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

I was also taught by a relative how to interpret Shakespeare, around the age of eleven and I enjoy Shakespeare, that I always keep to myself, though.

my favourite book is A Room with a View and I have read it hundreds of times-it is my fall back book.

I love that book! I read it sometime ago, but think I still have it floating around somewhere, so maybe time for a re-read.

This thread has made me wonder if I should give Wuthering Heights another chance - so many people clearly love it!

I'm curious about the Great Gatsby too - a few people have mentioned it as a favorite and I'd love to know what they enjoyed about it - I confess that I started it a few years ago and failed to persevere, but perhaps I should have done?

Books do burn very slowly, and at a surprisingly high temperature - Fahrenheit 451 in fact. It's because the pages are so densely packed together.

(You learn these things at library school - in a lot of fire situations, obviously ones where the fire is under control, your books tend to get trashed by water from putting it out rather than burned. If they are valuable there are options for recovery.)

How can you conceivably say that all classics bore you? There's such a wide variety? I'll admit to having been desperately bored by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I can't see how anyone could possibly find Jane Eyre boring.

My favourite books would be classics - and I'm happy to keep re-reading them because I get so much out of them, and I get more out of them the more I read them, even if I know the plot.

yy Llangollen. Also why some of the old classics are no longer read. Or when did you last curl up for an evening of sheer enjoyment with Prudentius?

I read all sorts, including a lot of crime and thrillers, but I do love a lot of classics, inc. Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot to name just 3. Middlemarch and The Way We Live Now are two of my all time favourites. And I get them for 0p on the Kindle, which is v handy when my own copies are falling to bits.
If you don't like classics, or find them too hard going, fair enough - you're not alone - but please don't assume that people who do really like them are only saying it to make themselves sound good.

My favourite book by a country mile is Wilkie Collin's The Moonstone. It's a classic for a reason- try it if you have not. It's not in the slightest bit pretentious, because it was written as a serial in Dicken's magazine and so it was meant to be sensationalist and to keep the reader's attention. It's also extremely extremely funny.

Incidentally, Wilkie Collins might have agreed with the OP's opinion on some classic novels;

''Richardson's Pamela; McKenzies Man of Feeling; .... all classical works, all(of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all possessing the one great merit of enchaining no-body's interest and exciting nobody's brain'.

My favourite book is The Magus by John Fowles -no idea if it's a classic or not - and I also love Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series which I sneakily reread all the time. I'm confusing myself now

The point about the classics is, as has been said, that they endure and are studied at school and university.

When people ask me my favourite book I usually lie because apparently Harry Potter isn't acceptable when you reach your late twenties.

My total faves that captivated my teenage self and transported me to different worlds: Tender is the Night, Antony andCleopatra, the Rainbow, and throughout my life everything by Terry Pratchett
Gave up The Goblet of fire, too boring. Sorry HP fans!

Roll away OP, I read for me and no one else, one of the few things that applies to actually!

But come on, people are being disingenuous if they claim that no one reels off a list of accepted classics in a desire to impress. I reckon it’s widespread behaviour.

ivenoideawhatimdoing
You shouldn't give a fuck what people think

Say Harry Potter if that's the truth

Before they were classics, they were bestsellers. If they hadn't been, no-one would have remembered them.

I remember reading Jane Eyre for the first time aged 14, utterly gripped, and unable to put it down. It still remains one of the most page-turning books I have ever read.

Probably my favourite all-time book is Pride and Prejudice. I've read it about eight or 10 times, and though it's a number of years now since I last read it, I still think about it a lot because just thinking about it gives me pleasure.

There are classics I haven't enjoyed, of course, and don't pretend to have enjoyed. I found War and Peace a bit of a struggle and I don't think I've ever been so relieved in my life as when I got to the end of Ulysses. But I know people who say they love those books and I believe them.

Harry Potter is a great example of a fad.

I very much doubt whether many children at all are terribly interested in those books but the hype at the time of each release convinced them to be avid “readers” of the books and to acquire them.

When the hype was at its highest, you would even see daft adults reading them ostentatiously on trains and so on. Laughable.

Sometimes Mumsnet provides me with unexpected insights. Sometimes I meet like a new co-worker or whatever and they take an instant dislike to me and I wonder, why? What did I do? But it could totally be something like this.
I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown just after having read Mansfield Park and it was just... shite. The descriptions of the characters were long despite being one dimensional, and it was really hard to care what happened to them. It's harder to get through, not easier. The likes of Austen, they take you by the hand and lead you through the story. You just sit back.

Loved Harry Potter. No idea if I read it ostentatiously or not (what a strange concept) but I found them gripping and enjoyable.

It depends what you perceive to be classics. Of my favourites I'd say three are classics - a town like Alice, the l shaped room and swallows and amazons. I doubt any of them make me like look a better person, nor do I care.

Rowling, of course, laughed all the way to the bank.

Most avid readers would admit that they read a massive variety of books. My "favourites" are a bizarre mix of Wuthering heights, Gone with the wind, Harry Potter series, Malory Towers series, Jane Eyre...I could go on. Books that have stayed with me and I could re read immediately after finishing. Malory Towers I must have read upwards of fifty times when I was a child!

I hate reading poetry though and really don't enjoy reading Shakespeare although I love watching the plays being performed.

I read a mixture of absolute mindless drivel and more highbrow books. There's a time and a place for both!

I'm more likely to reel off a list of obscure authors

C J Cherryh, Parnelle and Barnes.. oh! I forgot Gene Wolf (I may just have found my next marathon re-read)... Scott Card - all sci fi writers, many not easy to find unless someone makes a film based on a book!

I may never include a Dickens style name on my list... maybe that makes me even more of a book snob

When the hype was at its highest, you would even see daft adults reading them ostentatiously on trains and so on. Laughable

I read and re-read Harry Potter.

Why is an adult reading a book laughable?

Do people really judge other people's worth on what they're reading in public? How sad their lives must be.

I’d definitely give Gatsby another go Broken. It’s hardly any length so even if it’s not your thing you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you tried it - and it’s so embedded in US culture that it gives you insight into other stuff.

I’m baffled by the WH lovers though. I read it umpteen times as a teenager/young adult for study and I didn’t find it difficult, just terribly unedifying. The framing narrative is ridiculous and the actual conclusion is left out of most adaptations because nobody gives a toss about the second generation. Not saying you’re lying, but I don’t really understand what you’re getting from it.

Personally I’m restudying Pride and Prejudice at the moment with a teenager and despite the fact that I’ve read it so many times I’m rediscovering fresh gems on every page.

DH is reading A La Recherche for the third time atm and would defend the PP’s ex’s right to read it even if she didn’t think he was mature enough. Proust has got lots in it, and like Shakespeare or Austen you can reread at different ages and get different things out of him. He also (DH insists ) has some cracking jokes and is a properly funny writer.