Classic or renowned novels that you didn't enjoy?

[AlpacaTheBags]

I do generally enjoy the classics and I'm trying to read more of them this year but I finally read Jane Eyre last year and I didn't particularly enjoy it.

It took me 4 attempts to get through Pride and Prejudice, though I liked it in the end but I loved Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park and had no trouble getting through them.

I struggle with Hardy and I had to give up on Tess but perhaps I just haven't found the right Hardy for me.

Which classics didn't you enjoy?

I forgot Howards End. I've tried to read it 4 times and each time I've stopped at the umbrella part. I'm determined to finish it one day.

Madame Bovary ;- I found Emma Bovary the most self-absorbed, irritating and entitled heroine I’ve ever come across.

Really struggled to get through Life of Pi. I did get to the end but only because I don’t like to give up on a book

Not the first to say it but I loathe Wuthering Heights.

Don't like any of the old stuff.
I haven't got the concentration span for them. I don't enjoy them. I don't feel the need to educate myself with classic literature.

I've also tried wuthering heights a few times and each time I can't get past the first few chapters. I just can't get a flow with it and get my head into the story.

Another one was crime and punishment. I tried a couple of times before making it to the end and all I felt was meh. Interesting concept but meh

Hate Wuthering heights and hate Hardy! I like some Dickens and could not get along with Wolf Hall!.
Agree with a poster about Tender is the night.
A favourite of mine is passage to India. not read any others of EM Forsters though.

Reading The Goldfinch at the moment though and so far so good.

We have always lived in the castle. Really not my thing.

Also Beloved, and I couldn't finish Bleak House - too bleak I guess .

As I Lay Dying
Madame Bovary

I haven’t enjoyed any Jane Austen books

Loathed Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

And A Little Life it was just too much misery but the end I was thinking ffs what now has happened

The Secret History I really didn’t get what was so great about this book

Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books I got totally lost in it

Lucky (pukey) Jim

The moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I had it on a school reading list whee we n I was 15. I never got through it. Awful awful stuff

This is such an interesting thread. Me and DD26 are big readers and in lots of ways have similar tastes. We share recommendations a lot. She LOVES Wuthering Heights, and hates Jane Austen, Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey.
I read Wuthering Heights at her insistance and and loathed it. As someone else said upthread - confusing repetitive plot, everyone has the same names. Wuthering Shite

Also on my DID NOT ENJOY list:
I Capture the Castle
Old Man and The Sea (Thankfully short)

More recent renowned novel I could not get on with:
Normal People
A Man Called Ove
A Gentleman In Moscow

Classics I did enjoy:
Pride and prejudice (But I do maintain the BBC version with Colin Firth is as good as reading the book)
Jane Eyre
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Most Dickens (Little Dorrit was a drag, but Love DC, OT and Christmas Carol)

I've got Middlemarch on my TBR pile this year - I'll report back

Moby Dick - dull dull dull and long
Wuthering Heights - overblown melodrama

Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, which is a shame as I have to study it as part of my OU course 😭

I've never been able to get on with Dickens. And I am generally ok with the Victorians, my favourite novels from that period are Middlemarch and Far from the Madding Crowd.

Also not that keen on Wuthering Heights, melodramatic with unlikeable characters, but at least it's not boring like Dickens.

Love all Austen.

Also struggled with Virginia Woolf - the Hours, Mrs Dalloway - when I had to read her for my English degree, although I'm tempted to try again as a grown up.

I can't seem to get on with Dickens. I am about a fifth of the way through Bleak House and it's taken me a month (with many other books read in the interim). There's nothing about him that pulls me back to the story once the book is lying closed on my bedside table.

Love George Eliot, adore Thackeray, flat out worship the Brontes, like Austen and Henry James, tolerate Hardy but smirk a little over his love of melodrama, but plunk anything by Dickens in front of me and I'll even read shite like Sophie Kinsella or JoJo Moyes instead. HG Wells called James a painful hippopotamus, but I really think that's a better description of Dickens.

But I will finish Bleak House if it fucking kills me, swelpmegod.

The only Dickens I've read is A Tale of Two Cities. It took me weeks - I normally read fast, but I was avoiding it. I only read it because one of my friends was so shocked I'd never read any Dickens at all, I'd tried reading some before and couldn't get on with it at all. No chance I'm trying again. I do love a good TV adaptation though!

And every character in Wuthering Heights is terrible. I loved it as a teenager but re-read it later and really didn't.

Maybe we should start a club - the Dickens is Overrated Club. I see no point in trying to force myself through a book I'm not enjoying - reading is supposed to be fun and pleasurable, not a chore.

The first book we were set in secondary school was Lord of the Flies by William Golding - I was v cool and had better things to do than read but set to with a plan to skim read and scribble notes - haha, absolutely blown away by it.
But I've never read anything else by him - can anyone recommend anything in particular?

Catcher in the Rye was a dud as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't warm to any of Milan Kundera's books either.

When I was 14 I started reading classics but couldn't get through Middle March even setting myself a target of 1 page a day! Hated most Hardy but particularly Jude the Obscure, most depressing book ever. Loved most Austin but Persuasion is my favourite.

Now, many years later I'm wanting to read more classics as I didn't get very far last time.

Unfortunately QueenofMoo, I think you were too young as most of us would have also been. I think it was Virginia Woolf who said Middlemarch was a novel for grown ups. No teenagers could really be expected to appreciate the emotional complexity or writers like Eliot and Hardy. When I was about 12 my dad gave me a copy of Pride and Prejudice for Christmas. I didn't like it as I was not interested in a 'love' story and did not understand the wit. I think some people have a tendency to think if a book has no swearing or explicit sexual content then it is somehow simpler and suitable for younger teenagers. Not so of course.