. If Martin Fucking Amis had written it the bookish intelligentsia would be fawning over it.

In short, Bridget Jones is a really important 20th century novel. Whether you enjoyed it or not. I don't think it's middlebrow at all.

(And if we want to talk novelists who were considered middlebrow in their day, in the sense that they were aimed at and enjoyed by a huge and wide ranging readership and wrote with the intention of making money as well as making art, then may I present to you one Mr Charles Dickens. Also Mses Bronte, various, and Jane Austen herself.)

I meant Hareton, not Hindley.

I owe my love of the classics to my amazing English teacher - a Welsh woman with a passionate love of literature. We read Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, Galsworthy, Hardy, TS Eliot with her and adored them. I travel a lot, and always take with me my battered copies of "The Man of Property" and "Vanity Fair". They are such old familiar friends and bring me such joy in foreign lands. I have to add that I also love Robert Harris- Conclave was a-maz-ing, Mitchener, Faye Weldon, Philippa Gregory, Somerset Maugham and many other "light" fiction authors. I certainly don't mention my reading expecting an eye-roll - I like what I like and you can judge if you choose. But without the amazing Mrs G, I know that my life would have been very different in terms of reading for pleasure.

to kill a mocking bird
little women

do you think somerset Maughan is light fiction ?
the painted viel
is deep

Helen Fielding isn't bad or anything, it isn't from a literary perspective I don't enjoy her. Just don't feel any affinity for the characters and the plot doesn't interest me, and for me anyway her writing alone isn't enough to get over those hurdles.

I'd probably say Donna Tartt's little friend as middlebrow that almost could become a classic. Very simple, youth fiction style plot but so dark and imo similar to gone with the wind in that it captures the atmosphere of the South.