Great/classic novels you just don't like

[Thurlow]

Cloud Atlas (what prompted me to start this thread) - lesser than the sum of its part. It's all very clever and a very impressive exercise in writing and authorial(sp?) skill, but none of that makes for an enjoyable read. Too stop start, didn't like some of the stories, didn't feel the stories connected enough to make it feel like they deserved to be all wrapped up together. Emporer's New Clothes.

The Great Gatsby - too deliberate, too studied. I felt like Fitzgerald had written and rewritten and rewritten again every single word on the page, and so the story lost any sense of urgency or liveliness. It left me feeling very cold, which did annoy me as the bones of the story were really interesting.

Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist and The Life of Pi - couldn't read more than 2 pages of either of them, just hated them on sight.

Anything by Dickens - I just can't get into him . Ditto anything by DH Lawrence.

There are lots of books, classic or otherwise, that I haven't finished because they were dull. I don't feel any compunction ever to finish a book. Which is probably why the only classic books I can say with conviction I despise are Wuthering Heights (had to read it as had nothing else on a two day boat trip up the Amazon), Mill on the Floss (ditto, a coach journey from Thailand to Singapore) and The Rainbow which I had to read for A Level. I reserve particular hatred for Lawrence and his interminable drivel - perhaps I was too young but I tried again recently and threw it across the room after four chapters. Stupid, dull, repetitive, whiny nonsense.

I definitely don't think not liking a character means you don't like a book - though if you are meant to like them and don't (I'm looking at you, Maggie Tulliver, Cathie Earnshaw and Ursula sodding Brangwen) then that is definitely a problem.

The Scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, yyy to Wuthering Heights, The Slap and Anna Karenina. All full of either vile people or witless victims.

I love Jane Austen and Dickens though and really got into les miserables.

Loved 'Catcher', so evocative of time and place and the pointless angst of being a misfit teenager.

GG Marquez 'Nobody writes to the Colonel' = total waste of trees. Though 'Cholera' was tolerable.

Kingsley Amis bloody funny if criminally un-PC; Martin just writes disgusting violent characters obsessed with their height and teeth and shag-all happens. More pointless waste of trees.

"Heart of Darkness - incomprehensible"

I'm curious about this. What did you not comprehend in Heart Of Darkness? It is a very short novel, written in simple words and a conversational tone.

Another one for Wuthering Heights, I wanted to bang their heads together. If you love each other so much just get married and shut up about it.

Also hate anything by DH Lawrence that isn't Lady Chatterley.

Couldn't get into Wolf Hall but assumed it was because I am too stupid.

Oh, and I hated On the Road, probably because I am not cool enough.

Cold Mountain - dull drivel which made me care not a jot.
The Alchemist - "life changing" Really?
Watership Down - And the rabbits ran, and they ran, and they ran....
Wolf Hall - Beat me good and proper.
Lord of the Rings - Did nothing to ignite the unlit embers of my fantasy fire.

Anything by Henry James. His sentence structure anaesthetises my cortex.
Ulysses. Incomprehensible drivel.
1984. Makes me want to chuck myself off a cliff. I know this is kinda the point of the book, but I cannot cope with it.

Yy to withering heights and Madame bovary.

Yyy to most of dickens' work

Most things that have won the orange prize for literature. Oscar and lucinda - I didn't finish it. Neither did I finish a critically acclaimed book called 'still' although the title gave it away.

1984

War and Peace

You Dickens haters are obviously wrong. Bleak House might be one of the greatest books in the English language. As is Cloud Atlas (and it was the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop one needs a heart of stone for , not Little Dorrit)

However you're all spot on about
Austen (the same story over and over)
Moby Dick (has any one read it?)
All those dull American men . Roth, Cheever, Updike
James Kelman
Irvine Welsh
Virginia Woolf

You're really putting me off Wolf Hall.

You

Love Dickens. Loved Wolf Hall. Have actually read 60pc of Moby Dick and was enjoying it up to a point (then I lost it so obviously didn't love it enough to go and buy another copy).

Series I could not be doing with: Dance to the Music of Time. Anthony Powell. Awful drivelling prose - sentences that go on for paragraphs. Sample sentence - this is the first sentence of the second paragraph of one of the books. The first paragraph goes on for a page and a half...

Although they had remained in these parts only a couple of generations, there was an aptness, something fairly inexorable, in reporting under the badges of second lieutenant to a spot which quite a handful of the forerunners of the same blood had set out to become unnoticed officers of Marines or the East India Company; as often as not to lay twenty year old bones in the cemeteries of Bombay or Mysore.

