Oooh, I took four attempts to read Jane Eyre before leaving it for 20 years 
Wasn't particularly blown away by it then, either.
Couldn't stand Wuthering Heights, though to be fair I didn't actually get into the story because I was so pissed off by the bloody stupid multi-layered narrative conceit (ffs em, just use a god's-eye narrator! nobody cares!)
Quite enjoyed Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though again the narrative conceit was ridiculous (those sisters really should have met a few more people, if you ask me).
For some reason I took three attempts at Sense and Sensibility. Never worked out why because I enjoyed it.
Read an abridged version of Oliver Twist when I was about 12, and didn't like it much. Since then the only Dickens I've read is A Christmas Carol - which I did quite enjoy - and bits of the Pickwick Papers, which were mildly entertaining but didn't really hold my interest.
Eventually got round to reading War and Peace in about 2005. When the TV series came on I realised that all I could remember was the thing about the date confusion and the fact that it was quite normal to be addressed by any variation of one's given name. Enjoyed the series but when I recently considered reading it again I discovered that I didn't want to: didn't like any of the men except the father, didn't like the suggestion that you a man can achieve purity and simplicity by marrying it, fed up of couples who first meet when he's an adult and she's a young teen.
Discovered 15 years after reading Lord of the Rings - when we listened to the radio adaptation - that I hadn't actually finished it. Somewhere in the bleak grey stoniness of the bleak grey stones of the bleak grey stony landscape of bleak grey stony Mordor I'd obviously given up. [Last time I used this phrase my son rolled his eyes and said "Mum, it's about half a page! ...despite having (against my advice) read it at eight, three years younger than me and not as advanced a reader anyway, he devoured the lot.] Since then lots of people have said they thought Eowyn was hard-done-by having to make do with Faramir instead of Aragorn; but I thought that - a Real Proper Romance with a Real Proper Person, both of them starting to heal on the inside as well as physically - was the best part of the book.
The Handmaid's Tale - well I'm torn. This is what I wrote at the time:
You all know the premise. This is an author whose prose flows over me, like Harpur Lee or Kit Whitfield, and as such I loved reading the book. I liked the fact that Offred was not Moira, or her mother, or Ofglen, or even the previous Offred. Possibly I suspect I would be very similar. There was a lot of sororital love in the book.
The world-building was better than the plot.
I did feel that there was a bit too much detachment in the description of the high-emotion parts. Possibly this was intentional - it is supposed to have been noted in significant retrospect, and there's some musing on the act of memory and creation - but the last part, which is actually meant to be the academic detachment, is a little bit of a caricature of that (and no, you can't make it seem less so by adding the note laughter).
Wish I'd read it thirty years ago, when the film came out and I thought "oo, that sounds interesting"