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.

I haven't given up on any of them yet. I hope I've still got a couple of score years left to try again.

BUT I have taken a break of several years from The Alexandria Quartet and Love in a time of cholera.

Diary of a Nobody was a realy struggle. Can't remember when I gave up on it. There didn't seem to be any point to it.

I loved Crime and Punishment. I've read it several times. And Moby Dick. And most of the great Russian novels (you do need a cheat sheet of all the characters names and relationship to each other).

But I struggle to finish a single page of any Jane Austen novel. Ditto Trollop, Dom Delillo and his American peers.

I Caludius.
Would love to try again though.
Always wanted to read it but never mustered the energy.

Funny to read this thread though - I loved Tess of the D'Urbervilles & jane Ayre and adored Wuthering Heights and love love love Martin Amis, or did, has been a while since I read his books.

I loved doing Chaucer for my A'Levels, but can't really read anything written after that until maybe the 1950s.........

I blame English Lit lessons at school tbh, boring, boring, boring. DH is still on the verge of divorce over the fact that I refuse to watch, read or touch anything to do with Dickens. We have a 6 hour extravaganza of Little Dorrit on video somewhere that I'm sure he's going to tie me down and make me watch eventually (maybe when I'm senile and can't physically get away?)

Also can't abide Hardy, any of the Brontes, Shakespeare (to a certain degree), actually pretty much anything that people feel I should read tbh.

Out of those already mentioned I liked Catcher in the Rye iirc but I was about 12 when I read it and don't remember much, liked The Hobbit, struggled but persevered with LOTR, read The Bible but agree the Old Testament wipes the floor with the New one.

Totally with expat, except that 50 pages seems very generous to me. I haven't the patience to go that far - 5 pages max.

Funny thing is dino, I have no recollection of writing my original post

Not read the whole thread... but ooh er.. Satanic Verses... read two chapters and would have preferred root canel treatment tbh.

anything by Henry James..

Dr Zhivago - maybe it was the translation but I couldn't get past page100.
I must be in the minority because I loved Captain Correlli - speed read the first part - it does get better and I do believe I cried at the end (and not through sheer relief that I'd finished it).

Wuthering Heights - I really tried but hated it and gave up.

Any Dickens

Lord of the Bloody Rings - I read the Hobbit it was alright, but nothing to write home about. Have never read more than the 1st third of the 1st LoR books. So many songs, so many characters, got really lost and bored. Dp loves them - he can read them to ds when he's old enough.

I knew I wouldn't be alone with Captain Corelli but
I tried really hard with Orwell's 1984 but I just can't.
I hadn't read much Dickens but unabridged audio books are the way forward.

I loved 1984. Bleak and grim, but very easy to read.

Alexandria Quartet
a couple of Margaret Atwoods
really struggled with Henry James

ah Moondog, a Stendhal lover
he is my favourite writer, I was in love with Fabrice from La Chartreuse de Parme for years
Le Rouge et Le noir is great too
I'm surprised so many of you can't stand Henry James, I love him too!
ashamed to admit I have never managed to get very far in Proust, yawn.........
or Dickens.....
but I love Hemningway and Fitzgerald (expat )

I've just started Moby Dick. How do you rate my chances to finish the book seeing that it has taken me a week to get pass chapter 1?

Couldn't manage Moby Dick (too much sea), Ulysses (nuff said) and somehow just can't stomach jane austen (not great as i'm doing an MA in literature). loved Anna Karenina, all of Henry James, Brontes, can do Dickens, Hardy and anything else melodramatic, Moll Flanders is a fun book too and I'm writing on Woolf though she is an acquired taste. Strangely I gave up on Captain Correlli's Mandolin, just so much tedious love-lorn ...

Joseph Conrad - nostromo, so tedious. Most of Dickens except for Christmas Carol (sentimental at heart, you see).
Love Vanity Fair, all Austen..don't go a bundle on any of the Brontes..struggled with but then loved Chaucer, even Milton once I'd got to grips with it.

Ulysees (but that was a long time ago)
Shadowmancer because that is supposed to be a kid's book

But have done loads that appear on this list:
War and Peace
Lord of the Rings
The Bible
Great Expectations
All Bronte (that I have ever laid my hands on)
Middlemarch
Vanity Fair

so am feeling quite smug now. Despite the fact that the last book I read was a "historical romance".

I read Catcher in the Rye and it was rubbish. I read Wuthering Heights and it was fantastic

I've just got Crime & Punishment from the library& after only 3 pages am wondering whether it's worth continuing.
Just read Anna Karenina having seen it mentioned on another thread & mostly enjoyed it.
Read LOTR 4 or 5 times, love Dickens, Orwell & recently John Steinbeck, fascinating to know a bit about American life in last 100 yrs, Grapes of Wrath stayed with me for ages once I realised it's based on real stuff.
Wuthering Heights was a Big disappointment, such stupid people!

I wanted both Catherine and Heathcliff to die in Wuthering Heights.

Slowly and painfully.

B/c I had to read it by force for a class.

And I hated every minute of it from about page 10.

Heathcliff was a tosser.

Catherine was a stuck up bitch.

Always get to the same page in 1984 and that's it total mental block. Managed to plough on with War and Peace though, it was remembering the names in some of the books which always had me flicking backwards and forwards. At the third time of reading successfully managed The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Moby Dick. Would rather eat my way through the whale than read through the whole book.

Couldn't finish first chapter of The Beautiful & Damned - may have had something to do with new baby as FSF usually piss easy!