Which works of "great" literature have you given up on???

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Couldn't get past page 100 of Mill on the Floss (no one else in my book group could either!!). Felt that I really didn't need to see any more examples of gratuitious violence to animals to get the idea that Maggie was good and Tom was nasty.

War and Peace, though, maybe I had a bad translation.

Ulysses, James Joyce.

I finished Mill on the Floss though!

well Catch 22 is supposed to be very good - but I could never get past the first few chapters - despite many attempts.

Oliver Twist. Couldn't keep track of the plot twists and cast of seemingly thousands.

Ditto Bleak House.

Couldn't even do Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, let alone Ulysees.

Lord Jim. Found it unedifyingly boring.

The Scarlet Letter - couldn't follow it (or got too bored to follow it!)

Moby Flipping Dick, 2/3 of the book wasn't needed!

well it's more of a modern book but I could not get through Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. It started off so well but I just could not get through the middle.

you didn't miss much, Foxinsocks, it didn't really have an "ending" per se!

Oh Moby Dick how could I forget? I might be the most ignorant person on Earth but wondered for days how on Earth that novel is a classic... I did finished it though...

Oh I finished it too...but why....lol

The complete works of Shakespeare...

Ok I was 10 and I was trying to read the whole book...

oh good! I was a bit disappointed because I thought the first few chapters were excellent.

I also recently didn't properly finish Iain Banks's Dead Air (skim read the last few chapters). The first sex scene, to describe a woman's bits (in a supposed passionate, loving scene) he used the word c* (which immediately put me off!) and it never recovered from there.

so it might not have entirely been Shakespeare's fault then !

The Quixote, incredibly good fun when read by my literature teacher, imposible on my own... (And before you say something my teacher was older than my father so... just a narrative talent )

Finnegans Wake. And many, many more.
Am just making second attempt on Anna Karenina, the first being interrupted by birth of ds1 and subsequent dropping in favour of easier-to-handle Memoirs of Geisha.
Hopefully it'll be second time lucky. If so it will be back to Vanity Fair for the third time, then on to Ulysses for the umpteenth time as I refuse to give up on that one.

anna karenina -- I cheered out loud when she killed herself!

"Lord of the Rings" (finally managed on my 4th attempt, but, oh, it is so dull in the last two books).
Was last night trying to read "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon for the 3rd time and thinking that life was too short to bother.

Great Expectations - just couldn't get into it

another Bored of the Rings here. Plus Ulysses (suspect hardly anyone has read the whole thing).

Lord of the Rings - gave up and just watched the movies!!!

Don't know if it counts as a classic, but my mum lent me Captain Corelli's Mandolin and raved about it. Think I managed the first chapter before deciding it was pretentious twaddle, and settled down to read something 'crap' like Jilly Cooper!!!

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - not really 'given' up on it - started it, left it on a train when visiting a friend, and have never managed to buy another copy.

The Bible.