Deathly.

Guangle bloody hell. I've read that paragraph 4 times and don't understand any of it.

Equally turgid is George Meredith's The Egoist which I had to read for a book club.

It goes on like this through twelve volumes . Honestly its unbearable.

I feel quite liberated getting that off my chest

Going against some of the posts here, I love Austen, Hardy and Dickens, find them so readable! Also Zola and Flaubert.

But classics I have not enjoyed: Tom Jones (Fielding) and Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) spring straight to mind. Slogging my way through those for seminars was a real grind.

Hated On the Road (Kerouac). And I find Virginia Woolf so easy and pleasurable to read in essays and non fiction, but not at all enjoyable in her fiction. I want to like it, but just can't get on board with the style.

More recently, Wolf Hall and The Hare with the Amber Eyes ate two bestsellers that I fully expected to love, but couldn't even force myself to finish.

Oh yes, The Hare with the Amber Eyes - unreadable.

I had deleted that from my memory. Horrific trawl through the museums of Europe looking at dusty artefacts - like the worst school trip ever. Hated it but I always secretly suspected I was a complete philistine and that confirmed it for me.

Ohhh Quangle that's on my immediate tbr pile. Sounds like it could take me a while to read. May combine it with something lighter.

Am ploughing through a lengthy book about Henry VIII's wives by Alison Weir at the moment, which is very interesting but is taking forever to read.

It's Room 101 for Laurence Durrell. Thought I should give him a try, as people said he was good. Got to a scene where a little girl is skinny-dipping; he comments on her "little white purse", so i read no further, and wasn't surprised to read later that his
relationship with his young daughter was suspect....

I'll stick with his brother Gerald, thank you.

Also, - HERESY I know! - Pride & Prejudice - narrow, obsessive, convoluted, and all those narrow lives completely dependent on a band of servants who are rarely mentioned by name - rarely mentioned at all, come to that - and never given any individuality.

"Wuthering Heights" the perfect antidote; crazily gothic, i know, but at least the servants are real and human.

Vanity Fair - must try again soon as I don't think I've attempted it this decade!

What Maisie Saw by Henry James I just hated, though I liked others by him.

It was the servants that got me about Austen. Fielding, Dickens for example have real people as servants interfering with the plot.

Has no one mentioned Lady Chatterley? My god if you wanted to put teenagers off sex give them that book.

Favourite books of all time are: Catcher in the Rye (I am not a middle-aged man), Wuthering Heights and The Grapes of Wrath. Also enjoyed On the Road, Dracula and almost anything by George Orwell, apart from A Clergyman's daughter, which he himself described as 'Bollocks"

The book I have tried and failed to read twice is 'Confessions of an Opium Eater', by Thomas de Quincy. Has anyone ever read it?

Mill(stone) on the Floss, boring x 3
Everything by Dickens - the BBC are much better at him than he was, if you see what I mean.
WolfHall, oh God! But anything written in the present tense is immediately suspect as far as I'm concerned.
Wish I hadn't wasted hours of my life on Middlemarch.
But, loved War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights.

Never liked Austen, but admittedly I haven't tried since school. I couldn't understand why most of my class (all girls school) preferred Northanger Abbey to Lord of the Flies. Also couldn't stand Little Women - they all seemed so feeble and wet to me (based on what I remember from trying to read it 30 years ago).
However, I did love Catcher in the Rye, On the Road and my favourite book is Generation X.

Pride and prejudice

To kill a mockingbird

I hate terry pratchett

Oh and Frankenstein

Anything by Thomas Hardy - studied his books for CSYS English and they were utter bilge. The characters were all dull, wet, plodders, victims or a combination of the above.

Anything by Charles Dickens (except A Christmas Carol which is, for Dickens, surprisingly readable). I read them and I just see one word after another, I cannot process them as stories.

The Master and Margarita - it's meant to be a masterpiece, personally I thought it was badly written with style-less prose. I'm willing to accept it may just have been a poor translation I read though?

I completely agree with DameDeepRedRuby though - it's definitely damaging to give children books before they're ready for them. I'm not entirely sure my hatred of Dickens doesn't stem from the fact I was handed "Oliver Twist" to read when I was eleven.

I also think the way plays are taught in school can be quite damaging. A bunch of bored teenagers reading a couple of pages each in a relentless monotone; no characters being assigned, no acting, no historical context? It's no wonder I hated Shakespeare at school. However, I went to see a number of Shakespeare plays at the Globe in London in my early twenties and was completely blown away.